Why has Domantas Sabonis stopped shooting threes?

Three years ago the Kings faced the Golden State Warriors in about as competitive and entertaining of a first round series as you can get. It was a thrilling matchup that went 7 games, but ended in disappointment for the Kings as Steph Curry and the Warriors shut the door on what to that point had been the most exciting season in almost two decades.  One big factor in that playoff series was how the Warriors chose to guard Domantas Sabonis; Golden State dared Sabonis to shoot from outside, sagging off of him at every opportunity and packing the paint on the Kings.  Sabonis failed to punish the Warriors for that, and after the series it became clear that in order to take the next step, he would have to become more comfortable shooting outside shots.

“Obviously, my shooting, (to) have confidence in shooting that shot,” Sabonis said. “If they respected my shot more, we probably would have been going through what we did all season. Instead of the big playing back off me, we’re playing like I was during the regular season, so that would have helped us a lot.”

Despite that awareness, Sabonis didn’t really expand his game all that much in the following season.  He shot the exact same amount of attempts that season (just 1.1) and made a solid 37.9% of them.  It wasn’t until the following season that Sabonis really tried letting it fly, more than doubling his 3PA per game from 1.1 to 2.3 and making a career-high 41.7% of them.  41.7% from distance is excellent, and while the volume still really wasn’t there, it was a solid foundation to build on.

The 2025-26 season can almost be written off entirely due to Sabonis’ various injury issues causing him to play in just 19 games.  That brings us to this season however, where Domas’ game has shrunken down to being almost exclusively in the paint.  Here’s a look at his shot chart so far this season from Basketball-Reference:

By my count that’s 6 total shots from outside of the paint, and only two of those have been from three.  Now, Domas has always been most effective inside the paint and has never been all that prolific outside of it, but so far this season, it almost feels like he’s not even thinking about shooting from outside.  Part of this may simply be by design from Coach Christie. Now, Domas has always been most effective inside the paint and has never been all that prolific outside of it, but so far this season, it almost feels like he’s not even thinking about shooting from outside.  Right now he’s on pace to shoot just 21 threes on the entire season.  That seems flat out irresponsible for a player who has hit threes at a 38% clip over the last 258 games played.

I’m not asking for Sabonis to suddenly start firing threes up every chance he gets, but in today’s NBA you can’t have a defensively challenged big man who is also allergic to scoring outside of the paint.  This was a known issue for Sabonis that everybody knew about, and it was something that was supposedly worked on.  Sabonis’ challenges on defense aren’t particularly fixable as they’re almost solely based off his lack of size and wingspan, not necessarily effort.  But shooting is something that can be fixed and would have completely opened up the game for both him and the team and it doesn’t make sense to me that he is instead regressing back to a more simple form of basketball.

It’s the worst kept secret in the league that the Kings and Sabonis both know they’re heading for a divorce as soon as the right deal comes along. I get that he may just be biding his time and going through the motions.  I get that the team is more focused on putting Darius Acuff Jr. in the driver’s seat than anything else. But you’d think Sabonis and the Kings would want to make him as attractive as possible to other teams by showing that his game has expanded, not deflated.  This is also a season where the Kings can afford to do some experimenting, it’s not going to hurt anything. This team is 1-7 and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better soon, so might as well start trying some different things and who knows, maybe it ends up helping both the team and Sabonis’ career.