Improvement in any sport depends on physiology, technology, coaching, and equipment

Today's NY Times asks how it's possible that, when it comes to free throw shooting, basketball players today have about as much success as the players of 40 years ago.

We run faster, jump higher, have better shoes and uniforms, train harder (and smarter), eat better, yet in four decades, we've still not improved as FT shooters.

The general expectation in sports is that performance improves over time. Future athletes will surely be faster, throw farther, jump higher. But free-throw shooting represents a stubbornly peculiar athletic endeavor. As a group, players have not gotten better. Nor have they become worse.

According to Southern Utah coach Roger Reid (pictured above), "A lot of coaches give it lip service, but when you say that games are won and lost at the free-throw line, you better back it up." Coach Reid contends that "individual players and teams can improve free-throw shooting through better technique and repetition."

One reason why more teams/players don't work on FT shooting is that "there is little correlation between free-throw percentages and winning percentages. Only one of the 25 best shooting teams, No. 2 North Carolina, is also in the latest Associated Press top 25 rankings."

That is why, despite accounting for more than 20 percent of scoring in men’s college basketball and just below 20 percent in the N.B.A., free throws receive a fraction of the attention from coaches, players and fans. That is, until something considered free proves costly. [Like when Memphis missed "4 of 5 free throws in the final 72 seconds against Kansas, which had made a late 3-point shot to tie the game and won in overtime."]

One professor who's studied sports statistics extensively has found that "widespread improvement over time in any sport... depends on a combination of four factors: physiology, technology or innovation, coaching, and equipment."

Those factors can help explain why swimming records seemingly fall at every international event, runners broke through the four-minute-mile barrier, field-goal kickers are more accurate than ever, bowling a 300 game is not as unlikely as it once was, and home run numbers surged in major league baseball.

As the professor puts it, "There are not a lot of those four things that would help in free-throw shooting," except for coaching.

Coaches admit to baselines of acceptability for their players and teams. The average, apparently, is about 75 percent in the N.B.A. and 69 percent in college basketball. When numbers slip, time is devoted to improvement. When they rebound, the game’s other facets take precedence.

D-League guard Blake Ahearn, the best FT shooter in NCAA history (95%) says that rather than devoting time to free-throw shooting in practice, coaches "want to work on defenses and offenses and schemes."
But as the NY Times article concludes, "even practice has never made perfect."

The general rule is that players, in games, shoot 10 percentage points below their practice average. The difference is pressure and fatigue, hard to replicate in an empty arena.

A pure shooter is a guy who's spent time in the gym working on his shot

SLAM magazine's Matt Caputo has a good Q&A with Mark Price, a four-time NBA All-Star who won the 3-Point Shooting Contest twice, in which he asks Price about how he developed as a shooter.

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The secret is you have to have good technique and you’ve got to spend the time and put hours and hours in. There is no quick-fix. You hear the term, “pure-shooter,” but what people would call a pure shooter is a guy that’s probably spent a lot of time in the gym working on it.

I spent a lot of time in the gym. I was fortunate because my dad [the late Denny Price] was a coach, and I typically had a place to work out. My dad taught me what he thought was the right way to shoot the ball, and he told me it was up to me as far as how hard I was going to work. I spent a lot of hours just trying to perfect my shot, because I wasn’t real big—I was probably only 5-11, 155 pounds when I showed up at Georgia Tech. I had to work hard on my skills.

Form first, and the range will come

What does LeBron James have in common with Tiger Woods?

According to Chris Ballard in SI, "Just as Tiger Woods remade his swing when he was already dominant, James spent last summer quietly reconstructing his jumper, working with assistant coach Chris Jent five days a week, an hour and a half per session."

Why?

If you watched James shoot last year, you know why; even though teams were petrified of his penetration, he sometimes looked like he was chucking pumpkins at the backboard. According to NBA.com, he hit only 37.1% of his two-point jumpers from the top of the key and the wings, which are the money spots for an off-the-dribble midrange shooter.

Ballard describes how Lebron -- "like a pee-wee player, began by putting up one-handed shots close to the basket."

He graduated to "one-dribble jumpers and free throws, then midrange shots. Remarkably, never once during the sessions did he fling a three-pointer."

Says Coach Jent:

"Form first, and the range will come."

You don't win by being comfortable

Like fine wine, Ray Allen seems to be improving with age.

