Shoot at least 35% from Three
One of the few knocks against John Wall, when healthy, is that he isn’t a great outside shooter. So Washington knows just how valuable a legitimate three-point threat can be at the point guard position.
Early in his career, Thomas was, without a doubt, a threat from outside. While he has never shot 40 percent or better from behind the arc for an entire season (37.9 percent is his highest mark. He’s reached it twice), he also never shot worse than 34.9 percent for any of his first six seasons.
Much like his playing time, however, Thomas’s three-point percentage has taken a big hit since 2017. In his short stint with the Cleveland Cavaliers (15 games), Thomas shot just 25.3 percent on 5.8 attempts per game. He finished that 2017-18 season with the Los Angeles Lakers and shot slightly better on just as many attempts. In his 17 games with LA, he shot more than seven percentage points better than he had in Cleveland: 32.7 percent.
Things nosedived in Denver, though, as Thomas shot just 27.9 percent on 3.6 attempts a game. Twelve games, however, is a small sample size. Probably too small to use it as a projection for Thomas’s future in DC.
Thomas is said to be healthy again but asking him to return to MVP form this season would be setting the bar too high. Asking him to be a legitimate outside threat seems more than doable, though.