Who is the best shooter you've ever seen?
During the 2005-'06 NBA season, I had an opportunity to watch Seattle's Ray Allen set the NBA record for threes made when he canned 269 of his 653 attempts in 78 regular season games.
Allen is a flawless shooter with unlimited range and no conscious and he can single handedly bring a team back from a double-digit deficit.
This summer when Mike D'Antoni stated the best shooter he had ever seen was Danilo Gallinari, nobody was speaking up to second his claims.
Gallinari has hit 18 threes through the first three games of the season, and Knicks fans are finally beginning to understand what D'Antoni was talking about—and why New York spent the sixth pick of the 2008 draft on him when Eric Gordon and Brook Lopez seemed like great picks.
The 21-year-old Italian isn't hoisting up careless shots, he is shooting an uncanny 50 percent from behind the arc, and is quickly establishing himself as the deadliest long ball shooter in the NBA.
To put in perspective what Gallinari is doing, he is on pace to hit 492 of 984 threes, and that’s this season. Those projections are for an 82-game season, however, and the 6'10", 225-pound Gallinari missed 54 games due to injury as a rookie. It is highly unlikely he will be able to play in every game this season, but he has added good size to his frame since entering the league.
Missing a few games here and there won't hurt him one bit, though, as Gallinari is projected to break the record in his 45th game of the season. At his sickening pace, Gallinari will only need 422 more games to break Reggie Miller's all-time record of 2,560—if he can play just 60 games a season, he will have the record well before he is 30 years old.
It is not expected that Gallinari will keep his numbers at this level, but that's only because we've never see shooting like this before. With D'Antoni's system putting a priority on the trey and the green light to shoot, Gallinari could be breaking his own three-point records for years to come.
A deep threat like that is attractive bait to one of the elite penetrators in the 2010 free agency class.
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