True shooting punishes the players who make it possible

The metric rewards whoever takes the easy shot and charges the difficulty to whoever created it.

Two players, same team, same night. One of them shoots sixty eight percent from the field. The other shoots forty four. The first is described as efficient and the second as a volume scorer, and in a fair number of cases the causation runs entirely backwards.

Shot quality is not distributed randomly across a lineup. Somebody has to take the possession that has gone wrong, with four seconds left and the defence set, and whoever that is will shoot a poor percentage forever. Somebody else gets to take the shot that exists because the defence collapsed, and they will shoot a high percentage forever. The metric does not know the difference. It counts made and missed attempts and weights the threes and the free throws sensibly, which was the whole point of inventing it, and then it stops.

I do not think the answer is to abandon it. True shooting fixed a genuine problem with raw field goal percentage and it is a better summary than what came before. The problem is how it gets used, as a ranking of players rather than a description of a role, and then as an argument against particular kinds of shot without any accounting for who else was going to shoot instead.

The interior case is the clearest. Post scoring returns a mediocre efficiency figure and is therefore judged inefficient, but the alternative on many of those possessions was not a corner three. It was a rushed pull up from twenty feet by a guard who had run out of ideas, and that possession would have been worse. Comparing a shot to the league average shot is meaningless. You have to compare it to the shot that team would actually have taken instead, and nobody publishes that number because it does not exist.

The measurable version of this argument is shot difficulty modelling, which several teams do privately and none share, and which would let you say what a given attempt was worth relative to an average player facing the same defender at the same distance under the same clock pressure.

Until that is public, efficiency rankings are describing job descriptions and calling it talent.

Every roster needs somebody who takes the bad shot. That player will always look worse than he is.