Miami Heat: Duncan Robinson is a breakout star, but not out of nowhere

The Miami Heat’s resident sniper has seen his stock and production take on a meteoric rise since the season opened. He didn’t “come out of nowhere” though.

Duncan Robinson of the Miami Heat has not only become the absolute best shooter on the Heat’s squad, but he has started to approach, if not surpass, best shooter in the league territory. While it may be readily apparent just based on what you can see with your eyes, once you dive into the numbers it becomes just that much more apparent.

Across 30 total minutes per contest, Robinson is averaging 13.3 points, on 46.7 percent shooting from the floor and 44.8 percent from three. To put that into perspective, the league averages on the efficiency figures are 46 percent from the floor and 35.7 percent from deep. While he is only slightly above average when it comes to overall percentages, he blows average out of the water when it comes to one of the “most efficient shots in basketball”, the three-ball.

With this thought in mind though, it has recently come to our attention that some people seem to think that he “came out of nowhere“, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Coach Spo has been talking about Duncan for the better part of the last two seasons, telling us things that are now being embodied in Robinson’s shooting performances on a night to night basis.

While Spo has been singing his praises and telling us to prepare for this at this level for some time now, he was spewing that narrative based on the things he had seen in scouting, practice, and based on his stats at the lower level. Let’s take a peep at his G-League stats from his lone year there, the 2018-19 season.

If you take a look at his overall shooting percentage and three-point percentage, his field goal percentage was 51.4 percent while his three-point percentage was 48.3. He made 7.4 of 14.4 overall shots he took, while nearly 10 of those field goal attempts were of the deep variety. Plainly, he made 4.8 of his 9.8 attempts from deep, essentially 5/10 and as close to half as you can get without going over.

So, again, while Duncan Robinson is sort of what you might categorize as a breakout star, he didn’t “come out of nowhere”. We knew what we had because the people within the Miami Heat organization that we trust had been telling us. Whether you wanted to believe them or not is something totally different( Looking at you Rich).