As Ian Thomsen writes, "Shooting guards are supposed to become lame and ineffective at his age, but Allen is having what may be his finest season. He continues to defend at a better rate than over his 11 years before coming to Boston, while at the other end of the floor -- the end that has always defined him -- he is shooting a career-best 49.7 percent. He has moved past Kevin Garnett to become the Celtics' second option, with 18.1 points."

"He's doing it more efficiently than he's done it earlier in his career,'' Boston coach Doc Rivers said. "If you don't need the ball in your hands for 15-20 seconds, if you can have it in your hands for five seconds of a possession and you're still really good -- that means you're a really good basketball player. And that's what Ray has become with us.''

One of the NBA's best shooters, in the Celtics' title run last season, Allen was "asked to shoot less. When times were bad in previous years (and there were a lot of those bad nights, as Allen's teams in Milwaukee and Seattle missed the playoffs six times), he would naturally take it upon himself to shoot his team out of trouble. But that approach, as Allen noted, wasn't going to help the Celtics win a title."

"If on a season you're averaging 22-23 shots a game, you're going to shoot yourself into a good rhythm,'' Allen said. "But the majority of the time, if you have to shoot that many times, you don't win. Now I pass first more than anything. When I'm coming off a screen and it's early in the game, I just try to make a hard move, get to the basket and pass it so somebody else can get an easier shot. It builds your way into the offense that way.''

Says BOS coach Doc Rivers, "It was difficult for him but he did it. He did it and he got better and better at it. And now he's taking it to a different level.''

"I hear so many times guys say they want to win a championship, I want to be a winner, but what they're really saying is they want to win so long as it's comfortable for them,'' Rivers said. "You don't win by being comfortable. You win by doing things out of your comfort zone to make the team better, and Ray epitomizes that to me. He's completely come out of his comfort zone to fit into this team to make us better, and Ray has proved that he's a champion because he's willing to do that. He's accepting double teams and getting rid of the ball, where in the past he was the only guy who would get doubled and he'd still try to create a play.''

When you're really good at something, you can take it for granted

Indiana coach Tom Crean on freshman guard Matt Roth, who hit 9 of 11 three-pointers Saturday in a loss to Ohio State:

"We knew it was a matter of time with him. He has been spending so much more time in the gym on his own. He is an excellent shooter and sometimes when you're really good at something you can take it for granted once in awhile. He hasn't done that. He has really been one of our bigger gym rats in the sense of doing more things after practice or coming back at night. And he needs to continue to do that because that is how it gets done. It never gets done right away. He has to have that mindset."

The nature of a routine

Saw where Sports Illustrated polled 190 NBA players, asking them to name the best pure shooter they'd ever seen.

Ray Allen topped the list, earning more than a quarter of the votes. Reggie Miller, Larry Bird, Jason Kapono, and Peja round out the top five.

According to this column in the Boston Globe, Allen's shooting skills can be traced back to when he was a kid:

"The routine doesn't change much. That is the nature of a routine. Ray Allen will shoot in an empty gym. Got to make 10 threes from this spot. Got to make five midrange jumpers from this spot. In between, go to the line and make five. It goes back to when he was an 8-year-old kid in England. Allen's parents were ballers and when they gave up the floor to little Ray, he'd pledge to make five straight lefty layups, then five straight righty layups. They couldn't leave 'til he did it."

The keys to shooting

ASU has won two big road games in the last five days, snapped UCLA's 10-game winning streak this past Saturday before downing in-state rival Arizona last night on the road.

In the win over UCLA, Herb Sendek's Sun Devils shot 52 percent from the field in the first half. Senior forward Jeff Pendergraph hit nine of his 10 shots in the game. Guard James Harden, who connected on 10 of 11 vs Oregon State and 14-25 against UTEP earlier in the season, went 8-15 from the field.

But in the win over UA last night, ASU shot just 28 percent from the field (16-56), including 5-28 from 3-point range.

According to Coach Sendek, having players who are effective shooters is only the start:

"The key to shooting, more than anything else, is to have good shooters. But then to execute your offense, so guys know where their shots are coming from, making passes on time, on target, taking shots in rhythm. If you have guys who have that ability and they do it, it's probably not any more complicated than that."

How the nation's best-shooting team does it

Last year, 56-year-old Stew Morrill's Utah State team led the nation in FG and FT shooting, and they're the best-shooting FG team so far again this year. [Here are the team's stats.]

