The Greatest Shooters in NBA History

Scoring points and shooting a basketball are not the same skill. A great scorer can bully his way to the rim, draw fouls, and pile up 30 a night without ever being a marksman. A great shooter does something rarer — he turns the most difficult act in the sport, putting a ball through an 18-inch rim from 24 feet away, into something that looks routine. The greatest shooters in NBA history separated themselves not by how many points they scored but by how cleanly, how efficiently, and how often the ball went in from distance. Some rewrote the record book for three-point volume. Others posted percentages that still look like typos. A select few did both at once, and a handful joined the most exclusive efficiency club the sport has — the 50-40-90 club. This is a list about the purest strokes ever seen, not the biggest point totals.

What Makes a Great Shooter?

Before the names, it helps to define the argument — because "shooter" gets measured three different ways. The first is volume: how many shots you made from deep across a career or a single season. The three-point line arrived for the 1979-80 season, sitting 23 feet 9 inches away at the top of the arc and 22 feet in the corners, and the all-time makes leaderboard rewards the players who fired and connected the most.

The second is efficiency: what percentage actually went in. This is where the 50-40-90 club lives — a season shooting at least 50 percent from the field, 40 percent from three, and 90 percent from the free-throw line. Only nine players in league history have ever done it, and free-throw percentage is the sneaky tell here, because a pure stroke shows up most honestly at the line where nobody guards you.

The third is difficulty: contested, off-the-dribble, off movement, from range no coach would ever green-light. The best shooters checked more than one box. The truly great ones checked all three.

Stephen Curry — The All-Time Three-Point King

Stephen Curry is the greatest shooter who has ever lived, and the numbers no longer leave room for debate. He owns more than 4,200 career three-pointers — a total that dwarfs everyone else on the all-time list, with second place more than 800 makes behind him. On March 13, 2025, one day before his 37th birthday, he became the first player in NBA history to reach 4,000 career threes. He had already passed Ray Allen for the all-time record on December 14, 2021, and simply never stopped extending the gap.

His single-season record is just as absurd. In 2015-16, Curry made 402 three-pointers — over 100 more than the previous record, which he also held. That season he shot 45.4 percent from deep while averaging more than 30 points a game, and he was named the first unanimous MVP in league history. His career three-point percentage sits at 42.2, elite for anyone, unthinkable at his volume. Curry didn't just break records — he changed what the shot itself is worth, dragging every offense in basketball out past the arc.

Ray Allen — Textbook Form, Ice-Cold Nerve

Ray Allen held the throne before Curry took it. He made 2,973 career three-pointers, still third on the all-time list, and was the record-holder from February 10, 2011 — when his 2,561st three against the Lakers passed Reggie Miller — until Curry overtook him a decade later. He shot 40 percent from three for his career, the product of a jump shot so mechanically perfect that coaches still use his form as a teaching model: the same balanced base, the same high release, the same follow-through every single time.

Allen's signature moment doubles as the greatest shot in Finals history. With the Miami Heat down three and 5.2 seconds from elimination in Game 6 of the 2013 Finals, he backpedaled into the right corner, caught a kick-out after a Chris Bosh rebound, and drilled a three to force overtime. Miami won that game and then Game 7 for a second straight title. It was the ultimate expression of a shooter's value — one flick of the wrist rewriting an entire championship.

Reggie Miller — The Original Volume Bomber

Before Allen and Curry, Reggie Miller was the standard. He made 2,560 career three-pointers — seventh all-time and the record when he retired in 2005 — across 18 seasons spent entirely with the Indiana Pacers, shooting 39.5 percent from deep. He is also, quietly, a member of the 50-40-90 club, proof that his reputation as a chucker undersold how efficient he actually was.

Miller's genius was psychological as much as mechanical. He ran defenders through an obstacle course of screens for 48 minutes, then buried them the instant they lost him. His masterpiece came on May 7, 1995: in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals at Madison Square Garden, Miller scored eight points in 8.9 seconds — two threes and two free throws — to steal a 107-105 win from the Knicks. No shooter has ever weaponized the clock and the crowd quite like he did.

Klay Thompson — The Single-Game Record Holder

Klay Thompson's résumé holds the two most spectacular shooting outbursts in league history. On October 29, 2018, he made 14 three-pointers against the Chicago Bulls — the single-game record — finishing with 52 points in barely 26 minutes and breaking the mark of 13 that had belonged to his own backcourt partner. Three years earlier, on January 23, 2015, he scored 37 points in a single quarter, another NBA record, going a perfect 9-for-9 from three in the period on his way to 52.

Thompson made his 2,899th career three to sit fourth on the all-time list, and was the sixth player ever to reach 2,500. As one half of the "Splash Brothers" alongside Curry, he helped Golden State win four championships and set what was then a record for combined threes by a duo in a season. What made Klay special was economy — he needed no dribbles, no isolation, no theatrics. Catch, rise, release, splash.

Editorial illustration: NBA three-point shot chart

Steve Nash — The Efficiency Ideal

If volume is one measure of a shooter, Steve Nash is the patron saint of the other. He is the all-time leader in career free-throw percentage at 90.4 percent — the truest indicator of a pure stroke — narrowly ahead of Mark Price. And he is the undisputed king of the 50-40-90 club, having qualified four separate times: in 2005-06, 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-10. No one else has more than two.

Nash came heartbreakingly close to doing it a fifth straight year, missing in 2006-07 by shooting 89.9 percent from the line — one made free throw short of five consecutive 50-40-90 seasons. For his entire career, across 18 seasons, he averaged 49.0 percent from the field, 42.8 percent from three, and 90.4 percent from the line — a whisker on field-goal accuracy away from a 50-40-90 career. The two-time MVP wasn't a high-volume bomber; he was the most surgically efficient shooter the game has produced.

Kyle Korver — The Percentage King

Kyle Korver made a Hall-of-Fame-caliber career out of one elite skill: not missing. He holds the record for the highest three-point percentage in a single season, connecting on 53.6 percent of his threes for the 2009-10 Utah Jazz. He is also the only player ever to lead the NBA in three-point percentage four separate times — in 2010, 2014, 2015, and 2017 — and he shot 42.9 percent from deep for his career while making 2,450 threes, eighth on the all-time list.

His most staggering feat was one of pure consistency: from 2013 to 2014 Korver made a three-pointer in 127 consecutive games, an NBA record. Korver was never a shot creator or a go-to scorer. He was a specialist who refined a single skill to its absolute limit, and defenses had to account for him the moment he crossed half court — a gravity that reshaped every offense he played in.

Larry Bird — Trash Talk and 50-40-90

Larry Bird was a great shooter and, more importantly, knew it. He won the first three NBA Three-Point Contests, in 1986, 1987, and 1988. The 1988 edition produced the most famous shooting flex in league history: Bird reportedly walked into the locker room, asked the other competitors who was playing for second, then went out and won it — shooting the final round without even removing his warm-up jacket.

The bravado was backed by production. Bird posted back-to-back 50-40-90 seasons in 1986-87 and 1987-88, making him one of only three players in history with multiple such seasons, alongside Nash and Kevin Durant. In an era when the three-pointer was still treated as a gimmick and most teams barely used it, Bird was a spot-up marksman, a step-back artist, and a clutch dagger-thrower all at once — a shooting profile decades ahead of the league it dominated.

Dirk Nowitzki — The Seven-Footer Who Shot Like a Guard

Dirk Nowitzki broke the template for what a big man was allowed to do. At seven feet tall, he made 1,982 career three-pointers and shot 87.9 percent from the free-throw line — guard numbers on a power forward's frame. In 2006-07, the year he won MVP, he joined the 50-40-90 club, at the time only the fifth player to do it, pairing that efficiency with a franchise-record 67 wins.

His signature weapon was the one-legged fadeaway — a shot balanced on a single leg, released over any defender's outstretched arm, and essentially unblockable. It carried him to the 2011 championship, where he was named Finals MVP after leading the underdog Mavericks past the heavily favored Miami Heat, averaging 26.0 points across the series. Nowitzki proved that shooting touch had nothing to do with position or size — a lesson every stretch big who followed him learned from his blueprint.

Peja Stojakovic — The Sacramento Sharpshooter

Peja Stojakovic was, for a stretch in the early 2000s, the most feared spot-up shooter alive. He shot 40.1 percent from three for his career and won the NBA Three-Point Contest in back-to-back years, 2002 and 2003 — a rare feat that underlined just how automatic his catch-and-shoot stroke was. In 2003-04 he led the entire league with 240 made threes while finishing second in scoring at 24.2 points a game.

As the deadliest floor-spacer on those beloved run-and-gun Sacramento Kings teams, Stojakovic bent defenses simply by standing beyond the arc. His release was long, high, and effortless, and he punished any help defender who so much as glanced away from him. He was the prototype of the modern three-and-D wing before the league had a name for the archetype — a big forward whose entire value radiated from a lethal, repeatable jumper.

Damian Lillard — Logo Range and Ice in His Veins

Damian Lillard extended the definition of a good shot further from the basket than anyone before him. He has made 2,804 career three-pointers, fifth on the all-time list, and built his legend on shots taken from the halfcourt logo — territory that would get most players benched. What separated Lillard was not just range but nerve in the biggest moments.

His two series-clinching daggers are the stuff of playoff legend. In 2014, he hit a buzzer-beating three to eliminate the Houston Rockets 99-98 — the first shot to win an NBA playoff series at the buzzer since John Stockton in 1997. Then in 2019, with the series tied, he rose from 37 feet — nearly the logo — and drilled a buzzer-beater over Paul George to end the Oklahoma City Thunder's season, waving goodbye as it fell through. Lillard turned deep, contested, clock-expiring threes into his home address.

What the Greatest Shooters Have in Common

Line these strokes up next to each other and the patterns come into focus. Volume and efficiency are separate crowns, rarely worn by the same head. Curry is the singular exception who dominates both leaderboards; most of the others specialized — Nash and Korver chased perfection at lower volume, while the record-book bombers accepted a few more misses for a lot more makes. The free-throw line never lies. Nash and Nowitzki's absurd free-throw numbers were the fingerprint of a stroke that also held up from three, which is why the 50-40-90 club — Bird, Miller, Nash, Nowitzki, and Curry among its nine members — is the best single filter for touch ever devised.

Difficulty is the tiebreaker. Allen's cornered feet against the Spurs, Thompson's 14 makes in a night, Miller's eight points in nine seconds, Lillard's logo buzzer-beaters — the immortal shooters were the ones who kept making them when the shot was hardest and the stakes were highest. A great shooter makes the open ones. A legendary one makes them with a hand in his face, a series on the line, and the clock at zero.

Closing illustration for The Greatest Shooters in NBA History