TW: One of my pet peeves is watching highly trained basketball players miss free throws, especially highly paid NBA players. They are "free" throws after all. My concern appears valid, this piece examines that contrary to almost all other athletic endeavors free throw shooting has shown no improvement in fifty years. The only antidote appears to be more practice of the discipline yet few coaches and players are willing to focus on the shot.
From NYT:
"...Since the mid-1960s, college men’s players have made about 69 percent of free throws, the unguarded 15-foot, 1-point shot awarded after a foul. In 1965, the rate was 69 percent. This season...it was 68.8. It has dropped as low as 67.1 but never topped 70.
In the NBA, the average has been roughly 75 percent for more than 50 years. Players in college women’s basketball and the WNBA reached similar plateaus — about equal to the men — and stuck there.
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.
...Ray Stefani, a professor emeritus at Cal State, Long Beach, is an expert in the statistical analysis of sports. Widespread improvement over time in any sport, he said, depends on a combination of four factors: physiology (the size and fitness of athletes, perhaps aided by performance-enhancing drugs), technology or innovation (things like the advent of rowing machines to train rowers, and the Fosbury Flop in high jumping), coaching (changes in strategy) and equipment (like the clap skate in speedskating or fiberglass poles in pole vaulting).
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.
...There has not been a serious innovation in the way free throws have been shot for 50 years...
That leaves only one of Stefani’s four factors that might reasonably affect free-throw averages: 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.
“A lot of coaches don’t want to spend time on it in practice...“They want to work on defenses and offenses and schemes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/sports/basketball/04freethrow.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
From NYT:
"...Since the mid-1960s, college men’s players have made about 69 percent of free throws, the unguarded 15-foot, 1-point shot awarded after a foul. In 1965, the rate was 69 percent. This season...it was 68.8. It has dropped as low as 67.1 but never topped 70.
In the NBA, the average has been roughly 75 percent for more than 50 years. Players in college women’s basketball and the WNBA reached similar plateaus — about equal to the men — and stuck there.
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.
...Ray Stefani, a professor emeritus at Cal State, Long Beach, is an expert in the statistical analysis of sports. Widespread improvement over time in any sport, he said, depends on a combination of four factors: physiology (the size and fitness of athletes, perhaps aided by performance-enhancing drugs), technology or innovation (things like the advent of rowing machines to train rowers, and the Fosbury Flop in high jumping), coaching (changes in strategy) and equipment (like the clap skate in speedskating or fiberglass poles in pole vaulting).
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.
...There has not been a serious innovation in the way free throws have been shot for 50 years...
That leaves only one of Stefani’s four factors that might reasonably affect free-throw averages: 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.
“A lot of coaches don’t want to spend time on it in practice...“They want to work on defenses and offenses and schemes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/sports/basketball/04freethrow.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
No comments:
Post a Comment