The floater is the most underrated shot in the game

It is inefficient by the numbers and indispensable in practice, which tells you something about the numbers.

Ten feet, off one foot, over an outstretched arm. On a shot chart it sits in the ugly zone, that grey band between the restricted area and the arc, and every efficiency model in the sport would prefer you did something else.

Every efficiency model in the sport is missing the point of it.

The floater is not competing with a layup. That is the false comparison that makes it look bad. It is competing with the alternatives that exist once a seven footer has cut off the rim: a charge, a jump pass into a crowd, a kick out to a covered shooter with six seconds left, or a picked-up dribble and a reset. Against that set of options a decent floater is comfortably the best available outcome, and the small guards who own one are the reason their teams can attack drop coverage at all.

It also changes the coverage in a way nothing else does. A big man playing at the level of the free throw line is safe from layups but exposed to the floater, and once a guard hits two of them the big has to step higher, which opens the pocket pass, which opens the lob. The floater is a threat that creates other threats. Models grade shots in isolation, so they never see that second-order value, and it is enormous.

The technical bit people get wrong is the takeoff. Everyone thinks the floater is about touch. It is mostly about the last two steps and the ability to go up off the inside foot with the body still travelling, so the shot leaves before the help arrives rather than over it. Guards who wait until they are under the rim to decide are already too late, and pretty wrist action does not save them.

There is a durability angle too, which nobody mentions. A guard who floats it is not diving into the chest of a much larger man forty times a week. Over a career that is a meaningful number of collisions avoided, and trading a few percentage points for that is not obviously a bad deal.

So yes, keep telling young players to get to the rim. Just stop treating the ten footer as a failure of ambition. Sometimes it is the shot the defense left you, and taking the shot the defense left you is the entire craft.