Shooting help
Can Andre Roberson’s free-throw shooting troubles be fixed?
The Thunder agreed to a three-year contract with Andre Roberson late Wednesday night, and in doing so, it retained one of the world’s best defenders.
And one of its worst free-throw shooters.
His problems were evident a year ago when he shot only 42.3 percent from the line during the regular season, but they moved front and center in the playoffs. Late in Game 4 against Houston, the Rockets intentionally fouled him four times, and Roberson made only 2 of 8 free shots.
Roberson has a problem, and even though some might argue that shooting in general is his problem, the acquisitions of Paul George and Patrick Patterson will lessen the live-action shooting load on Roberson. He won’t need to take as many shots. But free throws? He is going to have to shoot those, especially if teams decide to follow Houston’s lead and hack him. He needs to be able to make them — but can he? Can he be consistent? Can he be passable or even reliable? Can Roberson be fixed? “Yeah,” said a man who would know, “he can be fixed.”
Jim Poteet is an expert on free-throw shooting. He coached smallcollege basketball around Oklahoma for many decades, most notably at Southern Nazarene, but he’s known around the world as a master of the free throw.
He studied the shot. Wrote about it. Darn near perfected it.
His lifetime percentage in free-throw shooting competitions and exhibitions is better than 96 percent.
Poteet knows of what he speaks, and he sees potential in Roberson as a free-throw shooter. Even though Poteet hasn’t done an in-depth dissection of the Thunder guard’s free-throw shooting, he believes Roberson has good technique. Not perfect. But good.
“But you’ve just got to do it over and over and over and over and over again,” Poteet said. “I suspect that he’s like most basketball players I know — they don’t spend any time at it.” What’s enough? A hundred free throws a day? Two hundred?
“He probably needs to take 30 days and shoot 500 free throws a day,” Poteet said. “I promise you, if he shot 500 free throws a day and did it correctly and worked till he grooved that shot, all of sudden instead of being a 40 percent free thrower, what if he just moved to be 65 percent?”
If Roberson had shot that well from the freethrow line a year ago, he’d have upped his scoring average nearly half a point a game. And in the NBA, an extra point here or there can be the difference between winning and losing.
Another factor in winning percentage is keeping Roberson on the court to defend the other team’s best player, and the Thunder might be forced to pull him if more teams intentionally foul him and he can’t knock down some free throws.
Needless to say, making an investment to fix this problem would be money and time well spent by Roberson and the Thunder.
Now, don’t misunderstand — the issue won’t be solved simply by Roberson shooting a bunch of free throws. Quality has to be paired with quantity, and by Poteet’s estimation, that would need to start with some psychology. Poteet would tell Roberson to forget everything in the past, to eliminate any negative thoughts, to make a fresh start.
Then, Poteet would develop a mental routine for Roberson.
Every time Poteet prepares to shoot a free throw, he has a run of phrases that he says to himself.
“Feet square to the line. Bounce the ball three times. Thumb in the channel.
“Bend your knees. Eye on the target. Shoot and follow through.”
Poteet doesn’t say those things because he needs to remind himself about what to do. He does it because it keeps his mind active, and if he doesn’t occupy it, something else will. An idle mind is fertile ground for extraneous thoughts.
And it’s not just negative thoughts that can derail the process. Something as simple as remembering that his wife told him to go to the grocery store can get in the way.
To hear Poteet talk about free-throw shooting, it seems so simple. Ditto for when he does it. But he knows it’s anything but easy.
He likens free throws to putts.
“In golf, you’ve been swinging and hitting the ball as far as you can, then all of a sudden you step to the green,” he said. “I realize a free throw is easier than a putt because the green is not always smooth. But you have to change your whole mental approach.”
It requires touch and calm, and getting your mind to slow down and switch over is no easy thing.
Poteet wrote all about that and more in his doctoral dissertation, “The Paradox of the Free Throw.”
“Everybody thinks you oughta be able to make it,” he said, “but when you’re on stage and you’re the only actor, it’s very difficult.”
That’s true for good free-throw shooters. For ones like Andre Roberson, it’s darn near impossible.
But Poteet doesn’t believe he’s a lost cause. If the Thunder called the free-throw guru seeking help for Roberson, if they pledged a real desire to improve, Poteet would be a willing teacher because he would have a teachable student.
And why wouldn’t the Thunder and Roberson do something like that?
His free-throw shooting can be fixed, and it should be. It won’t be easy to fix one of the worst free-throw shooters on the planet, but one of the best believes it can be done.