he and kobe are old as dirt, but now the lakers have an offensive orchestrator who will insure the bigs stay involved. they're going to get torched on perimeter defense again, but the nash/kobe combo is the best shooting tandem in the league, in terms of fg% from a variety of places.

if you want to nerd out, read this:

"As a case study and proof of concept, Goldsberry decided to try to use CourtVision to find an empirical answer to an often-debated question: Who is the best shooter in the NBA? He started by mapping out the "scoring area" — the 1,300-square-foot region on the court where 98 percent of NBA field-goal attempts occur. Then, he plotted out about 700,000 shots taken in every game from 2006 through 2011 — who took them, where they took them and what the outcomes of the shots were. Then he started making maps.

Goldsberry offers a new statistic for measuring a shooter's aptitude — "Shooting Range," a metric of how effective a player is at producing points from the greatest number of different spots on the court. A player's "range percentage" (Range%) measures the percentage of spots in that 1,300-square-foot scoring area from which a player will produce at least one point per shot attempted. The league leaders in Range% over the last five years mostly pass the laugh test — in order: Steve Nash, Ray Allen, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, Rashard Lewis, Joe Johnson, Vince Carter, Paul Pierce, Rudy Gay and Danny Granger.

When Goldsberry starts breaking down the maps, you start to see the value in understanding the unique spatial footprints and tendencies of every player, lineup and team in the league. You see just how fantastic Dirk is from the right baseline, an area in which none of the other top shooters even perform well. You see that Nash is a killer on wing three-pointers, but struggles in that right baseline spot that Dirk loves. You see that even deadeye Ray Allen has something akin to a three-point weakness — he's not so great from the left wing.

"Some players are good from some areas; some players are better from other areas," Goldsberry said. "We wanted to reveal those special spatial signatures.""