The 3-Point Contest is supposed to be the safest event on All-Star Saturday. No contact, no game plan, no “they scouted me” excuses. It’s just a clock, a handful of racks, and a shooter getting the same looks over and over.
That’s why the worst rounds are so memorable. When the rhythm is off, it snowballs fast. One bad rack turns into two, the feet get rushed, the release gets tight, and suddenly a guy who looks automatic in warmups is spraying shots like he’s never seen the arc before. The arena goes from cheering to politely waiting for it to end, and the broadcast starts searching for any other storyline.
Modern formats have made it even harsher. With money balls, deeper shots, and higher scoring expectations, a low total doesn’t just look bad, it looks historically bad. And the funniest part is that some of these guys weren’t random entrants. A few had real shooting reputations. A few had no business being there. All of them had one night where the contest exposed how thin the margin is between “shooter” and “this is painful.”
Here are five of the roughest rounds of this century.
5. Khris Middleton – 8/25 3PM (32.0%)
Khris Middleton is the kind of shooter who usually looks built for this event. Smooth base, repeatable release, and years of taking pressure threes for the Bucks without blinking. That’s why his worst 3-Point Contest showing stands out. It wasn’t some “why is he even here?” invite. It was a real shooter walking into a real spotlight and losing the feel completely.
His roughest night came in 2019, when he hit 8 of 25 shots, good for 32.0% and barely 11 points. The more painful part is how quickly the round felt doomed. He never got into that one-rack rhythm where your feet sync up and the ball starts coming off your hand the same way every time. It was more like stop-start, a couple go down, then a cold stretch that kills your clock and your confidence.
Middleton had also struggled in his first appearance in 2016, posting just 13 points and looking uncomfortable with the pace of the racks. So by 2019, the baseline expectation was simple: just look like yourself. Instead, it turned into the kind of round where the body language gives it away. You start rushing to make up time, your shoulders rise, and every miss feels louder than the last.
That’s what makes it qualify for this list. Middleton is a legitimate NBA shooter. He just had one of those contest rounds where the skill is real, and the results are still ugly.
4. Paul George – 7/25 3PM (28.0%)
Paul George is a great real-game shot maker, but he’s also a rhythm shooter with a longer setup, and the 3-Point Contest punishes that fast. There’s no dribble to find timing, no defender to key off, and no “one extra beat” to reset your feet. It’s just catch, load, fire, sprint, repeat.
In 2018, it went sideways immediately. George reportedly finished 7-for-25 in Round 1, which comes out to 28.0%, the kind of line that looks fake until you watch the round and realize he never found a groove.
The points total was brutal, too. Only nine points in the opening round, and the broadcast vibe basically matched the math: the misses stacked early, the clock became the enemy, and the last rack turned into a scramble instead of a finish.
That’s why this belongs so high on the list. George wasn’t a random invite, but the contest exposed the one thing you can’t hide in this event: if your mechanics need time, the format steals it from you.
3. Antoine Walker – 6/25 3PM (24.0%)
Antoine Walker might be the most “what are we doing here?” entry on the whole list, because the invite wasn’t random. He was a high-volume three-point shooter for that era, the kind of forward who took them with full confidence and absolutely zero shame. The problem is that the contest doesn’t care about confidence. It cares about rhythm. And Walker showed up in 2003 and looked like he was shooting in work boots.
In the first round of the 2003 3-Point Contest, Walker scored just seven points, which ESPN flat-out described as “particularly dismal.” The makes-and-attempts breakdown from Basketball-Reference’s shot-by-shot analysis is even harsher: 6 makes on 25 attempts, which is 24.0%.
That’s the kind of round where you’re out of it by the third rack. There’s no “one hot streak” that saves you. It’s miss, miss, scrape one in, miss again, and now you’re chasing the clock instead of shooting naturally. The funniest part is that it fits the Walker brand perfectly. He loved taking threes; he took more threes than anyone in the league around that time, and he still managed to produce one of the coldest contest rounds of the century when everything was supposed to be clean and scripted.
2. Vladimir Radmanovic – 5/25 3PM (20.0%)
This one is brutal because Radmanovic actually came in with a real shooter résumé. That season with the SuperSonics, he hit 38.9% from three while playing a real role as a floor-spacer in their rotation.
Then the contest started, and it basically ended immediately.
Radmanovic finished 5-for-25 (20.0%), but the detail that explains how ugly it was: he made only two of his first 19 shots. At that point, you’re not “having a cold rack.” You’re dead. The rest of the round is just trying to survive the clock without it looking worse.
And because this was the classic 25-ball format, there wasn’t any modern format padding to save him. No extra deep balls. No extra attempts. Once the rhythm is gone, you’re just sprinting rack-to-rack, rushing your base, and praying something drops before the buzzer.
That’s why Radmanovic lands at No. 2. He wasn’t a random invite. He was a legit in-season shooter who walked into the most repeatable shooting environment possible and couldn’t hit anything for two-thirds of the round.
1. Kevin Huerter – 5/27 3PM (18.5%)
This one is the modern-format nightmare, because the 2023 contest gave shooters more ways to survive. You had the normal racks plus two longer “Starry Range” shots, so the round was 27 total attempts instead of the old 25.
And Kevin Huerter still bottomed out.
He finished with eight points in Round 1, dead last on the night. That score matters because it confirms the vibe everyone saw: nothing got rolling, and once the first couple racks go bad, the contest turns into a sprint instead of a shooting routine.
The ugly part is Huerter wasn’t some random invite. He was having a legit shooting season with the Kings, hitting 40.2% from three in 2022-23. He also made 205 threes that year, which is real volume for a “this guy belongs here” argument.
But the contest is different. No dribble rhythm. No game flow. No “next possession.” It’s repeating the same shot while your legs and timing get worse with every sprint to the next rack. Once Huerter started cold, you could see the mechanics tighten and the pace speed up, which is exactly how a normal miss becomes five straight.
That’s why it’s No. 1. A great NBA shooter, in a format built to inflate numbers, still had a round where the only thing you remember is how fast it went sideways.
