Freethrow is a fundermental skill of basketball game. In tonight's loss against the Spurs, Rockets made only 32 out of the 53 FTs generously offered by the Spurs. 60.4%. Since the 2010-2011 season, the NBA had only 29 games with 50 or more FTs attempted by a team in a game. And tonight's 60.4% was the 2nd lowest in percentage, only better than the Clippers performance on the line (27/52 for 51.9%) on Feb 19 this year, also against the Spurs. From my limited personal experience, I don't believe it requires special physical attributes from a normal person. However in order to make high percentage of freethrow shots, one has to shoot the ball in a consistent form and practices it many times to generate a "muscle memory" of the shot strokes. Other than that, some players might feel nervous shooting FTs in the game. Even though they shoot well in practice they may falter on the line during real games. But you know what? If I were able to shoot 95% of FTs during practice, I'd be VERY confident of shooting them during a game, no one will block FTs after all. Yet many of our Rockets players can't shoot consistent freethrows. No enough practice. I can't find any other reason. Can you?
You made a "fundermental" spelling mistake Anyway, I do agree with your thoughts this is a practice and muscle memory thing
After starting this thread and knowing Free throw shooting is a standard key fundamental part of the game... I gotta ask wtf is Moreyball? Does it ignore free throw shooting?
Shooting a free throw in practice is not the same as shooting a free throw after chasing around the greatest athletes in the world in front of 20,000 people. I am not excusing poor fundamentals but it's not just about practice. Howard supposedly shoots 80 percent in practice but his legs have to be somewhat tired when he gets to the line in a game.
It's true, you should be a 75% FT shooter if you are a full time NBA player, it's aggravating to watch.
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21 missed FTs, that's the ball game right there. We are choke artists, I would try in all of our players who are terrible FT shooters in for worse players who are better at the line. FTs are huge in the play-offs.
Funny thing about Moreyball, it values efficient shots and tries to maximize points per possession yet the GM has somehow constructed a roster when all our bigs shoot absurdly terrible percentages at the stripe. It absolutely blows my mind why the roster isn't constructed to adhere to Morey's philosophy. Mind you, I think his philosophy is absolute garbage but even blind Freddie can see that the players don't fit the game plan.
They're all tired. Yet some of them shoot 90% and some of them shoot 40%. It's about having the right mechanics and wanting to be a good shooter. All Dwight has done in practice all these years is shoot a bunch of free throws with bad mechanics. He'll always be around 60% or less because he has the wrong mechanics and never corrected him. Nobody made him do it right in grade school, high school, AAU, or the pros. Now he is what he is. (And that sux because if Dwight was an 80% FT shooter it would make his offensive power game DEVASTATING. He would undoubtedly already have a 'chip.) This has been my point about Andre Drummond since the first day he came into the league. And it remains my point about DeAndre Jordan as well. Neither of those teams will win anything with those guys because it's too easy to stick them on the line and water down the efficiency of the team. They may put up ungodly rebounding numbers. They may put up a whole bunch of dunk videos where they're throwing it down over some small guy. But that's 2 points. They may win a ton of regular season games. But when it comes down to nut cutting in the playoffs, every coach in the league is going to do what Pops did last night. Put those sorry r****ds on the line and watch them look stoooooooopid. They gotta go to the bench because the team cannot afford to have them out there. The Clips and Pistons have to beat teams by running away from them early so that they can sit those big boys down the stretch and the opponent not come all the way back. A simple game my coach played with us boys in high school. At the end of practice you gotta hit 20 in a row b4 you go home. Not 10. 20. He didn't even have to teach us mechanics. Guys that couldn't do it were begging their teammates that could shoot to help them do it right. We're talking high schoolers here. We didn't know how to teach them so we got coach to give us training videos on vhs cassette, set up a monitor in the gym and our big boys learned to shoot free throws. That is those that really liked basketball and wanted to play. A couple of them quit. And that was the best thing for the sport and our team. These guys are professionals, paid millions of dollars to play this game. It's what they've spent the bulk of their lifetime doing. Can you imagine Fox News hiring some chick to do the news? She's beautiful in all ways, has a great personality, is smart, witty, etc. But when it comes time to read the teleprompter she starts st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-stuttering and can't quit? You tell me, what would they do? Hire her? How about an IT guy that don't know how to type? He's a hunt and pecker. Hire him? Would you hire somebody to build circuit boards for you that is a genius with circuitry but when you hand him a soldering iron he gets the shakes and spews solder all over the board? None of us could keep our jobs if we were so god awful at some portion of it that we couldn't do it when the company needed it. This is one of the reasons why I'm an advocate for the Rockets to hire a shooting coach like the Spurs have done with Chip Engelland. You can go back through their numbers and see the impact that Chip has had on the spurs free throw shooting and floor shooting since he's been there. The Spurs roster is littered with guys that Engelland has made significant improvments to their stroke. Aron Baynes is the lastest example. He's taken Baynes from the sub 60's to over 80%. Do you understand what kind of pressure it puts on a defense when everybody on the floor is 75% or greater from the free throw line, especially the bigs? It is two-fold. 1. No more hacking strategy 2. The defense has to actually try to play defense without fouling because the opponent wants the fouls to get on the line. 75% is 1.5 points per possession. There are no teams that get 1.5 points per possession in the NBA even on finishes at the rim. So the offense is looking to get fouls called. And the defense has to play it safe a lot of times throughout the quarter so they don't stick the offense on the FT line. Do you understand what that does for a team's offensive efficiency? You can take very average athletes like Baynes, teach them a shot fake, and all of a sudden they're a problem for the defense when they catch the ball. Shooting free throws is a fundamental part of the game and always will be. If a player can't shoot them efficiently.....it's going to bite his team in the fanny at some point. It's just a matter of when. And that player is limiting himself significantly from being a much, much better, more productive player.
I just want to point out that the hack tactic is also used when the hacking team is ahead, like the Spurs last night. It cuts off the come back.
I would think the players practice more on three than free throw under the Moreyball, but the problem is they still can not make three at a high percentage.
Yes. It eats into possessions that would otherwise go to James getting to the rim. Our most efficient possession is James going to the line. Next most efficient possession is James or one of the bigs finishing at the rim. Third most efficient possession is a corner 3-ball. All those possessions are generated by James having the ball and creating from the top. You take all those possessions away (which generate somewhere around 1.2 points to 1.7 points per possession) and turn them into Smith or Dorsey at the line (generating .75 to 1 points per possession) and you take all the steam out of our offense. Doesn't matter that we are positive against the Spurs during that time. They simply got 10 minutes of rest and basically stayed in the game until the end where they won it...mostly without Parker out there. While we limped in with another L.
And to further expand on this point, the hack tactic makes the audience watch free throws, very very poor free throws, instead of MVP Candidate James Harden tryin' to do work and the defending champion Spurs defend. The entertainment value is why the clear path foul gives two shots and the ball, because the league wants to encourage fun breakaway slams for highlights on ESPN. The audience wants to see it, I think that's enough reason to make a potential rules change, even though I agree that foul shooting is a fundamental part of the game and all players, especially professional players, should shoot a high percentage regardless.
The organization has access to Murphy, who can teach the bigs and improve their FTs. I don't know if Murphy has ever been approach by the team to help, if not they should and pay the man!
