Most evidence says practicing FTs doesn't help the worst shooters
Discussions of NBA free-throw shooting often come back to one point — that there’s no good reason why professionals shouldn’t be able to practice enough to avoid Hack-a-Shaq fouls and the ignominy that comes along with shooting around 50 percent from the line every season. Professional basketball players may have lots to improve at from season to season, but they surely have enough time in there to work on their free throws. If a 45-year-old man in his backyard can make 75 percent, than surely a young man in elite physical condition can do the same.
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The problem with this position is that most serious evidence suggests that practice can only do so much to improve NBA players’ free-throw percentages. Tom Haberstroh of ESPN.com has done a deep dive into many possible reasons why many centers miss free throws, and all the most credible have little to do with practice or physicality. Instead, they’re psychological:
It turns out free throws aren’t the problem. It’s free throws in games that cause the basketball yips. […]
[Dwight] Howard made 67.1 percent of his free throws his rookie season, but he’s only gotten worse as his career has goes on, bottoming-out to a career-low 48.9 percent this past season. Though he said he practices more than ever these days, he claimed the more he practices, the worse he gets. […]
“Free throw shooting is all mental. In practice, I don’t miss. In warm-ups, I don’t miss. When I get into a game, I hear people say, ‘He’s going to miss,’ and it gets inside my head.”
“Because of all the attention to it, our flaw has been magnified to the whole world,” Howard said. “I’ve got little kids at basketball camps telling me, ‘My dad says you suck at free throws.’ Other players have flaws, but they aren’t getting magnified the way the free throws are.” […]
For some athletes, Dr. Christian Marquardt said, practice is not the answer at all — not if the issue is thinking too much about public criticism.
“You think, ‘OK, I’m at 85 percent from the line now,’ and then you go back into the game and then you have even more reason to think about it when the performance drops again,” he said. “Which makes you think more because there’s a difference there. You start to wonder, ‘What the hell is going on!?'”
Howard is possibly not the best messenger here, because many basketball fans are already quick to claim that he is psychologically weak. It’s very easy to replace the idea that players who miss free throws do not practice (i.e. that they’re lazy) with the idea that they lack some essential winner’s mentality. But there seems to be some truth to the questionable value of practice. We have discussed Howard’s fine free-throw form in practice before, and DeAndre Jordan has made it very clear that he works on his shot often with no real sign of improvement.
The key is to not react as if bad shooters are lost causes or stupid just because they can’t make free throws. As Haberstroh notes elsewhere, it’s very possible that we only see such flaws in seven-footers because they represent a small enough portion of the greater population — smaller players have less glaring skill weaknesses because there are enough 6-4 men to find some that do everything well. Similarly, identifying psychological problems means that players who wish to improve will have to undergo different kinds of treatments, many of which take time or different kinds of attention. If practice isn’t the answer, that doesn’t mean there’s no answer at all.
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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
