Gay's true shooting percentage, which accounts for two-pointers, three-pointers and free throws, was a stout. He is earning a career-best 6.3 free throws per game, a sure indicator he no longer settles for lazy jumpers.Ī recent shooting bender, precipitated by Cousins' absence and the Kings' desperation, has eroded Gay's efficiency, but consider this snapshot: As of a week ago, his field-goal percentage was a crisp. Gay is averaging a career-high 4.7 assists per game, more than double his average in his first eight seasons. Cousins is due back soon, Ben McLemore has broken out as a scorer and Gay is in the midst of a midcareer transformation from ball-stopping gunner to team-first star.
There are shards of a silver lining here, however. Coaches had been preaching these ideals since the moment Gay entered the league in 2006 but, like many headstrong young stars, he wasn't ready to heed them.
The solution wasn't complicated: Move the ball. I had to figure out what I could do to be better, just be better altogether." "It was just kind of like a shock to my system," Gay told Bleacher Report after a recent practice at the Kings' suburban training center. If there ever was a moment for earnest reflection, this was it. He had been branded "inefficient"-toxic in an analytics-driven era.Īnd so Gay was sent trekking across the continent, packing and unpacking and repacking. These things aren't supposed to happen to a scoring star with a max contract.īut Gay had become known as something else: a "volume" shooter-an overpriced gunner whose deficiencies had been laid bare by advanced metrics. Two trades in 314 days, each one sending Gay further down the NBA power rankings, further from his comfort zone, further into the unknown. He was sent to Sacramento, an even more muddled situation with a woebegone franchise. Eleven months later, Toronto gave up on Rudy Gay, too.