The One Free Throw Rule Proposal

What's not to love?

I guess you could miss out on those oh-so-exciting instances of make-the-first-brick-the-second late in the--- oh wait, no, we can still have such thrills in the last couple of minutes of a game.

 

The players that suck at free throws would suffer. Imagine Sengun, his PPG would drop by a couple of points.

 

But as fans -- and this is the point -- we would watch fewer free throws, and in Alpi's case, fewer bricked free throws. I think it's a net win. For the last many years, the game just stops too often.

 

it would intensify the hack a Shaq nonsense, no?

 

that's not gonna leave a lot of time for Mokaram Injury Lawyers to show off their AI girl advertisement during free throws

 

Commercial breaks should still be 2 minutes, so we should get plenty of action from the AI chick.

 

This is something Stone would support

 

Someone should run through all the PbPs to find league average First FT% vs Second FT%. I assume the 2nd FT might be noticeably better.

 

I doubt intensify it. If my hackable player makes 50% of this FT, I still have the same expectation value of an average of 1 point per intentional hack or a hack on a FG attempt.

As they're running the trial, the new rule wouldn't be in effect near the end of a game, so somebody would have to be doing hack a shack in the middle of a game somewhere anyway.

I love that I'm defending some random possible minor rule change, haha. At my age, I have watched too many free throws!

Spoiler

 

I don't know if you consider 3-4% "noticeably better", but there it is. IMO, that is more than enough for teams to employ the Hack-a-Player strategy a whole lot more often.

I imagine for individual players, the difference could be very significant. Unfortunately, Alpi comes to mind.
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https://zachschonbrun.substack.com/p/the-science-of-free-throws
The science of free throws
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Free-throw calibration

Speaking of free-throw shooting percentages, one factor does seem to imply whether or not an NBA player is going to make his shot: if he has already attempted a free throw moments earlier.

In 2020, researchers in Cologne, Germany, analyzed more than 610,000 free throws from 1,098 players in NBA games between 2006 and 2016. They found that, regardless of fatigue, the success rate for the second free throw was uniformly higher than the first attempt. If the player was taking 3 free throws, then the success rate of the third attempt was higher still.

The researchers cited their findings as a confirmation of a 2019 study on expert dart throwers. In darts, a player makes three successive tosses, then goes to the board to retrieve the darts before a next player tosses, in a cycle of tossing and waiting. And, well, sure enough — among those experts participating in the 2017 World Darts Competition, the first toss was consistently less accurate than the next two.

Ok, so, why would this be the case?

The throwing of the first dart, or the first free throw, gives the performer a “visuomotor calibration” of what he or she needs to do. This might sound ridiculous for something as well-rehearsed as a free throw! But it’s not. Elite skill relies a great deal on registering the feedback that your motions are offering (the ball’s feel off the fingertips, the position of your shooting form, etc) and fine-tuning constantly to optimize performance given certain conditions (how you’re being defended, your fatigue level, your sweat output, etc).

It’s the case even in darts, a skill already so finely tuned one would think it cannot be optimized further. But the researchers found that even the world’s best dart players routinely missed their targets vertically on the first toss. Their improvement vertically on the second toss was “consistent and conspicuous,” the researchers wrote.

Why would “re-calibration” be necessary in the first place? Don’t these players constantly practice these things?

Recall what I said earlier about the “cycle” of dart tossing. In those slack periods in which a player has finished his or her tossing, her visuomotor system is doing something … other than aiming at a target. Therefore, when it’s their turn again, the brain needs to “recalibrate” what it’s been trained to do. That’s why the first shot is generally less accurate than the succeeding ones.

The scientific term for this is the “warm-up decrement,” coined by Jack Adams in 1975, and I’ll probably save the bulk of the research on this for another post. But the main thrust of this theory is that the motor system has a lot that’s required of it, and even just walking around or attempting another task can mess with the delicate skill of an elite performer. Returning to that elite level of skill requires a calibration, a warmup. The first shot is essentially a warmup.

Can you calibrate ahead of time so that your first shot becomes more accurate?

Theoretically, sure! The researchers, however, don’t offer any suggestions on this, other than to recognize that re-calibration is necessary to achieve peak performance.

Whether that can be achieved through visualization, or mental imagery, or has to be paired with a motor element and feedback — I don’t really know. Maybe you have some suggestions for further research on this?

 

I only scanned through the article, but didn’t see the 3-4% difference on 1st vs 2nd. Just a general acknowledgment. What am I missing?

 

I would be interested in seeing studies about bench players coming in taking their first few field goals. Does a player playing longer stretches shoot better than if he plays only a few minutes at a time.

 

This spells the demise of free food for everyone.