Gravity lives in the scouting report and it expires

A shooter only warps a defence for as long as the opposition still believes the shot is going in, which is rarely a whole season.

Two defenders lunge at a man forty feet from the basket and leave a lane open behind them. That is the effect everyone means by gravity, and it is not a property of the shooter. It is a property of what the other team decided about him last Tuesday.

This matters because gravity is treated as a fixed attribute, something a player carries around like height. It is not. It is a belief held by five opponents, updated slowly, formed mostly from reputation and a coaching staff's video cut-ups rather than from what is happening in the current game. Which produces two situations worth thinking about.

The first is the shooter whose reputation outlives his shot. He is closed out on hard every night, still moving the defence, still creating the driving lane, while his own percentage has quietly fallen below the point where taking the shot is a good idea. He is, in a strange way, more valuable not shooting. Teams almost never say this out loud because you cannot tell a man to stand in the corner as a rumour.

The second is the reverse and it is more common. A young player has a genuinely good stroke and gets ignored for a year and a half, because nobody has seen enough of him to change the plan. His shooting numbers look worse than his ability, since every shot he takes is one the defence was happy to concede, and the open ones he does get come with a delay while he decides whether he is allowed to take them.

The practical version of this is that gravity is earned in a specific way. Not by percentage. By volume at speed, in moments that hurt, on national broadcasts, until an assistant coach somewhere types a name onto a list of people you do not leave.

Which is why I get impatient with teams that tell a young shooter to be selective. Selectivity is how you stay invisible. The shots that look inefficient in year one are the ones that buy the space in year three, and the accounting for that never shows up in any single season's numbers.

Take the bad ones early. That is the whole investment.