An American coach noticed that the local league’s ratings were improving by taking advantage of the rebound on the scoreboard
In basketball, the free throw is one of the few game situations in which variables and external interference are reduced to a minimum: there is only the player and the basket, always at the same distance, without any defense. There is no other game situation more repeatable and reproducible, and in point-to-point games, a free throw scored (worth one point) can make the difference.
For these reasons, free throws have often been the subject of extensive study, particularly in the country that invented basketball, the United States. One of the most famous and cited was created in the 1990s by an aerospace engineer and professor at North Carolina State University who, using software designed to reproduce millions of different trajectories, tried to find a simple answer to a big question to find: how to perform the free throw perfect?
The results suggest that, starting from a shooting angle of 52 degrees, the ball receives three revolutions before reaching the basket, so that at the highest point of its parabola the ball reaches the height of the top of the backboard. The target should also point to the other end of the iron. In practice, the shooting mechanisms were described that were already carried out by most professional players and that have been perfected since then without changing much: hardly anyone still shoots them from below, between the legs, as was practiced many decades ago like it Today only the less practical do it.
Recently, however, the attention of experts has been drawn to the South Korean basketball league, where the hit rates of an unusually high number of players are above 80 percent (the best in the NBA are around 80 percent) and 90 percent: most recently season 4 of the 9 best South Korean goalscorer shot like this.
Eric Fawcett, a university coach, first noticed this, telling Slate, “I’m always looking at foreign championships to see if there’s something innovative I can bring to college basketball.” So I thought I’d take a look I’ll take a look at the Korean championship. Fawcett realized that free throws there are usually shot by aiming at the backboard, i.e. from the bench. He wrote on Twitter: “The first time I saw a player do this I thought, ‘Wow, he’s interesting and shoots 82 percent from the foul line.'” The second time I was surprised again, but when I saw a third, a fourth , a fifth, and then others, I realized it was actually a trend.
See more
Interesting trend from the Korean Basketball League, where a number of players are 80% or more from the free throw line and only shoot bench shots. pic.twitter.com/OBKmVW3pfa
— Eric Fawcett (@EricFawcett_) August 31, 2023
Backboard shots themselves are certainly nothing new in basketball, and some great players remain famous for their use, such as Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs. However, they are rarely taken for distance or free throw shots: they are usually aimed directly at the basket. Fawcett’s report sparked several discussions about this South Korean style of free throw execution, which has been reported on several times in the past but has mostly been noticed in isolated cases at international tournaments. According to the most widespread opinions, the introduction of the bench as a free throw technique could be useful, but only for those who have low hit rates and cannot find other ways to improve them. Executing the shot would actually become more complex: instead of aiming directly at the basket, one must aim at the backboard while simultaneously calculating the trajectory of the rebound.
These discussions are fueled by the fact that free throws are still a rather complicated aspect of the game for many players. Despite their apparent simplicity, there is something that makes dealing with them problematic. In the NBA championship, the great difficulty that Shaquille O’Neal, one of the most dominant and successful players in the history of North American basketball, had shooting is still remembered. His difficulties also gave name to an equally famous game strategy called “Hack-a-Shaq,” which involves intentionally fouling players with low free-throw rates in order to deny them the basket on good-shooting field goals. Probability that they won’t even score from the foul line (as they say in the jargon when it comes to free throws).
In today’s basketball, this strategy is often used with Giannis Antetokounmpo, who, despite being named the championship’s best player twice, has a career average of just over 70 percent and was barely above 60 percent last season.
– Also read: The man who changed bowling by bowling with two hands
Continue with the post