http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/story/_/page/PERDiem-120113/nba-dwight-howard-foul-strategy If anyone has insider, please post that, otherwise just discuss: Does the hack-a-Dwight strategy work? Last season the two best offensive teams in the league, OKC and MIA, averaged exactly 1 PPP (points per possession). Everytime Dwight goes to the line and makes 1 out of 2, he's essentially scoring at the same rate OKC and MIA score at on average. It makes sense that the last time I saw Dwight taking 39 free throws Orlando won.
So is it does not make sense to hack-a-Dwight unless your offense is on the level of OKC or MIA and Rockets' defense is below league's average.
I know one thing, you better not try Hack - Asik. The dude put them in for us last year's playoffs as if he were a 90% career free throw shooter.
The purpose of the hack strategy is a head game against the coach/player (if done relatively early in the game) or a variance issue if done late (yes it gives you 1 ppp, but if the opponent gets lucky, they can out down 2 ppp and get an extra 4-5 plays to do it), it's a hail mary strategy, sometimes they work, usually they don't, but without them you have no chance.
The problem with this analysis is that it ignores the situation you might be at hand. If you are down 8 points with 2 minutes to go - this strategy makes a lot of sense. For the same reason you foul an 80% shooter with 30 seconds left down by 4. Because time is valuable. Is it better to give up 1.15 points and lose 20+ seconds (more if they get an offensive rebound) or put D.H. on the line and give up 1.2 points and get the ball right back to get 2 quick points or a 3? Also keep in mind that at 59.5% - D.H. is only going to score 2 pts 35% of the time. Most of the time you are only giving up 0 or 1 point and getting the ball back. Yes, most times it is a losing strategy, but when you are down more than a few points late in the game, most times you are going to lose anyway. Hack-a-Dwight isn't done to protect a lead, it's to help make it go away when 20 seconds becomes more valuable than giving up 1 point. So yes, he needs to hit FT's better in crunch time. Him being a 70% shooter alone make a huge difference.
we be unstoppable now if they hack us, we will have the best offense in the league w Dwight draining FTs all game long
That was ESPN's logic: If the efficiency calculation was right, short possessions or more possessions will only make Howard beats the hacking even more. Too much generalization and simplification. However NBA game is way more complicate that that. We all know in the big picture betting or buying lottery is a losing strategy but we did it anyway hoping to beat the odds. NBA game is way more controllable than betting the odds. Hacking a Howard is very viable strategy in many of the situations, such as: Howard is on the road where home team usually have better offense.------> A lot teams are this way. Houston playing bad perimeter defense due to system, fatigue or injury. ------->Pretty much a given. You have superstar or good players who steps up his game in crunch time. ----->many many teams have that. In fact, Hacking a Howard should be working most of the time.
This article was written in JANUARY 2012, and makes its calculations using Howard's then FT% of 59%. The incentives are a bit different if DH shoots 50% from the line.
OKC was doing Hack A Asik in the playoffs which was interesting but he practiced his free throws. Now Dwight i hope hes practicing his free throws in practice
Exactly, fantasy league should all use FTM. Instead, most league are using FT% which lowers the values of players it shouldn't be lowering ie. Dwight
The only time hack-a-50% free throw shooter works is when something insane happens like back to back to back to back 3's are made. Point is, it very rarely works even though it makes sense to do it in certain situations--like delaying the inevitable in hope of a miracle.
This article is OLD but: Spoiler Hacking Howard not the Dwight move Thoughts on Golden State's foul strategy and more (PER Diem: Jan. 13, 2012) Updated: January 13, 2012, 2:50 PM ET By John Hollinger | ESPN.com Dwight Howard Golden State sending Dwight Howard to the line 39 times wasn't great strategy. Hollinger explains. Here's the thing about Hack-a-Dwight, or Hack-an-anybody: The player has to be an exceptionally bad foul shooter for this strategy to have much merit. Emphasis on exceptionally. It works with Ben Wallace or DeAndre Jordan. With just about anyone else, it's highly questionable. Take Thursday night, for instance. Dwight Howard is a career 59.5 percent foul shooter and has done slightly better than that each of the past three seasons. But let's take 59.5 percent as his chances of converting any given free throw. Sending him to the line for two shots produces an expected return of 1.19 points from the foul shots, a scoring rate better than that of any offensive team in the history of basketball. Just sending him to the line time after time is one of the worst percentage moves a team could possibly make. It gets worse, though. Howard will miss 40.5 percent of those foul shots, and 20.25 percent of those misses will be on the back end of the pair. It's nice to assume that all 20.25 percent will end up with the defense, but it's also unrealistic. The offense rebounds about 1 in 10 missed free throws, and that mark tends to go up for a bad foul shooter. Simple observation backs up this point -- offensive players waste little effort pushing for position when Chauncey Billups is at the stripe, but they fight like mad when Andris Biedrins steps up. But let's say 1 in 10 of those boards goes back to Orlando, giving the Magic a new possession. That means 2.025 percent of Howard's misses still generate points; assume league-average efficiency on the new trip and that's another .021 points for the offense. So now you're giving up an average of 1.211 points -- a breathtaking offensive efficiency level -- for the privilege of piling up fouls on your players. That's compared with a normal offensive season, but remember, too, that this year has been anything but normal. Offensive efficiency is down across the league, as noted below, so the points surrendered by this strategy are even more than normal. Once you factor in offensive rebounding, the break-even point for this