No matter when you’re reading this story, odds are Buddy Hield is in the gym right now getting up shots. That may be an exaggeration, but only slightly.
Ask around the Pacers locker room and you’ll hear tale after tale of Hield’s unmatched work ethic.
On road trips, he leaves the hotel an hour before the first team bus heads to the arena, arriving early so he can get up extra shots.
Tyrese Haliburton says he’ll often come into the team facility and find Hield there by himself, hoisting threes and then chasing after his own rebound like a kid in a driveway.
During a timeout in Tuesday’s win over Atlanta, head coach Rick Carlisle and assistant Lloyd Pierce glanced out to the court and there was Hield, who had finagled the ball away from the referee and was feeling out the grip and hoisting a couple quick jumpers before the teams returned to the court. The two coaches couldn’t help but smile.
“That guy’s special,” Carlisle said to Pierce.
“It gets to the point where my family gets mad at me that I overwork,” Hield said about his dedication to being in the gym. “But when you love the game so much, that that’s all you think about is just how can I get better each and every day, you just want success each and every day and you crave for it.”
The success that he craves has been coming in bunches lately for Hield, who is playing some of the best basketball of his career. Hield doesn’t like talking about shooting, but admitted Tuesday that his 3-point percentage in recent seasons hadn’t been up to his usual standards. He hasn’t shot above 40 percent from beyond the arc since 2018-19 and shot a career-low 36.6 percent last season, which he split between Sacramento and Indiana.
Lately, however, Hield has been on a tear. He is shooting 50.9 percent from 3-point range in December. He’s made four or more 3-pointers in 10 of 14 games this month, including five of his last six. Over the past six games, Hield is an absurd 28-for-44 (63.6 percent) from beyond the arc, including a 7-for-11 performance in Friday’s win over Miami and a 6-for-7 outing on Tuesday, when he dropped a team-high 28 points in a 129-114 victory over the Hawks.
With his six threes on Tuesday, Hield now has made 132 treys on the season, which moved him one ahead of the injured Stephen Curry for the NBA lead. Even though he hoists them at such a high volume, Hield has been remarkably efficient, with his recent hot streak bumping his 3-point percentage up to a team-leading .419.
It’s easy to look at a player like Hield, who basketball fans have seen draining shots and getting buckets for over a decade now dating back to his days as an All-American at the University of Oklahoma, and think that they were just born with the ability to put the ball in the hoop. But in truth, Hield’s shooting prowess is the product of countless hours of devotion to the game he loves so much.
The Sideline Guys Podcast: Buddy Hield
Growing up in the Bahamas, an experience that Hield detailed recently as a guest on the Sideline Guys Podcast powered by Gainbridge, making it to the NBA was a farfetched dream. But taking inspiration from his childhood idol Kobe Bryant, Hield worked and worked until he earned an opportunity to come to the United States for prep school. That eventually led to a scholarship to Oklahoma and ultimately being drafted into the NBA. But Hield has never forgotten how difficult that journey was for him.
“Coming where I come from, being at this platform is very hard,” Hield said. “I really cherish being in the NBA each and every day of my life because you never know when that last day comes. I want to take advantage of it. I don’t want to be like oh, I didn’t work as hard as I can.”
While most players scale back their routines as they accumulate more years in the league, Hield – who turned 30 on Dec. 17 and is in his seventh NBA season – has seemingly done the opposite. He joked after Tuesday’s game that he feels as though he’s getting younger instead of older and at times he carries himself more like a wide-eyed rookie than a jaded veteran.
“He lives for the game,” Carlisle said. “He lives for running around and getting open shots and trying to knock them in. We break up from halftime, he sprints out to the floor and starts feeling that ball and starts shooting. You watch him during timeouts and he's grabbing the ball. He just is fully engaged in his craft all the time.”
24-year-old Oshae Brissett, one of the young shooters on Indiana’s roster, has started to tag along with Hield on his early trips to the arena on road trips, hoping to soak up any advice he can from the veteran sharpshooter.
“He’s a guy if he comes in, misses his first couple, he knows in his heart the next one’s going in and he shoots it like it's going in,” Brissett said. “He’s always confident, always ready, and that starts hours before the tip.”
The fruits of Hield’s labor are starting to reveal themselves in the NBA record books.
Hield recently reached 1,500 career 3-pointers made, becoming the second-fastest player to reach the milestone (only Curry did it in fewer games).
Not even six-and-a-half seasons into his career, he is already surpassing many of the greatest shooters from previous eras on the all-time threes made list. Over the past two games, he moved past Hall of Famer Tim Hardaway and Eddie Jones. He should pass Glen Rice in the next week and Mike Miller in the next month.
Hield is also on pace to shatter Reggie Miller’s franchise record for most 3-pointers made by a Pacer in a single season. Miller made 229 in 1996-97. Hield has made 132 less than halfway through the 2022-23 campaign.
Some of those statistics are reflective of the increased volume of 3-point attempts in the modern NBA to be sure, but Hield – through his time in the gym – has clearly earned being mentioned in the same breath as those legendary sharpshooters.
“He just works really hard,” Haliburton said. “That's just who he is. He's got a beautiful shot. He just plays a good brand of basketball. He makes open ones, he makes tough ones when we need him to.
“He ain't new to this. He's one of the best shooters in the league. When he's done, he'll be one of the best shooters that's ever played this game. That's just what he does.”
One reason Hield has shot up the career lists so quickly is because he simply doesn’t miss games. He is one of just two Pacers (the other being rookie guard Bennedict Mathurin) to appear in all 35 games this season.
Over his career, Hield has missed a grand total of four games. One of those came last year when he was traded from Sacramento to Indiana on a game night for the Kings and held out of that night’s contest with the deal pending. He missed one game due to illness in February 2021 and two with an ankle injury in November 2017, but otherwise has been out there on the court every night since he was drafted in 2016.
That durability is a testament both to Hield’s love of the game and also how he takes care of his body. While he pushes himself daily with his shooting routines, Hield also knows how to limit the stress on his body to avoid injury.
He joked before the season about having a friendly competition with Haliburton to see which of the two would get the most dunks this season and he always leaps up and hangs on the rim during pregame introductions as part of his gameday routine, but Hield has not been rocking the rim on the regular this season.
In fact, his first dunk of the year didn’t come until Tuesday night, when he leaked out ahead of Atlanta’s defense late in the second quarter and took a pass from rookie guard Andrew Nembhard in front of the Pacers bench.
Hield’s long-awaited dunk isn’t going to make the Sportscenter Top 10 list. He rather meekly dropped the ball through the rim with two hands then smiled at the Indiana bench, which gave him mixed reactions. His teammates all rose from their seats in celebration, though Brissett and James Johnson gave him a thumbs down rating for the half-hearted slam.
But Buddy Hield knows his role. He isn’t a dunker. He’s a shooter. And he’s going to keep shooting. And if he wasn’t somewhere getting up shots when you started reading this story, he probably is by now.