How Bucks’ Brook Lopez reinvented his 3-point shot with the help of ‘Noah’

As an industrial-sized fan whirred just a few feet behind him, Milwaukee Bucks center Brook Lopez stood five inches away from the far wall of a former laser tag facility turned basketball gym in Waukesha, Wis., and prepared to fire up another 30-foot catch-and-shoot jumper.

He planted both feet and waited for his next pass. As the ball floated through the air, Lopez lifted his right foot and then his left foot, caught the pass and fired up a deep 3.

“Forty-two,” a vaguely robotic voice projected throughout the gym as the ball ricocheted off the rim.

A local teenager chased down the miss as two coaches kept their eyes trained on Lopez and another filmed Lopez’s shot. Lopez steadied himself again before another pass came his way from the fifth and final member of the operation. This time, as he caught the ball, he planted his left foot and then his right foot and shot another 3.

“Forty-six,” that same voice said as Lopez’s shot swished through the net.

As the next pass came to Lopez, he went back to planting his right foot first as he caught the ball and tried another 30-footer.

“Forty-nine,” the voice said as the ball splashed down in the net.

And this is how Lopez spent two weeks this past summer.

“I put a lot of work in this offseason to be a better shooter,” Lopez recently told The Athletic. “I changed my shot a little bit. And so the confidence is there, because the work, it’s in the bank. So that definitely helps a lot.”

How did Lopez change his shot?

“I messed with the Noah a little bit,” Lopez continued. “I don’t know if you know what that is. You could look it up.”

Rather than look it up though, The Athletic asked Lopez to break it down and explain his summer-long jump-shooting journey, including the coaches who helped him and the machine that guided the whole process.

For 30-plus years, John Welch served as an assistant coach, either in the NCAA or NBA. During that time, he worked for great basketball minds and championship coaches such as Jerry Tarkanian, Jerry West, Hubie Brown, George Karl, Jason Kidd and Doc Rivers. After stepping away from the bench following the 2019-20 season with the LA Clippers, Welch began working with players on an individual basis to help them take the next step in their career.

But when he received a call from longtime NBA agent Darren Matsubara about working with Lopez this past summer, he wasn’t sure he should take on the new job.

“Obviously, usually, I work with younger players. I think I can make a difference and really help them,” Welch recalled in a recent phone interview with The Athletic. “I had Brook in Brooklyn and we always got along well, but I didn’t really want to waste Brook’s time or my time. At Brook’s age, to be honest, I didn’t really think there was much I could do to help Brook.”

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And Welch knew Lopez well.

Not only had he coached Lopez as an assistant with the Nets for two seasons, but he also was coaching at Fresno State at the same time Lopez was making his way through high school as one of the top prospects in the country at San Joaquin Memorial High School in Fresno, Calif. Despite their familiarity, Welch remained worried about whether he could actually find a way to help Lopez, 34, improve before the 2022-23 season, Lopez’s 15th year in the NBA.

Matsubara insisted, though, and told Welch that Lopez believed he could really help him. So, Welch accepted the assignment and immediately started to dig into the film and the statistics to get a closer look at what Lopez did last season as the veteran center returned from midseason back surgery.

“Looking at the numbers, especially shooting the ball above the break, he hadn’t shot the ball from three as well as I thought he had,” Welch said of Lopez. “And, of course, I did speak with the Bucks coaches for their input about what Brook needs to get better at because Brook had his idea, I had my ideas, but what really matters is Brook and the Bucks. And they kind of came to the same conclusion, so we decided to focus on his 3-point shooting, specifically above the break.”

With that focus in mind, it was time to get to work, but Welch knew he needed some help. Specifically, he needed a Noah Shooting System.

“Essentially, it’s a camera that tracks all of your shots,” Lopez explained. “It does the angle of entry, the arc, your depth of the shot and then left, right coordinates.”

With a camera placed seven feet above the rim, the Noah Shooting System can measure shots from all over the court in real time. But as Lopez explained, it doesn’t just record whether the shot went through the net; it can record just about everything about the shot. It can tell the exact arc — the name Noah is a play on words from “Noah’s Arc (sic) in the Bible because the company’s original focus was on the arc of the shot and Noah built the perfect arc” — of each shot. It measures where the shot gets to the rim — front rim, swish, back rim — and also whether the shot is on-line — left or right.

