Originally Posted by
Pelicanidae
Bunch of reasons for scepticism.
One has already been mentioned: no real improvement in FT shooting despite 3pt improvements. Generally those two things go together; it's not always the case, we all remember Bruce Bowen being a career 39% 3pt shooter while also being a career 57% FT shooter. So you can have good 3pt shooting and bad FT shooting, but that's fairly uncommon.
There's also the consistency argument. Ingram basically hit the season and was shooting well from 3. The change was immediate and bold, and it stuck around; obviously it's cooled off a big (he's not shooting 48% from 3 anymore) but it's remained good. That's not true for Lonzo; he was shooting 33.3% until Christmas, about 25 games, for example. So it's been a sudden, out of nowhere improvement in terms of sustainability.
Thirdly, he still has a tendency to drift towards his old form on step-backs. Credit to him, he only really does it on stepbacks, which is a testament to the work he's put in; to be otherwise so consistent after only really one summer+season of repetition is fantastic, but I do think seeing it rear its head from time to time puts some people off.
Fourthly would probably be his tendency to shoot really really badly in some circumstances. Lonzo is a 32% pullup shooter, and he takes almost a third of his attempts as pullups, so if you see him doing that a lot, it may colour your perception. For comparison, 32% on pullups ranks 5th on the team, behind Zion (lol, 0.3 attempts per game), Redick, Jrue, and Melli. For comparison, Ingram is a much worse pullup shooter (down to 25.9% on the season) but he takes only half the amount, so it influences people's view less than Lonzo, I think.
Lonzo's shooting 40% on catch and shoot 3s, by the way, which is really a huge improvement. Redick leads the team in C&S percentage, at 47.1%, followed by Ingram (41.8%), then Moore (40.5%), then Lonzo at 40%.
These aren't necessarily my personally held opinions; I think his improvement has been huge and notable, and is a credit to both him and Vinson, and while it may not be regularly quite this good, I don't see why he couldn't continue to be at least a decent shooter going into the future. I just think that if you're wondering why some people are doubtful, these may play into it.