Why All Pro Basketball Players Shoot Free Throws Wrong

whether you're a pro basketballer or a tween fighting their way through seventh period gym class you've probably had to shoot a free throw or two in your day and odds are you did it wrong unless your name is Rick Barry which it might be because I feel like the YouTube algo would serve this kind of thing to Rick Barry this is Rick Barry his father was a semi-professional basketball player and coach and when he was a kid said dad had an unorthodox idea to help him sync more free throws Rick for his part thought the technique looked pretty stupid but took to it anyway this is Canyon Barry his father the above Rick Barry retired from the NBA in 1980 with the highest free throw percentage the league had ever seen Kenyon is the only of Rick's five basketball and Sons to adopt that stupid looking free throw technique in his 2016 2017 College season he sank 88.3% of his free throws to put that in context this is a bunch of basketball players you're more likely to have heard of and their career best free throw percentages none of them use the technique Rick and Kenyon did despite the fact that everyone including me knows it probably would have helped their game so it gives to find out what gives I sent my outside correspondent Amy to shoot 200 free throws in the park now she's not much of a jock but she learned beef no beef in gym class so maybe this will go okay also to help her out I made her learn a whole bunch of free throw physics so here goes that the free throw line is 15 ft or 4.6 M from the hoop which is 10 ft or just over over 3 m off the ground from the moment the ball leaves your hands it's pure physics there's no defense so only a gust of wind or an AC of God can stop a good shot from going in the key physical factors in a free throw are your alignment how high above the floor you release it how fast you throw it it's Spin and what angle you throw it at in a perfect overhand free throw you'd shoot straight at the hoop rather than off to one side or another you're better off with a higher release height hence the power of releasing above your head doing a little jump and or being tall speed wise it's a goldilock situation too fast and you'll overshoot the basket too slow and you'll look like a wimp for spin someone went ahead and figured out you want three Hertz of backspin which is to say in the 1 second it takes for the ball to go from your hands to The Hoop It should spin towards you three times this maximizes the likelihood that if it hits the rim it'll slow down and then tip into the basket instead of bouncing away release angle is basically a trigonometry problem and here's the gist 32° and Below bad risky don't do that 56 de and above too hard to aim 90° ouchy bad this sweet spot is understood to be between 45 and 55° or more specifically 45° plus half the angle between the top of your hand and the rim so if hypothetically you're a 5'5 YouTube Rider with a genuinely shameful vertical jump you're probably releasing the ball about 6 ft and 9 in off the ground meaning the angle between your hand and the hoop is 12.22 5° making your optimal launch angle 51.1 one25 de information which is fun to know but very difficult to use because when it really comes down to it a free throw isn't a math problem it's a human activity which makes it very screwup let the ball roll slightly on your hand as you throw it Mis aim it a bit to the right or forget to keep your elbow in you introduce a tiny bit of force on the ball that could throw it off course a good free throw is neurologically complex demanding tons of different motor functions working in Perfect Harmony to make one smooth motion just a bit of anxiety or imprecision can throw it all off which is why so many basketball players have a little routine before they shoot a free throw it helps your brain go through the motions more consistently but those little tricks weren't enough for Rick Barry or his dad or his son they realized there was an even better way to take some of that bodily variability out of the free throw shooting underhanded yeah he the ball up from between your legs like you're birthing it is actually really effective you're holding the ball with two hands and it's a relaxed position so your elbows and wrists aren't so likely to get misaligned you're just making a smooth gentle pendulum motion which done right should send the ball on a lovely Arc up and then down into the hoop that tall Arc is key here see a hoop is wider than a basketball by about the length of the short side of a piece of computer paper so if the ball's coming down straight at the hoop it's got a good bit of room for error the flatter that entry angle the less forgiving the hoop is so while that 51 and change degree angle is optimal for my rer shooting overhand the underhand throw gives a higher angle and with it more forgiveness for small Miss aims to hear Rick Barry tell it picking up the underhand technique is super easy he says players he trained on it could get their free throw percentages into the 65 to 70% range with just a bit of practice in the 1961 1962 season all-time great Wilt Chamberlain actually gave it a go for all his accomplishments Chamberlain was notoriously bad at free throws he was hovering just over 50% in his first two professional Seasons so in his third he took to the underhand technique and it went great he finished the season having made over 61% of his free throws more than he ever had before or ever would again that was also the year he became the first and still only NBA player to score 100 points in a single game and he did it in no small part by making 28 of the 32 free throw opportunities he was given underhand nevertheless he reverted to the overhand shot after and his stats got bad again his Worst season saw a 38% free throw percentage and he retired having missed nearly half of all the free throws he took in his career leaving us all to wonder why you're a basketball player you've learned a hack to get more points in basketball games why on Earth wouldn't you use it will Chamberlain had the excuse of otherwise being one of the greatest players of all time so I guess it's kind of whatever if his free throws are mid but what about Rudy goar what's his excuse I've literally only heard of him because he licked all those microphones in March 2020 and now it turns out he doesn't even throw ball good not to coach from my couch but get your act together Rudy since Rick Barry retired three guys have managed a better career percentage than him everyone else is worse a lot of it comes down to how silly the underhand shot looks the very same thing that made Rick Barry hesitate when his dad suggested it to him this has been nicknamed The Granny shot after all and not a lot of Ballers are trying to serve grandma on the court in fact many of them have characterized it as looking girly which doesn't really make sense because women don't use it either Shaq one of the worst free throw shooters in NBA history once told Rick Barry he'd rather shoot zero than use the granny shots but can we possibly put this all on Aesthetics are generations of elite athletes assing an effective technique just because it looks kind of loserville I mean most of them have probably been training the overhand shot their entire lives and if it ain't totally broke why fix it switching to underhand might only marginally improve their game and sure those marginal points would probably add up handsomely over her career but you know what they say about old habits it's impossible to know every player's MO for not switching most of them don't get asked about it and those that do tend to be hung up on the look here at half as interesting all we have to go on is our field or rather Court research I made Amy shoot 100 free throws each overhand and underhand and here were her stats now granted the underhand shot is actually not that great for unskilled players because if you're not that good at aiming for the hoop already the granny shot does make it harder so the numbers here don't actually teach us much about the shots but what I can tell you is that even though she knew even though she wrote everything I just told you and even though she's probably less worried about looking girly than your average NBA player she still described being embarrassed every time one of those twins on the adjacent courts or people in nearby cars saw her do the granny throw and maybe that shame actually made her shooting worse who's to say but just for fun here she is missing a shot really badly okay so Amy stats are as is tradition on hii useless to us but how do we know that mathematically that would be the unpaired two sample te test she ran on her scores which gave her this very high P value and this 95% confidence interval both of which in stat terms say that Amy's 200 free throws prove nothing significant about the overhand versus underhand techniques but it's the same math they Ed to test drugs in clinical trials or see 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Channel: Half as Interesting

Views: 285,331

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Id: qYwGfw4i-yg

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024