The Noah Shooting System is not just a camera though; it is also a computer that can project a real-time measurement through a speaker system in the gym. Immediately after a shot, the speakers can project a reading in one of three ways:

There was just one problem.

When Welch met with the Bucks, he found out they didn’t have a Noah installed in their practice facility, so he made a couple phone calls.

“So I’m friends with the CEO (John Carter) and I called him,” Welch said. “I was hoping Marquette would have it and they didn’t. And so he called around and he goes, ‘There’s a training gym. It’s called The Pro Lane, Drew and Jake run it, two great guys.’ So I called them up, introduce myself and said, ‘Can we bring Brook over?’ And so we went over there.”

Run by Drew Dunlop and Jake Grossmann, The Pro Lane — a 20-minute drive from the Bucks’ practice facility — is where high school, college and pro basketball players work out to sharpen their skills. The 6,000-square-foot facility does not have a full court in it, but it does include two separate NBA half courts set up with Noah Shooting Systems. That was all Welch needed to hear.

“This facility isn’t about finding a pick-up run or just getting up and down the court,” Dunlop told The Athletic. “It’s about getting better, emphasizing player exploration and allowing new skills to emerge. That’s why we have the Noah and why we’re always trying to get the best of the best for our players.”

With a Noah secured, Lopez made his way to the facility and the work began in earnest.

Lopez started regularly shooting 3s two years earlier in the 2016-17 season, his final with the Nets, and made 34.6 percent from deep on 5.2 attempts per game that season. He followed that up with a solid season with the Los Angeles Lakers in which he hit 34.5 percent from 3 on 4.4 attempts per game. But no one could have predicted what was going to happen next when the Bucks signed Lopez to the biannual exception (one year, $3.3 million) in the summer of 2018.

To properly spread out the floor for Giannis Antetokounmpo in Mike Budenholzer’s new five-out offensive system, the Bucks needed Lopez to fire up shots from deep and keep opposing centers out of the lane. But it wasn’t just a couple 3s each night to keep teams honest; it was a full-on 3-point barrage on a nightly basis to the start of the season. Lopez has taken 10 or more 3-point shots in a game 17 times in his career. Eleven of those instances occurred in Lopez’s first season with the Bucks, nine of which happened in the first three months.

The 17th instance of Lopez shooting 10 or more 3-pointers in a single game occurred in the Bucks’ season opener in Philadelphia this season.

Against the 76ers, Lopez teed up 12 3-pointers. He made just four of those 12, but he is still shooting a career-high 6.4 attempts per game and making 35.7 percent, a percentage much closer to his first season with the Bucks. While it may surprise some to see Lopez shooting more 3-pointers than he did during the halcyon Splash Mountain days at the start of his Bucks tenure, Lopez knew that is what the Bucks needed from him this season. So, he spent the summer trying to more perfectly fill his role.

“We just realized we want to get better,” Lopez said of his summer. “We finally took the time. ‘All right, we’re trying to get better? How do we do that?’ We’re playing on the perimeter a ton, that’s somewhere we can help the team get better.”

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Enter Welch, the Noah and their reserved gym in the Milwaukee suburbs for a week-long shooting summit in the middle of July.

“You know there are people that say, ‘Oh, you gotta get in the lab, blah, blah, blah.’ But that’s really what we were doing,” Welch said. “We were experimenting with things trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. We’d have five, six guys all focused on Brook and we’d have the camera, we’d have the Noah. You talk about deliberate practice, the gym was just us, there was no one else on any of the other baskets. It was great.”

If they were going to improve Lopez’s 3-point shot, they needed to break it down piece-by-piece and find out how they could improve it, so they got into the gym and let Lopez start shooting.

Welch remembered pushing for Lopez to shoot more 3s when he worked for the Nets from 2013 to 2015, but there always being a little bit of a struggle getting Lopez to move from shooting long 2-point shots to 3-pointers because he was less accurate. Even though the shot was just slightly longer, Lopez would go from nearly automatic in the midrange to slightly above-average at the 3-point line, even in just the corners.

“It always felt like my shot was right there from 3,” Lopez told The Athletic. “We talked about how from long two, it doesn’t miss, but you step back and it’s a little different.”

