Free advice for the King, who has one non-fatal flaw
LeBron James is a basketball genius in too many ways to count. It took Sunday night’s career-best performance from Jimmy Butler to keep the NBA Finals from morphing into a global genuflection at the feet of basketball’s reigning King, who still finds himself just two wins away from winning his fourth championship with his third team.
But even if we’re still in the midst of a coronation — with James’s L.A. Lakers leading the Butler’s Miami Heat 2-1 in the best-of-seven series — there’s at least one aspect of James’s game that’s almost always been worthy of cross-examination. It’s always seemed odd that James, who has mastered almost every aspect of his sport, has been stymied by at least one: On a lot of nights, it’s as though the free-throw line is his kryptonite.
Through the opening three games of the championship series he’s shooting a miserable 65 per cent from the charity stripe, down from his regularseason rate of 69 per cent. And the shoddy marksmanship on those unguarded 15-foot shots — where all-time NBA percentage leader Steph Curry sinks 91 per cent — puts James in rare company among the game’s most productive offensive machines. Of the top 20 scorers this season, only James and Giannis Antetokounmpo shot below 70 per cent from the line.
To which James might say: So what? His woes aren’t exactly new, after all. His career clip from the charity stripe is an underwhelming 73 per cent, a few points below this season’s league average of 77 per cent. And even if that means freethrow shooting is the rare skill at which James ranks below standard, it hasn’t exactly been a career killer.
James is already the NBA’s all-time leading scorer in the playoffs. He sits third on the regular-season list behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone, who shot a Jamesesque 72 per cent and 74 per cent from the line for their respective careers. And don’t forget that James won a title with the Cavaliers in 2016 despite shooting 66 per cent from the line during the playoffs — his worst post-season freethrow-shooting performance coinciding with one of his greatest triumphs.
Still, given James’s vast athletic ability and renowned attention to detail — and given the current era of instant video analysis and micro-coaching — it’s sometimes hard to fathom how, 17 seasons into a storied career, James has never managed to do to his free-throw shooting what he’s done to almost every other aspect of his game: elevate it to an elite level.
“You’d think he’d improve a little bit,” Dave Hopla, the longtime NBA shooting coach, was saying the other day over the phone from his home in Naples, Fla. “I’ve read he spends a million on his body, his personal masseuse and his chef. He’s got his personal trainer and everything. He’s going to go down as one of the all-time greats. It should be something he can get better at. He’s so good at everything else. There really is no excuse.”
Basketball history, of course, has had its share of great players who were far more inept at the line than James. Shaquille O’Neal shot below 50 per cent in seven of his 19 seasons. Wilt Chamberlain once averaged 50 points a game shooting 51 per cent from the line. Still, there are plenty of other stories of superstars who have found a way to improve. Magic Johnson, after toiling as a 76 per cent free-throw shooter in a couple of his early seasons, improved enough to lead the league at 91 per cent in 1988-89. Kawhi Leonard came into the league as a 77 per cent free-throw shooter as a rookie; this year he shot 89 per cent. And hey, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant both managed to shoot 84 per cent for their careers. So why not LeBron?
Dave Love, a Calgary-based shooting coach who has worked with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic, said it’s his experience that any pro can improve at free-throw shooting if they’re willing to make the necessary changes. But Love doesn’t underestimate the difficulty of performing in front of a massive audience, televised or otherwise.
“Especially when you’ve grown up thinking you aren’t good at the skill and then you have to go and execute in a hostile environment,” Love said. “To say ‘They’re professionals, they should be able to do this’ is not that different than them saying ‘I can’t understand how anyone can stop growing at six foot tall. Why don’t you just keep growing to six-foot-nine?’ We all have our advantages and disadvantages, and our skills and our weaknesses.”
What’s James’s free-throwline weakness? There are those who’ll tell you he’s changed his routine too often. He’s mostly stuck to a three-dribble prelude. But sometimes he has licked his fingers while spinning the ball in his left hand. Sometimes he hasn’t. Sometimes he’s performed something akin to a pump fake, before pausing and shooting. Lately he’s ditched that. There’ve been times he’s stepped back with his left foot as if to simulate a catch-and-shoot rhythm. But recently that’s been gone, too.
“You’re never going to be great at something you keep changing,” Hopla said. “You’ve got to get something that you’re comfortable with and it’s repeatable.”
Hopla, who once made 1,234 consecutive free throws, has never worked with James. But watching him from afar, he enumerates a list of observations of the great player’s form. Hopla, for one, says he doesn’t love the way James toes the free-throw line so squarely, with the left toes only slightly further back than the right. Hopla prefers a more staggered stance.
“It’s like shooting a dart. If you watch great dart players, if they’re right-handed they’ve got their right foot in front of their left. They’re not square to the board. They have a lead foot,” Hopla said. “To shoot properly from that (toessquare) position, there’s a slight torquing of the shoulders.”
Hopla had other observations. James, he said, looks “too rigid,” “too upright,” and his attempts are delivered with too little arc for the coach’s liking. And certainly anyone who’s spent time chatting courtside with NBA coaches and critics in the pre-COVID era has heard myriad critiques of James’s form. Some say he’s “elbow out” — meaning his shooting elbow, rather than being in an efficient position under the ball, protrudes too much to his right. Others say the elbow’s not the issue, that his problem is with his index finger, which pushes the ball across the target line rather than straight down it. Some say it doesn’t help that, on a lot of attempts, James lifts his heels too early and actually lowers them as he releases the ball — a less-than-efficient movement sequence — or that he’s been known to, as he prepares to shoot, start the ball toward his left side before bringing it back to his right — again, not the straight line taken by many of the great converters of freebies.
Which is not to say James, whose Lakers are favoured by 7 1⁄ 2 points in Tuesday’s Game 4, isn’t currently making a beeline to his fourth championship all the same. He may never go down as a great freethrow shooter. But he’s been good enough to go down as a great.
“You have to want to get better,” Hopla said. “I always say if there was a clause in contracts that said you couldn’t make X amount of dollars unless you shot 80 per cent from the free-throw line, you’d be seeing a lot more guys breaking 80 per cent.”