LA Clippers guard Landry Shamet is a star in the making

Landry Shamet has only spent a short while with the LA Clippers, but if his rookie season was any indication of what’s to come, he’s going to be a star.

It’s probably fair to say at this point that when the LA Clippers traded for Landry Shamet, they didn’t expect him to be this good — at least, not yet.

They knew that as a Philadelphia 76er, Shamet was a high-volume, high-percentage shooter from three-point range. They also knew how quick he was, how easy it was for him to get around screens and run all over the floor. Doc Rivers probably had an idea of how easy it would be for him to run plays he once ran for J.J. Redick, too.

But if there’s one thing that the Clippers have learned from Shamet’s first 31 games with the franchise, it’s that he’s got the potential to be so much more than the next Redick. We’re thinking higher, better than that. Somewhere around the Klay Thompson range.

Shamet doesn’t possess Thompson’s size, and certainly not his defensive ability. Thompson will always be the better two-way talent between the two, without a doubt. But there’s a legitimate argument to be made that Shamet will be a better shooter than Thompson in due time.

In his rookie season (at age 21), Shamet connected on 42.2 percent of his 5.0 attempts per game from three-point range. Those numbers are the combined average of his time with the Clippers and Sixers, but what if you single that out to just LA, where he spent the latter portion of his rookie season? The percentage jumps up to 45.0, and the attempts up to 6.0. That’s in a little less than 28 minutes per contest.

Comparatively, Thompson made 41.4 percent of his 4.1 attempts from range during the course of his rookie season (also aged 21). He didn’t put up as many attempts as Shamet did (as a Clipper) until his following season, when he made 40.1 percent of his 6.4 attempts per game.

In every season since, Thompson’s number of attempts per game has climbed, and it now seems to have leveled off somewhere in the high sevens and low eights. But still, Thompson has never had a season in which he shot at least 45.0 percent from deep (Shamet hasn’t either, but he maintained the 45.0 percent mark with the Clippers), and he’s only shot a percentage higher than 42.2 three times over the course of his career — something, again, that Shamet did as a rookie. Thompson didn’t beat that percentage until the 2014-2015 season, when he made his first All-Star appearance and shot 43.9 percent from range.

It’s difficult to imagine what Shamet’s true mark would have been this past season if he spent it all in Los Angeles. It likely wouldn’t have been as high as 45.0 percent, but the 40.4 percent mark he set during his time in Philadelphia feels awfully low considering what we’ve seen from him thus far.

The question, then, is where does Shamet go from here? Does he lean more Redick? Or does he become the prolific shooter that Thompson is today?

Truth be told, it’s likely somewhere in-between. Shamet isn’t quite the shooter that Redick is right now, but he’s close. For being 21, that’s extremely impressive, and it suggests that his ceiling is higher than Redick’s peak.

Whether he can reach Thompson’s level of scoring remains to be seen, but he’s getting a good start at it. Next season, we should begin to see where Shamet’s career will go from here. Future All-Star certainly seems to be in play, though.