“They’d all be close, they just wouldn’t go in,” Welch said.

So, they turned on the Noah Shooting System and started trying to figure out what they could do about that problem.

The Noah tracks and catalogs every shot taken during a session and presents those findings to system users in interactive reports like this:

Users can pick out each individual shot and see the measurements or pick out groups of shots to see if certain problems arise while shooting from certain areas on the floor. That type of data can be useful after a workout, but what makes the Noah unique is the system’s ability to give a real time report. While shooting, users can hear the system’s speakers project one of the three measurements on that specific shot immediately after a shot is taken.

“The Noah is great because it gives you the feedback,” Lopez said. “It gives you the feedback right in front of you in real time. So you can mess around with stuff and find where you’re best at and then it’s just a matter of getting great at shooting that way in live situations, so it’s a lot of repetition.”

After using the Noah for two decades, Welch has found that many shooting problems can typically be solved by fixing the arc of a player’s shot. The ideal arc is typically around 45 degrees for most players in Welch’s findings, so the first thing Welch did was set the Noah to read out the arc on Lopez’s shot. Listen in the video for measurements of degrees between 40 and 50:

Quickly, they found that Lopez had been putting too much arc on the ball.

“Mine’s probably around 44 (degrees), which is interesting because we originally thought mine would be a bit higher,” Lopez told The Athletic of his shot’s ideal arc. “We were comparing it to Dirk (Nowitzki) a little bit. Like Dirk really liked to have a lot of arc and so once we got in there and messed around, it turned out being 44. So just a little bit lower than 45, which is about optimal.”

Bringing down the level of arc on his shots, though, was only the start of the process. While Welch and Lopez were able to pinpoint an ideal arc, the problems persisted as Lopez’s shot still bounced in-and-out more often than they would like. So, they continued to tinker. They messed around with the left-right coordinates on Lopez’s shot. In the video, the measurements will be expressed in inches between minus-9 (off to the left) and 9 (off to the right):

Take a look at Lopez’s feet while shooting this grouping of shots with the Noah calling out the left-right coordinates of each shot. On this set, Welch asked Lopez to keep his feet close together. Later in the week, he asked Lopez to spread his feet out wider than normal. All week long, they kept experimenting to figure out how to find Lopez’s perfect form.

“We were just messing around with different things,” Lopez said. “They’d just be like ‘This set of 25 shots shoot with your feet like this.’ Or ‘Shoot like this. With your feet way out.’ You know, just feel out the different stuff, feel what feels good.”

Eventually, they decided that Lopez’s ideal form includes him keeping his feet shoulder-width apart and pointed straight toward the basket.

Last season, after he returned from back surgery, Lopez often ended up turning his feet at an angle when setting up his shot, instead of keeping them square to the basket. An example from March:

Using the Noah, Lopez also tried to find the perfect depth for his shot to get to the rim.

As Welch explained to The Athletic, basketball rims have a diameter of 18 inches. The center of the rim is nine inches, which would be an ideal spot for the ball to go through the rim, if not for arc. Shooting from distance with an optimal arc of 45 degrees means shots that arrive in the first two inches of the rim won’t actually go in, so the ideal depth is actually 11 inches. In most NBA circles, the ideal type of make is one that goes “Back Rim And Down” (BRAD).

Just as they did with the other two parts of the Noah measurements, Welch encouraged Lopez to experiment when it came to depth as well. Watch at the 20-second mark in the video as Welch tells Lopez to move his release from in front of his body to behind his head:

(In this video, the Noah was set to depth and read out measurements between 0 (front rim) and 18 (back rim).)

As they experimented, they found that some of Lopez’s problems were interconnected, as often tends to be the case with jump shots. Because his feet were on an angle, Lopez was generating more power on his jump shot last season by bringing the ball to the left side of his body and then behind his head. That was something they worked to eliminate this summer.

“Less twist,” Lopez said of the change. “And we saw that kind of led to left-right (problems) a little bit. So we’re trying to get rid of that left-right variance and keep it as zero as possible.”

All week long, Lopez tried out new and different things with real-time assessments from the Noah and a deep study of the data after each session.

