Keep Grinding: Getting Better With Age.
A basketball-driven reflection on compounding skill, getting better with age, and why improvement is still possible after the obvious growth years.
You can get better with age, but only if the work keeps compounding. Starting from a high baseline is not enough. The people who become truly great keep improving after the obvious growth years, after the first leap, after the market has already decided they are good. The baseline matters; the curve matters more.
The shape is the same — and it tracks reps, not age. There is an analysis I used to show people years ago, pulled from Basketball Reference: plot LeBron James's and Steve Nash's shooting efficiency year by year and you see the same shape for both. They start below the league median. They climb for a decade. They end as one of the most efficient scorers the league has ever had. No epiphany. No single summer of transformation. A line that keeps going up.
I re-ran the exercise. The stat that tells the story most cleanly is true shooting percentage:
TS% = PTS / (2 × (FGA + 0.44 × FTA))
It rolls twos, threes, and free throws into a single number normalized to points per shooting possession. League average has sat around 53–55% through most of the last two decades. Both players started below that. Both finished well above it. Here is what that looks like.
True Shooting Percentage by Year in League — LeBron James vs. Steve Nash
Two future Hall-of-Famers who started below league average.
The shape is the same — and it tracks reps, not age
Two different players. Different positions, different eras, different body types, different games. Same curve. Start below or at the league average. Spend a decade climbing through the noise. Both players hit their personal TS% peak in year 11 in the league — LeBron at age 29, Nash at age 33. That is the payoff of reindexing to year-in-league instead of age: the curves line up on the reps axis, not the calendar axis. Development time is a function of how long you have been in the work, not how old you are while doing it.
This is the kind of chart that is almost impossible to see from inside. Year to year, the delta is small. Nash added close to two percentage points of efficiency per season on average during his climb. LeBron added a bit more than one. At the scale of a single summer of work, the gain is inside the noise. At the scale of a decade, it is the difference between a rotation player and the TS% leaderboard.
LeBron: rookie 48.8% → peak 64.9% at year 11 → still 62.1% at age 33
| Year | Season | Age | TS% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2003–04 | 19 | 48.8 |
| 2 | 2004–05 | 20 | 55.4 |
| 3 | 2005–06 | 21 | 56.8 |
| 4 | 2006–07 | 22 | 55.2 |
| 5 | 2007–08 | 23 | 56.8 |
| 6 | 2008–09 | 24 | 59.1 |
| 7 | 2009–10 | 25 | 60.4 |
| 8 | 2010–11 | 26 | 59.4 |
| 9 | 2011–12 | 27 | 60.5 |
| 10 | 2012–13 | 28 | 64.0 |
| 11 | 2013–14 | 29 | 64.9 |
| 12 | 2014–15 | 30 | 57.7 |
| 13 | 2015–16 | 31 | 58.8 |
| 14 | 2016–17 | 32 | 61.9 |
| 15 | 2017–18 | 33 | 62.1 |
The rookie season is the one everyone forgets. LeBron came into the league at 18 as the most hyped prospect in basketball history and shot the ball at 48.8% true shooting — meaningfully below league average. He was the Rookie of the Year, averaged 20/5/5, and was still, by this measure, a bad shooter.
Years 2 through 10 are the grind: +6.6 points of efficiency in year 2, then a mix of small gains and small setbacks, adding roughly one point per year on average. By year 10 he had gained more than 15 points of TS% on his rookie self. Years 10 and 11 — the back-to-back MVP seasons in Miami — are the payoff.
After the year-11 peak his line dips (a move back to Cleveland, a new cast, a changed role) and then climbs again. At age 33, year 15, he is still shooting 62.1% — well above league average and above where he was in any of his first nine seasons. The curve does not reverse after the peak; it settles into its own new plateau.
Nash: year-3 nadir 47.1% → peak 65.4% at year 11, back-to-back MVPs at 31 and 32
| Year | Season | Age | TS% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1996–97 | 23 | 53.9 |
| 2 | 1997–98 | 24 | 55.6 |
| 3 | 1998–99 | 25 | 47.1 |
| 4 | 1999–00 | 26 | 60.1 |
| 5 | 2000–01 | 27 | 60.3 |
| 6 | 2001–02 | 28 | 60.2 |
| 7 | 2002–03 | 29 | 57.6 |
| 8 | 2003–04 | 30 | 59.0 |
| 9 | 2004–05 | 31 | 60.6 |
| 10 | 2005–06 | 32 | 63.2 |
| 11 | 2006–07 | 33 | 65.4 |
Nash's curve has a worse trough. His third NBA season he shot 47.1% TS — that is not a backup point guard's number, that is a player the league is about to push out. He was a 15th-pick bench guy in Phoenix who Dallas then traded for and who, in 1998–99 at age 25, looked like a mistake. Year 3 in the league is also the year most players decide what kind of career they are going to have.
What happens next is the part that keeps getting underestimated. He gets a starting role in Dallas, rebuilds the shot, and in year 4 jumps to 60.1% — the highest mark of his career to that point and 13 points above the year prior. From there he grinds upward for seven more years. He wins back-to-back MVPs at ages 31 and 32 (years 9 and 10 in the league), and posts his career peak 65.4% at age 33 — year 11, the same league-year at which LeBron peaks.
Why TS% is the right lens
True shooting percentage is the right stat because it strips out volume, style, and role. It asks one question: when you decide to try to score, how many points do you actually produce per possession? A guard who lives at the arc and a forward who lives in the post can be measured on the same number. Improvement in TS% is almost always real improvement — not a stat artifact of taking more or different shots, but a compounding of better shot selection, better form, better free-throw conversion, better conditioning, better reads.
Keep grinding
The reason this analysis stuck with me the first time I saw it is that it answers the only real question most people face about improvement in their own work: how long does the boring middle last, and is it worth it?
LeBron went from 48.8% to a 64.9% peak in year 11, and was still at 62.1% at age 33 in year 15. Nash went from 47.1% in his year-3 trough to 65.4% at his age-33 year-11 peak. Neither did it in a summer. Both did it in a decade of small, year-by-year wins that at any single point looked like noise.
Keep grinding. The chart is the chart.
Notes and sources
- Player data. Basketball-Reference.com season totals for LeBron James (2003–04 through 2017–18) and Steve Nash (1996–97 through 2006–07).
- True shooting formula. TS% = PTS / (2 × (FGA + 0.44 × FTA)).
- Chart treatment. Player seasons are reindexed to year in league and trimmed at each player's age-33 season. League-average TS% figures use Basketball-Reference league totals over the same span.