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Young Set to Shoot for Three-Point Contest Title

It’s been 29 years since the Lakers last had a player compete at the Three-Point Contest, but now Nick Young is trying to become the franchise’s first champion of the All-Star Weekend event.

It’s been a deserved opportunity in a resurgent year for “Swaggy P,” who has already hit a career-high 147 3-pointers despite missing two weeks due to injury.

And, with 24 games remaining in the regular season, he is well on his way to breaking Nick Van Exel’s 22-year-old Lakers record for most triples in a season (183).

It will be interesting to see if Young — a shooter who relies a lot on going off for hot stretches — can find his groove in the contest format, which will see him launch five racks of balls, placed across the arc, in one minute.

The event will take place Saturday night at New Orleans' Smoothie King Center. It will follow the Skills Challenge, which is set to start at 5 p.m. PT on TNT.

His competition is headlined by defending champion Klay Thompson and 2013 winner Kyrie Irving. Fellow All-Stars Kyle Lowry and Kemba Walker will also shoot, while Eric Gordon, Wesley Matthews and C.J. McCollum round out the field.

Young’s standing amongst this group suggests that he has a solid shot at the title.

Of the eight-man field, only Young, Lowry and Thompson are currently ranked among the NBA’s top 15 in both made 3-pointers and 3-point percentage.

Young is averaging the NBA’s seventh-most triples (2.9), trailing Gordon (3.5), Thompson (3.4) and Lowry (3.3).

He is also hitting 41.3 percent from deep, which is 14th in the league but third among the field, behind only Thompson (42.2) and Lowry (41.7).

Still, regular-season success can only be so much of an indicator when the competition itself is played so much differently than the game.

For Young to bring the trophy back to his hometown Los Angeles, he will need to find the kind of Swaggy touch that allowed him to hit a career-high eight 3-pointers versus Cleveland in December, or whatever led him to knocking down the game-winning, buzzer-beating trey against Oklahoma City the month before.