Surprised teams don't hack a Deandre Jordan more often. Now you wanna talk about horrible free throw shooting...
Once again, I seriously, seriously doubt that we will play Asik and Howard together very much AT ALL. More likely we will always have one of the two in the game, but rarely both at the same time. As for teams fouling like that I don't see it working out well for them. Dwight had a couple down years FT shooting, but he was dealing with injury stuff for a lot of that time. His career FT% is 58%, and prior to 11-12 the average was actually about 60%. Pretty normal for a center. If he shoots better than 50% on free throws it should be fine.
Duncan is more of a model for Dwight since he was also terrible and then jumped up to 80%+ Dwight has been a target for hacking much longer than Asik and the Lakers lost a few games last year in part because of his missed free throws. Can't say the same for Asik.
I think examining on a ppp basis is taking a macro-scopic view on a micro-scopic situation. Typically the Hack-a-_________ strategy is utilized to gain a few points within a span of a few minutes. If a player's season average is 50%, there is a greater chance that during a hack session that player will shoot 30-40% below the 1.0 ppp limit thereby gaining the hacking team points so long as they make shots. Teams are banking on the player being worse than their average.
I think it does make a difference. Have we forgotten the Spurs losing game 6 because of the 2 missed free throws? Yes, we can argue about losing due to bad rebounding, but the free throws allow the Heat to tie the game. In a 82 game season, it is not such a big impact, but during the playoffs every game counts. We can not afford those misses in close games. I do believe FT shooting is more mental than skill. After all these years, I'm not holding my breath in hopes that DH will improve in that front. I hope I'm wrong.
Simple, just tell Les to swallow his pride and pay Calvin Murphy to work specifically with DH12 and Asik on free throwing shooting starting now and throughout the season, as well as the rest of the team as a whole. Hire him strictly as a FREE THROW SHOOTING COACH....although he could offer a lot more than that, but he may not gel with the other coaching staff. But he is our Hall of Famer and best free throw shooter every I believe, so we should hire him as our FT shooting coach! IMHO
That's just an argument for lack of sample size. Could also deal with the points differential of the two teams -- which makes sense to me, since it seemed like we often were either getting blown out or were blowing someone out lol.
1. they hack when they are down and are trying to catch up 2. that will get them in foul trouble if done early 3. it eventually becomes FT practice and the percentage can go up with every shot (I remember shaq commenting on how he loved it when the other team hacks him because it just starts developing a rhythm even though it's not that good)
I'm sure Morey and crew have the coaching staff working on that with Dwight. Hack-a-Dwight is all about DH just stepping up. Hopefully he's mentally there, because that's what counts in the end. If he shoots with no confidence, its gonna affect the Rockets.
ashiin posted this pic in another thread; it appears that Howard's practice FT% does not carry over to in game FT%:
As long as we don't keep them out together too long, Hack X won't be too much of a problem. We may only get 1 point per possession, but we'll put the other team in foul trouble, which should make resulting possessions even easier- especially when you consider how good Harden is at driving and drawing contact.
Not worried. This is not the old college 1 and 1 with no bonus at the 10th foul (that system was brutal for bad FT shooting teams like the Cougars with Akeem but FAIR in my opinion). And these stats are misleading because Asik has improved while DHo has dropped over the years. I would just pull DHo if he is struggling from the line in certain 4th quarters and play Asik, who has shown that he can hit clutch free throws, has good form, and is improving. Not worried in the least.
It works when you're dumb enough to pull the player, and shoot his confidence in the foot, like say when Pop did it to Bogut in the 3rd quarter to see if Jackson was stupid enough to pull him.
I think Asik struggles in normal FT situations because he runs himself dog tired in our offense and on defense. When the pace slows down and he has time to catch his breath and focus on his FTs, well you saw what happened in the playoffs. Dwight is just a terrible shooter, so he isn't any better in clutch situations than normal.
Playing them together or separate doesn't really matter when talking about hack-a-Dwight/Asik, only one of them can be hacked at a time. As others have mentioned, they won't play together often because neither is an offensive threat outside of 10 feet.
