NBA 2K15: What’s Wrong With The Suns?

 No. 2 — Earl Barron’s Three-Point Shooting

(Yes, I’m about to make a big deal about one of the ratings of the Suns’ 12th/13th man in the rotation)

If you didn’t watch Barron play in Bakersfield and you never went to a Suns game and watched shoot around, it’d be very easy to think Barron doesn’t shoot threes.

Spoiler alert: He does.

And it’s kind of funny, because normally the ratings are based on real life percentages, but because of Barron’s four shot sample size (of which he made 50 percent, I might add), there was absolutely no way the game was going to make him as good of a three-point shooter as Kyle Korver and Stephen Curry, and rightfully so.

However, instead of actually looking into that number to assign Barron a rating, they simply chose to ignore its existence.

His 3PT Scoring Letter Grade is an F. He is a 27 overall in the Moving 3PT Shot category and a 25 in the Standing 3PT Shot category, which puts him BEHIND guys like Dwight Howard, Roy Hibbert, DeMarcus Cousins, etc., etc.

Here’s the thing though, Barron is actually a pretty okay three-point shooter. And I can personally vouch for this.

For the Bakersfield Jam, Barron shot about 33 percent from three, while averaging three attempts per game. And counting his NBA experience, he attempted a total of 86 threes last season, making 29 of them, for a cumulative 33.7 three-point percentage.

However, for whatever reason NBA2K decided that he can’t shoot threes, so you basically can’t make any threes with him ever.

Believe me. I’ve tested this theory.

Bucks: 18

Suns: 3

Barron:

1-of-14 from three

Last night I decided I was going to play a game on Hall of Fame mode, which is the highest level of difficulty the game goes to. On that mode, all I did was shoot threes with Earl Barron, waiting for one to go in. It took me 5:17 of game time (seven-and-a-half real life minutes) to make one. And take a look at his stat line then. It wasn’t pretty.

And this is something that definitely matters, at least in the NBA2K sense. One of the reasons the Suns were so awesome last year in 2K was because they had Frye and the Morris Twins who could play at the big man positions and stretch the floor. 2K is a lot more fun when you have big men that can actually hit threes, because you don’t have to sacrifice rebounding and shot-blocking to get a shot-maker out on to the court, and for a team like the Suns that lacks a DeMarcus Cousins-type dominant center, it makes an especially big difference, pardon the pun.

What I mean by that, for all the non-gamers out there, is that the Suns don’t have a highly rated center that’s so talented you have to play him, meaning that the strategy that would provide the most fun might be putting in a big that can step back and hit a three. Without Barron having the proper rating, the Suns don’t have that.

Now Earl Barron obviously has a long, long, long way to go as an NBA player, and in no way am I saying he’s deserving of a dramatic boost to his overall category, but he does deserve to have his three-point rating brought up, at least to the point where it is even with, say, Markieff Morris. Just doing that would make the team a lot more fun to play with, at least until LeBron James opts out and join the Suns in the offseason (sarcasm font).

Next: No. 1 -- Fixing The Bled-Show