According to this article on ESPN, "Morrill's program is one of just five to win three-quarters of its games [they're 12-1 this season] since the turn of the century, and that has been thanks in large part to its consistently superb shooting."

What's his secret?

"We've had a lot of kids who can really shoot the ball. We've been blessed with a lot of skilled kids, and Utah's a great basketball state. I don't know if people really realize that. We always take extra shots in practice; we work on our free throws all the time. But there's a lot more to it than that."

By "a lot more to it" Coach Morrill (pictured above) is referring to a "2-inch thick playbook that's as thick as any NFL team's. And those binders are chock-full of ways to get the open looks and easy shots for which Utah State has become known across the West."

Says one Utah State player (who's shooting better than 71% from the floor):

"Learning this system is almost like taking a class. We have to remember a lot of plays. For example, we have this one play where everything goes on timing. I make my move when one guy gets to a certain point on the floor and not a second before or after, and if I don't set my screen at the exact moment, the whole thing is busted and everybody gets lost."

As the article describes, "during games... associate head coach Tim Duryea and basketball operations director Lance Beckert... hold a thick set of indexed flip cards. Either set, red or blue, represents the actual plays being run at any given time, and the 'hot' set can change at a timeout's notice. The Aggies on the floor always know what to execute, but opposing teams trying to steal signals are lost in an endless blur of 'Cross Iso,' '24,' 'Monster Right' or any of the hundreds of possible flip-card combinations."

Says Coach Duryea:

"I don't think anyone else uses two sets. We use it in practice from day one, so it becomes a way of life when it comes to playing offense at Utah State. The assistants that have held the cards in the past have a running joke that on nights when we aren't shooting so well, those cards get a whole lot heavier."

There are two keys to running Coach Morrill's system. First, as one player puts it, "We have really, really smart guys; there isn't anyone on our team who's under a 3.0."

Second, "in Morrill's complex system, which focuses on inside-out play, four-year players often have a marked advantage, which is enhanced by the general advanced maturity and intelligence of the squad as a whole. The Aggies' average age is 21, and only one player was born in the 1990s." [Here's the roster.]

According to one player, "Freshmen almost never start with this system. I took a redshirt, and that helped me a lot. When you come in as a freshman, you have time to learn how things work. The two-year players, on the other hand, have to understand everything right away."

Training with a Hall of Famer

ESPN's Marc Stein did an interview recently with DAL guard Jason Terry, who talked about working out with George "Iceman" Gervin in the offseason:

"He started training me in 2002 and then I went back to him this summer. We played golf and trained three times a day.

The thing about it is, once you've been in the league for 10 years, you know how to shoot. But just being with a guy that's a Hall of Famer and him just building you up mentally, I think that does more than all the shooting.

I think he's trained one other guy and that was Stephon Marbury and he had his best scoring year that year Ice trained him. He doesn't really do it, so it's an honor. I give him a lot of credit for my success.

On the court, I think we made 500 jumpers a day, but it's all midrange. No 3-pointers. He shows me how to get where I want to get on the court and be able to rise up and shoot and square my shoulders.

He has this thing called 'one piece.' That's the [method] that he used. So every time I shoot, every time he grabs the rebound, he's over there screaming, 'One piece, one piece.'

My uncle's from Detroit, where Ice is from. His high school coach -- Coach Meriweather -- he told me, "Ice would love to work with you and all you've got to do is call him."

I called him back when I was in Atlanta and he told me: 'Young fella, I'm a big fan of your game, I've been watching you. Come down and let's spend some time together.'

No doubt [Gervin] is the best as far as getting to the spot, pulling up and squaring your shoulders. He's the best."

When thinking gets in the way of shooting

UCLA's Nikola Dragovic, a 6-9 junior forward from Serbia, has connected on just five of his 30 3-point attempts this season.

[As a point of comparison, Dragovic's teammate Michael Roll is 16-28 from 3-point range this season.]

Dragovic's FG percentage is up overall from last season (38% vs 33%), but something's not clicking for him.

According to this article, "Dragovic has talked about feeling hesitant, passing up open shots."

To improve his shooting, UCLA "coaches want him to crouch lower when he receives passes, so he gets his legs into the shot. Beyond that, [UCLA coach Ben] Howland doesn't want to make a big deal of Dragovic's low percentage."

"When everybody starts talking about it, and it's the same question, it becomes too much thinking about it rather than following your routine."