Season in Review: Troy Daniels
Troy Daniels might end up having played only 11 games for the Charlotte Hornets organization in his career. Yet he has already left his mark on the franchise, albeit in a trivial way.
A player conditioned to jack up as many threes as possible, thanks to his affiance with the Houston Rockets (the team that first gave him a shot in the NBA) and its D-League long-range bombing experiment, the Rio Grande Valley, Daniels helped us break a 19-year-old franchise record, per Basketball Reference’s data.
On March 8th, 1996 Glen Rice and Larry Johnson combined for 19 three-point field goal attempts en route to a overtime loss at Orlando. The team’s 31 three-pointer attempts was a franchise record.
Daniels and Brian Roberts turned out to be the main participants in the event of breaking this record. In the last week of the season we managed to approach the record real close (30 attempts in Atlanta), break it (32 attempts against Houston, 6 for Daniels, 12 for Roberts) and then settle one 3FGA above (33 attempts in Toronto, 13 for Daniels, 6 for Roberts).
The two games showed how you can hang around with long-range shooting in today’s game. We had no business competing with those two teams (especially Houston) with the roster we had. Yet if Brian Roberts and Troy Daniels can go 8 for 18 and 7 for 19 in two consecutive games, that’s found money for our bad offense. It’s a volume of three point shooting that we see very rarely with the selection of players we have. Sometimes such chucking can keep you in games.
I won’t act as if there’s an evaluation you can make on Daniels based on a sample size of 11 games. But, hey, his shooting is good enough to keep him around. We need it badly on this roster and I don’t see how he could be any worse than PJ Hairston, if only for the fact that his percentages are a lot better than the ones of Peter Jr. The man seemed fearless and it did seem like Daniels is comfortable with taking difficult looks. He can be a few feet behind the three-point line, he can be backing up with the dribble, no matter what, he can make such a shot.
However, I will give you some footage of him that I found interesting and it’s on his defense which did in fact seem to be on the level of a player in between the NBA and the D-League. Troy’s job on Jodie Meeks at Detroit was infuriating. It looked as if he hadn’t grasped the fact that he’s guarding a dangerous shooter and that screens would be coming his way.
Here you can see mistakes of all types. Daniels randomly over-committing off the ball and leaving Meeks wide open, Daniels not being ready for a screen-and-roll and Daniels forgetting about the possibility of having to track Meeks through off-ball screens.
I believe the “Shit!” we hear comes from Troy Daniels’s mouth once he realizes that Jodie has a solid advantage on him and already is off and running.
Grade: N/A
Not enough of a sample size.
Reinis Lacis's Basketball Blog 
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