It was arguably the biggest moment of the whole season for the Atlanta Hawks. Game 1 of their first-round playoff series with the New York Knicks was tied at 105 with less than five seconds remaining. Trae Young dribbled around a perimeter double-team and darted toward the paint. As he arrived at the right elbow, only two players were in the lane: teammate Danilo Gallinari and Knicks big man Julius Randle.
Randle was already in a hopeless situation. Either he could stop the ball and give up an easy lob to Gallinari, or he could stay with him and give up an open look to one of the best young players in the league. He tried to split the difference. As Young entered the paint, Randle took a stand at the edge of the restricted area. But Young leaped off his left foot and let go of a game-winning floater that was both deadly and gorgeous.
Young's big shot quieted a raucous crowd at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, but it also served as a loud reminder that floaters are having a moment in the best basketball league in the world. Soft runners and teardrops are quickly increasing in both popularity and importance in the NBA.
Game 1 of the Knicks-Hawks series was an instant classic whose outcome turned on a pair of floaters at the very end. First, Derrick Rose tied the game with a clutch version with 9.8 seconds left. Not to be outdone, Young returned the favor, lifting the Hawks to victory with his own clutch floater that fell through the net with just 0.9 seconds remaining.
Overall, Game 1 included 19 floaters, with seven of them in the fourth quarter, according to tracking data from Second Spectrum. Anyone who has ever watched Tony Parker or Chris Paul can tell you that these types of shots are nothing new. However, we're seeing an unprecedented rise in their use around the league.
The reason is simple: There has been a massive leaguewide increase in drives to the basket.
Despite the 3-point revolution, the best shots in the sport still occur close to the basket. That hasn't changed. But the ways teams are getting those shots and the players who are taking them has. NBA offenses used to rely on entry passes to post up players to get the ball near the rim, but they are now leaning more on drivers to dribble their way inside instead. Consider these two facts:
Since the NBA added its player-tracking system in 2013-14, post-up activity has been cut in half, while drives have increased by 31.1% (Second Spectrum).
Guards have scored more points in the paint than both forwards and centers each of the past two seasons. It's the first time in NBA history that's happened.
In 2013-14 there were 36.1 drives per 100 possessions. This season there were 47.4 per 100. As drives have increased in frequency, so too have floaters, which are 22% more popular now than they were in 2013-14. As we've seen over the past week, they've become vital weapons in crunch time of huge games.
The two biggest shots of Game 1 at MSG were floaters. It was a Ja Morant floater that iced the West play-in finale last Friday, sending Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors home for the year. Morant was right back at it two days later, knocking down two huge floaters to help his team upset the top-seeded Jazz in Game 1.
Welcome to the Floater Era (The Floatera?), folks. Your tour guides will be the best young guards on the planet.
Here's another telling stat: The six most active float men in the NBA are all 22 or younger, and they are all guards.
The rise of these young "Float Goats" is proof that this shot type is emerging as a future fundamental for elite on-ball playmakers. The young man's dagger has already become a weapon of choice for many of the league's best young guards, which means it's a crucial tool for the next generation of superstars and any player trying to join that club.
The pace-and-space era forced defenses to emphasize protecting the rim and the 3-point line, and it opened up the midrange area for cleaner looks -- which modern offenses tried to avoid taking. But as defenses become more and more content with allowing midrange looks, the ability to score from the floater zone is becoming a vital skill.
Morant's dagger in San Francisco happened between the rim and the nail, near the exact center of the lane, which is the epicenter of floater activity. This chart shows the concentration of floaters in the NBA during the 2020-21 season.
According to Second Spectrum, NBA shooters combined to shoot 12,286 floaters this season. On average, these shots occurred 9.8 feet from the rim, and they went in 43.0% of the time. Some players tend to shoot the shot closer than others, and some produce better outcomes than that.
This year, nobody was better at the shot than Rose. The former MVP converted 53.3% of his 108 attempts from an average distance of 10.5 feet. If it weren't for Young's dagger in Game 1, we'd still be talking about Rose's clutch floater on the previous possession to tie the game.
But Young came through too, and in just his third season, he's become the most prolific user of the floater in the whole league. This season Young converted 45.6% of a league-leading 252 attempts. Nobody else in the league crossed the 200 mark.
The quintessential Young floater begins with some crafty ball-handling outside the arc, a dribble drive and a one-footed leap somewhere near the free throw line. His average floater distance is 10.6 feet from the rim.
While Young is rightfully developing a reputation for being among the league's most brash deep-range 3-point shooters, any scouting report that doesn't provide insight into his use of the floater is incomplete. He is much more than a long-range bomber, and his approach to scoring inside the arc provides a helpful glimpse into how the younger generation of scoring guards look to get their buckets.
Once he gets inside the arc, Young is much more likely to try layups and floaters than he is to attempt a pull-up jumper. Out of his 715 2-point attempts, only 8.9% of them were pull-ups -- 35.0% were floaters and 44.9% were layups.
Morant and Doncic exhibit similar 2-point shooting tendencies, being more likely to shoot floaters than pull-ups. Meanwhile, older point guards like Chris Paul and Kemba Walker are more than three times as likely to take a pull-up than a floater. It's a sign of the times: Midrange pull-ups are an endangered species; floaters are not.
When you look at a chart of where points from the field came from this season, it's obvious that the analytical dogma of 3s and layups now has a firm grip on the NBA. In previous seasons, these charts used to include patches of activity near the elbows and off of the low blocks, but those days are gone. The decline of post play has eroded the use of baseline fadeaways, and the fact that this new generation of attack guards prefers floaters to pull-ups is diminishing the prevalence of the elbow jumpers that Paul and Walker have thrived on for years.
Bottom line, as the older generation of point guards hand the keys over to the young guys, floaters are poised to become the new midrange.
Today's best guards must be able to shoot 3s, throw lobs and get their own buckets in the teeth of the defense. Players like Young, Morant, and Doncic excel in each of these key facets, and floaters are a huge part of that, as the league's backcourt players suddenly become its primary frontcourt producers.
The inside-out trends of the past decade have reformed conventional wisdom in pro hoops. Now, at the dawn of the 2020s, floaters -- and the young guards who know how to use them -- are emerging as the next great disrupters in the NBA.