How could he recover his best version?

This week’s NBA mailbag takes a closer look at two of the season’s early surprises. On the pessimistic side, we consider Damian Lillard’s slow start, which has seen him shoot 33.7% from the field and 21.7% from three-point range through the Portland Trail Blazers’ first nine games of the season.

Are refereeing changes a factor in Lillard’s bad timing? How about the NBA’s controversial switch from using basketballs made by Spalding to those made by Wilson?

Throughout the NBA campaign, I answer your questions on the latest and most interesting topics around the league. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to [email protected].

When will ‘Dame Time’ be back?
Lillard began the season with one of the worst eight-game stretches of his career, with only two others in 2015 and 2016 in which he posted a worse effective field goal shooting percentage (eFG%) over that. His bad stretch continued Friday night with four points on (2-of-13) shooting and (0-of-6) from deep, albeit in a Blazers win over the Indiana Pacers.

The good news is that Lillard bounced back from those earlier slumps and was fine. In 2016, right after that stretch, Lillard helped the Blazers beat the LA Clippers to win a playoff series. So, it is certainly that this is the same and no further explanation is needed.

I am encouraged that Second Spectrum’s tracking data does not suggest a dramatic change in Lillard’s shooting quality. His quantified shooting quality (qSQ), which measures the expected eFG% for an average shooter on the same type of attempts, has declined only modestly from 48.6% in 2020-21 to 48.1% so far this season. His actual eFG% has dropped from 55.4% to 41%, indicating that the problem is making shots rather than getting good shots.

Based on that, for the most part we can rule out arbitration as a major factor, just as we did with James Harden in last week’s mailbag. Even the side effects of Lillard having less room to operate on the perimeter without defenders for fear of a shooting foul don’t seem to have affected his shots much.

The change is one explanation for Lillard’s shot making, but it’s not the only one. My colleague Seth Partnow of The Athletic wrote earlier this week that the league-wide three-point percentage (34.3% through Wednesday’s games, down from 36.7% in 2020-21) is actually not out of line with what is typical at the start of the season.

With the Second Spectrum data, we can get more specific. Accuracy on both ‘pull-up’ triples and catch-and-shoot triples is about 95% of what it was for the entire 2020-21 season. However, accuracy on deep triples (from 25 to 40 feet) is only 90% of what it was, declining from 35% in 2020-21 to 31.4% so far in 2021-22, the worst at this stage of the season since 2015-16, when these shots were attempted less than half as often.

It’s worth monitoring if Lillard and other shooters continue to fall.