Jordan Crawford and Cartier Martin work on their corner 3s during a post-practice shooting drill after the morning session of Washington Wizards training camp day one.

Last season the Washington Wizards attempted 329 corner 3-pointers, 16th most in the NBA. The Atlanta Hawks led the league with 464 3-point attempts from the corner and the Spurs were next with 453 attempts.

Washington made 132 of their corner 3-point attempts, good enough for 40.1 percent and seventh best in the NBA. Atlanta made 39.7 percent of their corner 3s and San Antonio made 41.9 percent; the Golden State Warriors led the league in shooting 45.6 percent on corner 3s.

One could easily deduce: Hey, the Wizards need to shoot more corner 3s. From a tweet of NBA.com’s John Schuhmann (@johnschuhmann) in September:

Here’s a fascinating one: The league leader in assists on corner 3s was, by far, John Wall (77). Rondo was next w/ 59.

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[Emery Rec Center - NW Washington DC - photo: K. Weidie]

I’ve previously used historical statistical analysis in an attempt to determine who were some of the best, and worst, shooters in Wizards/Bullets franchise history.

One post explained that Slick Leonard might have had to worst shooting season in franchise record books. As a member of the ‘61-62 Chicago Packers, Leonard threw up 1,128 shots, second most on the team after Walt Bellamy, but only made 37.5-percent of them. In a nine team league that season 30 players attempted 1,000 or more field-goals, and Slick was the worst of them all.

Others, such as Kevin Loughery and Mitch Richmond, have cemented themselves as some of the worst shooters beyond the window of just one season. Loughery, over 591 career games played with the team in Baltimore, made only 41.5-percent of his 9,209 FG attempts. Richmond, who adeptly bastardized any memories of trading Chris Webber into scorn from fandom toward his aching knees, made just 41.7-percent of the 2,356 shots he took as a Wizard. To note, Loughery and Richmond were two of 26 players in franchise history to play in 160 games or more with the team and average over 15 field-goals attempted per 36 minutes.

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“YOU SUCK GILBERT!,” yelled a member of the attending audience who witnessed Gilbert Arenas’ 2-14 performance (1-9 from three-point land), right after the final buzzer sounded on a Washington Wizards loss to the Charlotte Bobcats on Friday night.

And Gilbert did suck, but getting impatient with his play right now lacks an understanding of how difficult it really is to score in the NBA … when the clock is ticking and the lights are on.

A lot of people can hit in practice. Regular guys, like this guy, go on shooting streaks by themselves, easily. Watch any NBA player, even a big man, in most non-game settings, and they are hitting shot after shot. Sure, hitting a baseball is probably the hardest thing to do in sports, so then shooting the rock in practice is the equivalent of Albert Pujols hitting countless dingers off a bullpen pitcher during BP.

“You always think he’s going to make the next one, that’s just the way he’s been,” theorized Flip Saunders on his streaky shooter after the game. “I hesitated because Nick [Young] made some shots, you know, putting him in. But the thing was, Gil’s the one guy that was actually rebounding for us in the second half. He was our second leading rebounder, and he was active as far as getting his hands on a lot of balls.”

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[Shaw Rec. Center - Washington, D.C. - K. Weidie]

In mid-September, ESPN.com contributor Tom Haberstroh made an attempt to determine the five worst players in the franchise history of each NBA team [ESPN Insider]. The requirements, along with the implementation of John Hollinger’s PER, were:

“… a player needed to have played at least 10 minutes per contest over the course of at least 100 career games with the franchise. Furthermore, we’ve added the “Bruce Bowen Corollary” to exempt players who started for championship teams.”

And the list of distinguished gentlemen for the Bullets/Wizards franchise:

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