The Best Shooters in Basketball History
Shooting is basketball's most democratic skill — no genetic lottery required, just ten thousand hours and nerve. It is also the skill that reshaped the modern NBA more than any other. Here are the marksmen who define the craft, the ones whose names cluster in basketbadle's guard rows and whose eras you can almost read off a Guess the Player board.
The one who changed the map
Stephen Curry is not just first on this list; he is the reason the list needed rewriting. The all-time three-point record, the only unanimous MVP, multiple five-threes-per-game seasons, and a range that moved defensive pickup points a full ten feet outward across the entire league. Before Curry, a thirty-footer was a bad shot and a coaching staff would bench you for taking it. After Curry, it is an offense, a staple, a thing children practise in driveways. No single player has ever altered the basic geometry of the sport so completely, which is why he also anchors our ranking of the greatest point guards.
The pure strokes
Ray Allen held the career three-point record before Curry and owns the most famous three ever made — the corner dagger that saved the 2013 Finals with the season on the line. His mechanics remain the textbook every shooting coach still teaches. Klay Thompson, Curry's splash brother, produced the most violent shooting flurries the league has ever seen: 37 points in a single quarter, 60 points on a barely believable eleven dribbles. Reggie Miller terrorised the nineties with relentless movement shooting and the most theatrical eight points in nine seconds in playoff history, a one-man demolition of an entire arena's hopes.
The big-man marksmen
Height was once a disqualifier for great shooting. These players ended that idea. Dirk Nowitzki's one-legged fadeaway made seven-foot shooting not just respectable but unguardable, and it won a championship — a story we tell more fully in the evolution of the modern big man. Larry Bird — three straight Three-Point Contest titles, famously asking the rest of the field who was playing for second place — fused shooting with trash talk until it became performance art. Kevin Durant belongs here as much as on any scorer list: at his height, with his release point, his jumper is simply the least guardable shot in the sport's recorded history.
The specialists
Every era has its snipers, players who built long, valuable careers on a single elite skill. Steve Kerr set the career percentage benchmark for decades before becoming the coach of the team that broke all his old records. Kyle Korver turned relocation shooting into a Hall of Very Good career. JJ Redick was the professor of running off screens. And the free-throw aristocrats Mark Price and Steve Nash sit among the rare members of the 50-40-90 club — the single cleanest measure of a complete shooting season.
How shooting is measured now
Raw three-point percentage badly undersells the revolutionaries. The modern lens is volume multiplied by efficiency multiplied by difficulty. Curry shooting 42% on twelve deep, contested, off-the-dribble attempts a night is playing a different sport from a specialist hitting 44% on four wide-open corner threes created entirely by a teammate. Both are valuable; only one bends a defense out of shape. That is why the 50-40-90 season — 50% from the field, 40% from three, 90% from the line — remains the connoisseur's stat: fewer than a dozen players in history have ever managed it, because it demands volume, range and touch all at once.
The next generation
The revolution is self-perpetuating. Today's teenagers arrive in the league already able to shoot off movement, because the NBA effectively stopped drafting players who cannot. The young wings and guards profiled in our rising stars piece treat deep range as a baseline requirement rather than a specialty. In twenty years, this list will look quaint — the records Curry set will be chased by players who grew up assuming his range was normal. That is the truest measure of his influence: he did not just break the records, he reset the definition of what a shooter is.
The clutch dimension
There is a difference between shooting well and shooting well when the entire season hangs on it, and the greatest shooters earn their place partly on the second skill. Ray Allen's 2013 corner three is the most replayed shot of the modern era precisely because of the stakes — a championship erased and rewritten in a single release. Reggie Miller built an entire reputation on tormenting one rival in the playoffs' final seconds. Damian Lillard authored two of the most audacious series-ending buzzer-beaters ever, both from well beyond the arc, both with a defender draped on him. Stephen Curry has hit more game-altering deep threes than anyone can count, to the point that opposing arenas exhale when he merely crosses half court.
Clutch shooting is hard to quantify and easy to romanticise, and statisticians rightly caution against reading too much into small late-game samples. But the eye test and the history both insist on it: the marksmen who define the craft are, almost without exception, the ones who wanted the ball with the clock running out. That willingness — the nerve half of the "ten thousand hours and nerve" equation — is what separates a great shooter from a great closer, and the names on this list tend to be both.
Where the marksmen surface in the daily puzzles
Shooters cluster in Guess the Player's guard rows and skew toward certain eras and famous franchises. When the tiles say "guard, light, recognisable team," start your guessing from this article's roster and let the age tile point you to the right generation. Shooting also threads through Odd One Out, where Three-Point Contest winners and 50-40-90 club members form neat hidden traits, and it colours the way you read a Starting Five — a lineup built around famous shooting numbers tends to belong to one of the league's spacing-obsessed offenses. Master the marksmen and you have mastered the players the modern game is built around.