“We’ll see what works because you get the visual feedback with the groupings,” Lopez said. “It’s like a gun range, you know? You get your grouping of where the misses are. It was really fun. It was just, it was cool to see the improvement. You could visually see yourself just getting better.”

Eventually, they even dove into the placement of Lopez’s hand on the ball. On this grouping, Lopez tried to spread his right hand out wider and focus on shooting the ball primarily off of his thumb and pointer finger:

(This video featured the Noah reading out left-right measurements.)

By the end of the week, they had decided on a number of things. To shoot the most perfect version of a 3-point jumper, Lopez should keep:

If he does all of those things, each shot has a much better chance of finding his ideal arc of 44 degrees, splashing down 11 inches deep in the rim and hitting dead-center in the middle of the rim.

“It’s super useful,” Lopez said. “It was great for me. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I loved it. I’m an analytical guy, obviously. I love thinking about stuff like that. So it’s super helpful. Very cool.”

With the experimental work on his shot complete, Lopez planned to abscond on a world tour for his engagement. As he detailed meticulously to reporters during training camp, his engagement plans were ultimately dashed, but that didn’t keep him from making his way back out to Waukesha for a second session at The Pro Lane at the end of August.

While Welch enjoyed working with Lopez, one thing kept bothering him during their first week-long session.

“I know everyone’s on their phone all the time, but we’d be shooting and we’d get some water and Brook would go get on his phone,” Welch recalled to The Athletic. “And I’d be like, ‘F—. Typical. Typical guy on his phone.’ And then we’re shooting free throws and he runs and gets on his phone again. And I’m thinking, ‘What’s so damn important that he has to be on his phone?”

After a couple days working together, Welch finally had enough.

“I said, ‘Brook!’” Welch said. “And he said, ‘Hold on coach, I just want to make sure I write that down, what you said.’ And I said, ‘What?’ Turns out he was going to his phone taking notes. I’ve never had a high school player take notes, and Brook would show me his notes and he’d say, “Coach, is there anything else?”

As Welch got a better look at Lopez’s notes, he started to comprehend just how seriously Lopez had been taking their sessions. He also came to appreciate Lopez’s ability to quickly understand a new concept and adapt his approach.

“It was amazing how quickly Brook picked things up,” Dunlop told The Athletic. “You could talk about it during one session and then after a water break, Brook was doing exactly what you had just talked about on every shot.”

With Lopez’s mental capabilities, the group started to use shorthand terms to represent larger concepts. “Dirk” helped Lopez to remember that he needed to keep his fingers spread out on the basketball. “Steph,” as in Stephen Curry, became a reminder about how he needed to finish his shots and keep his follow-through straight at the basket. And the note taking must have worked because after some time away from each other, Lopez picked up right where they left off when Welch returned to Wisconsin in August.

“It was amazing,” Welch said. “I worked with him for a week, left for two weeks and then came back a week later. I figured we’d kind of have to start over. He went out of the country. When I came back, he did everything. It was like he hadn’t missed a day. He was quoting all the terms to me and he expanded on them all.”

“I think that’s the interesting thing with Brook. You hear about Disney World and the comic books, but he’s the hardest working, most professional player. It’s how serious he takes his craft. It’s just amazing how, at this age, he wants to continue to improve. I’ll kind of follow Brook’s progress and, you know, text him and different things. And it’s just amazing how appreciative he is. It’s like I tell my wife, ‘If it was someone else, I’d almost think they’re being sarcastic.’”

The Bucks are 11 games into the season and Lopez has carried all of the summer work with him as he fires up more 3s than ever before. And now, if he wants to check out his arc or depth or left-right coordinates, he doesn’t have to drive all the way out to Waukesha. He can just go gets some shots up in the facility because the Bucks installed Noah systems on the four main baskets in the Froedtert & MCW Sports Science Center.

“It’s wild,” Lopez said. “We have it in the facility now and it can recognize who’s shooting. It tracks their face, so it can track all the shots. And then, you have the whole set of shots and your averages and everything like that. It’s super useful. It’s just really cool.”

If the Bucks are going to secure their second NBA title in three seasons, they are going to need Lopez to make 3-point shots. With the help of the Noah, Welch and a small gym in Waukesha, he should have the blueprint (and the notes) to keep his shot on target all season long.

(Top photo of Brook Lopez: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)