In the past, the aesthetic appeal of Gay's pull-up shot would have shrouded its awful inefficiency. Because Gay is so unabashedly in love with precisely those kinds of shots (long two-pointers and jumpers off the dribble, for instance), he's become a pariah. One of the easiest concepts to understand is that low-percentage shots are a sure way to kill a team's offensive productivity. It's just that there are some change-resistant holdouts who like to pretend the numbers aren't important.īut as we get smarter, players like Gay become victims of that growing intelligence. It seems silly to talk about the "rise of analytics" these days that's an outdated term-mostly because statistics have already risen. It's hard to resist the glut of information that now populates every NBA website, and unless you're actively trying to avoid statistics, you can't really read about or discuss the league without referring to them. What's really happening is that observers of the Association are simply getting smarter. The fact that so many fans and analysts are seeing Gay for what he really is could be viewed as a sign of the rampant cynicism that marks a lot of NBA discourse. Michael Grange of Sportsnet.ca has recently piled on, damning Gay as " the $19-million shadow of superstar on the roster that is choking out the sun and making the rest of the team ill." The humor of the league's worst high-volume shooter wanting to exclude evidence of his inefficiency wasn't lost on the NBA community: