Shaun Livingston's throwback game still works beautifully in this era

On the most prolific deep-shooting team of all time, Shaun Livingston stands out. Among all guards who played at least 1,000 minutes this regular season, not a single one shot fewer threes than Livingston, who attempted just 12 over the course of 78 games. Even Tony Allen took about four times as many threes as Livingston over a similar number of minutes. Stephen Curry took a three roughly once every three minutes in the regular season. Klay Thompson did it roughly once every four minutes. Livingston fired up a triple once every 127 minutes.

Why? That's easy: Livingston is a bad three-point shooter, so he doesn't take them. He's never hit more than five in a season. His 12 attempts this season actually approached a career high, set back pre-injury when he went 5-16 as a 21-year-old with the Clippers. As essentially the entire league has embraced deep shooting at historic rates -- largely due to Livingston's teammates' success -- Livingston has remained an anachronistic outlier.

It's telling that the team most in love with the three, the franchise that bathes in the Kool-Aid of the analytic revolution, sought out Livingston as a free agent in 2014 and gives him such a prominent role. Despite his aversion to deep shooting, Livingston checks so many boxes. With a player this solid overall, the lack of range becomes a quirk instead of a fatal flaw.

Livingston's primary attribute is incredible defense. What made him such a drool-worthy prospect out of high school was his combination of length and athleticism. A long 6'7 point guard who can fly is tough to beat. The speed and jumping ability has degraded quite a bit since that catastrophic knee injury almost 10 years ago, but the length allows him to leverage his high-level awareness into elite defense.

Defense matters to the pro-analytics crowd, too. Defense matters a lot. It's just harder to measure than three-point shooting and Livingston's other analytics gold star, a low turnover rate. By any measure, Livingston is a very strong defender, and while he doesn't deliver a ton of assists (about six per 36 minutes in recent years, which is rather run-of-the-mill), he keeps the turnover rate low.

This is because he's not attacking the rim frequently: fully half of his shots come in the mid-range, between 10 and 22 feet, per basketball-reference.com. There aren't a lot of positive things you can say about a heavy diet of two-point jumpers, but they do tend to be associated with low turnover rates. This is one of the hallmarks of Dirk Nowitzki's career: he's the rare high scorer who can create for himself without racking up giveaways because he's not usually driving into traffic. Like Nowitzki and other famous mid-range mavens like LaMarcus Aldridge, Livingston has a huge length advantage against most defenders. He doesn't need to get fancy most of the time; he can just shoot over the top.

This is what makes Klay Thompson so deadly from deep. Livingston applies the principle 10 feet in, and hits at a similar rate (albeit without the benefit of the extra point).

Livingston has a partially guaranteed contract for next season -- the Warriors would only waive him if it's absolutely necessary to land someone like Kevin Durant with no other options for salary cutting. So he'll likely hit free agency a year from now, at age 31, existing as a younger, less-shrill Tony Allen or a younger, less-athletic, less-prolific and less-famous Dwyane Wade.

It's a nice place to have in the modern NBA, especially when he has been so successful on a team so averse to mid-range shots and guards without range. He's proven you can be a good NBA guard without a deep shot in Golden State; no one will doubt it's possible elsewhere. Here's to Shaun Livingston, a throwback player allowed to be himself and succeed doing so.

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The play by the Warriors that blew up Game 1