How efficient is Daniel Gafford?

Ritu13

First of all, if you're going to make 35 consecutive baskets, your offensive style can't lean towards jump shots. Gafford is definitely not a player who relies on jump shots. As of Thursday (3/14), out of his 376 attempts, 366 came from inside the paint, with the vast majority of them coming from within the four-foot range, where he boasts a shooting percentage of over 77%. According to NBA.com, he has only attempted non-dunk or layup shots 69 times throughout the season.

In simple terms: Gafford is very selective about his shot attempts, which are almost exclusively close-range opportunities, so he rarely misses. In fact, Gafford is poised to break the NBA record for shooting percentage.

Among all players with at least 2,000 attempts, DeAndre Jordan's 67.4% shooting percentage is the best in history. As of now, Gafford has attempted 1,527 shots, which hasn't reached the threshold of 2,000 attempts yet, but his current shooting percentage is 70.6%.

A nearly seven-foot-tall player who can mix it up under the basket, coupled with the likes of Luka Doncic (the league's best alley-oop and pick-and-roll attacker) and Kyrie Irving (creating many of the same scoring opportunities as Luka), gives Gafford the chance to become even more efficient. In the game against the Warriors, five of Gafford's baskets were assisted by Luka or Irving.

For any big man against the Mavericks, their job is straightforward. As long as Gafford attacks under the basket, whether it's alley-oops, slips after screens, low-post seals or screens, cuts or offensive rebounds, he almost always scores with dunks or layups.

In the game against the Chicago Bulls on Monday, Gafford went 9-for-9 from the field and said afterward: "My philosophy with my game is definitely to maintain consistency with what I do. I have a mentality to finish everything, whether someone is in front of me or not. Either way, it's going to be a dunk or a layup."

Indeed, of Gafford's 33 consecutive made shots, 17 were dunks, including all five in the game against the Warriors, with 31 of them having at least one foot inside the paint (the only two that didn't were from about six inches outside). And perhaps five of them were slightly contested. He needs some airspace along the way, but basically, we're talking about scoring opportunities that are almost automatic.

There's no doubt that Wilt Chamberlain holds many NBA records, some of which are almost impossible to break: such as scoring 100 points in a game, averaging over 50 points per game in a season, averaging 37.6 points per game as a rookie, scoring 70 or more points in a game six times, and scoring 60 or more points in a game 32 times (including four consecutive games in 1962) ... this list of records seems endless.

But 35 consecutive made shots is a quite remarkable record, and again, while Gafford may not sound like the most likely candidate to break Chamberlain's record, he is indeed very close to doing so.

If Gafford was a proficient scorer in the paint with the Washington Wizards (according to Cleaning the Glass statistics, in his first 45 games with the Wizards, over 78% of his non-garbage-time shots came from inside the paint), then with the Dallas Mavericks, he has become an even more cautious scorer, with over 87% of his shots coming from inside the paint. Achieving data that rivals Chamberlain's is not something many players can boast about, but Gafford is one of them.

Yamini003

Amazing!!!!

Niti998

What a record.