strategy in the 2011-12 season is about 48.5 percent -- slightly less for a team with a rebounding disadvantage, slightly more for one with a rebounding advantage. And that doesn't include the attrition factor from having players accumulate fouls. Howard, at 59.5 percent, was far too proficient for this strategy to be likely to benefit Golden State. Instead it foiled a pretty good effort at the offensive end. The Warriors scored 109 points on just 99 trips against one of the league's better defensive teams … and still ended up losing, largely by riding Hack-a-Dwight down the toilet. Bizarrely, the Warriors didn't foul Howard in the one situation when it made completely obvious sense -- with 21 seconds left in the third quarter and Orlando playing for the last shot. In that instance, the expected points of Howard free throws would have been nearly offset by the points Golden State scored on the offensive possession it just created. On to the Harbingers: 1. Speaking of free throws, the Bucks and Pistons combined to go 41-for-41 from the line Thursday. I'm not sure people appreciate what an amazing feat this was -- for comparison purposes, Howard had fewer attempts and missed 18 times. Most players shoot better than Howard, of course. Normally, NBA teams shoot about 75 percent from the stripe, and the Bucks and Pistons haven't deviated significantly from that so far this season: Milwaukee entered Thursday night's game at 74 percent for the season, Detroit at 77.8 percent. The odds of such teams producing perfection in 41 attempts? 1 in 69,111. Wait, it gets better. There are only 1,230 NBA games in a normal season, plus roughly 90 playoff games. That's 1,320 total games, meaning you'd expect to have to wait about 52 years to see this happen. So bravo to anybody who carved out time for Bucks-Pistons on Thursday night. It might not have felt as if you were watching a once-in-a-lifetime event, but apparently you were. 2. If you think things have been ugly, your eyes have not deceived you. Some ugly numbers back up that point: The league median offensive efficiency mark is a paltry 99.5, a far cry from last season's 104.6. Although efficiency normally goes up a couple of points as the season progresses, it appears we'll fall well short of last season's offensive numbers. The secondary stats back that up -- and point to the lockout as a major culprit. Take foul shooting, for instance -- the league average is just 74.3 percent, down from 76.3 percent a year ago. Three-point shooters are also having trouble finding the mark, at 33.9 percent compared with last season's 35.8 percent. Again, we can expect those numbers to rise over the course of the season, based on recent history, but they'd have to rise much more sharply than in past seasons to get us back to 2010-11 levels for the season as a whole. Similarly, teams are at .442 from the field after making .459 a year ago, and they turn it over about 1 percent more often -- a bigger deal than it might sound. One canary in the coal mine is that rates of free throw attempts and 3-point attempts are down slightly. These are the two most efficient shot types, and they normally are somewhat countercyclical -- if one goes up, the other is likely to go down. The fact both are down is a good indication teams are just having a harder time getting quality shots. The only thing that hasn't changed is offensive rebounding. That had been in decline for the past several years, but thus far teams are grabbing exactly 26.3 percent of their missed shots, scarcely different from the 26.4 percent of a year ago. About the only good news I can offer is that things are still much, much better than in 1998-99. That season, the league shot an impressively bad .728 from the line for the season and only one team averaged a hundred points a game. There's been some bad basketball recently, but anybody over the age of 20 has seen much, much worse. 3. After seeing Charlotte's Boris Diaw in person Thursday night, here's my complete scouting report: Woof. It's hard not to notice that the Bobcats lost by 30 on a night that their starting power forward was outscored 30-0. It's equally hard not to notice that Diaw's conditioning is getting into Eddy Curry territory or that, despite his considerable girth, he appears to be absolutely terrified of contact. Which takes us to this amazing stat: Diaw has drawn two free throw attempts the entire season. TWO!!! He's a starting NBA frontcourt player who has played 348 minutes and taken 104 field goal attempts; if he keeps up that rate all season, he will have by far the lowest FTA/FGA mark of all time. His FTA/pastry ratio should also set a mark. It's so befuddling for Charlotte because Diaw is probably its most talented player. Even in his Michelin Man costume, he's averaging nearly five assists a game, and he has become an effective midrange shooter. Perhaps the Bobcats thought moving him to power forward Thursday night and giving Byron Mullens the start at center would invigorate Diaw to attack against smaller opponents, but he looked more passive than ever. 4. Don't sleep on Cleveland, people. The Cavs are 18th in the daily power rankings after an impressive 101-90 win in Phoenix on Thursday night, and Kyrie Irving keeps impressing. He had 26 points in 28 minutes, including an impressive dipsy-do around Steve Nash and under Marcin Gortat for a lay-in, and held his own against Nash at the defensive end. With Anderson Varejao at his pestering best (17 boards, and such nimble feet that he denied an inbound pass to Nash for nearly five full seconds and forced the Suns to waste a timeout), Antawn Jamison still pumping in points (let's not talk about the defense part), and a second unit of Ramon Sessions, Daniel Gibson, Alonzo Gee and Tristan Thompson regularly outplaying its foes, the Cavs are the No. 8 team in the East right now. And if they do manage to squeak into the postseason, what a story that will be. Because their probable opponent would be the likely No. 1 seed in the East … Miami.
I wouldn't call it unwise, because if you're down by 10 and it's like a 4 possession game and you want to increase the number of possessions in the game in hope of a miracle, then it definitely makes sense. With that being said, miracles (for example T-Mac's 11 points in 33 seconds) are rare, so just because it makes sense doesn't mean it works.
