You can call me Giannis
Having fun with free throws
What do you do when you’re at your childhood home for two weeks during quarantine? If you’re me, you revert to being a child. Telling your parents to leave your room so you can work (read: watch YouTube), getting your meals served to you, and taking afternoon naps on the couch. Oh, and playing basketball. Lots of driveway basketball.
And when I play driveway basketball, it gets intense. I pretend to be various NBA players and simulate games where I am somehow both teams. (spoiler alert: I win. Every time.)
As an adult, the dreamer in me has had his wings clipped. I know I’ll never jump like LeBron. Step back like Harden. Dunk like Zion. But there was still one place where I could compare myself to NBA players. Free throws.
Have you ever watched Shaq miss a free throw and just think - how hard could this be? There's no one defending you. It's from the same spot every time. How can you not just practice enough to make it more than 1/2 the time? I set out to understand this. For 14 days, I shot 100 free throws a day in my driveway. I take some warm-up shots from around the driveway, and when I feel warmed up, I head to the free throw line and start counting.
Couple caveats:
There's no pressure here. I'm not dealing with the pressure of winning or losing. That being said, I am confident that enough muscle memory and experience in pressure situations can reduce the gap between practice and a live setting.
There's also no crowd noise, either for or against you. Same response as above. In fact, in the current NBA bubble, with games played in empty arenas, you get an approximation of this. The sample size is limited, but free throw shooting has improved by 1.5%. So we can even account for this if we want to.
There's no game and therefore no fatigue. It’s harder to shoot a free throw when your legs are shot.
There's too much rhythm. Nobody shoots 100 free throws at a time. They shoot in batches of 1 or 2 throughout a game.
Caveats aside, I went ahead. I compared myself to the NBA free throw shooting percentages from the 2018-19 season. 121 players shot enough free throws to qualify with a 76.6% league-wide average. Let’s get to it.
The raw performance
Over two weeks, I ended taking 1,400 free throws and making 1,041 over two weeks. At 74.4%, this placed me at #88 in the NBA. Once we take into account the -1.5% effect of fans, that puts me at 72.9%, or #92 in the NBA. Number 92 out of 121 seems bad until you look at who that puts me next to.
Giannis Antetokounmpo, otherwise known as the reigning NBA MVP. Not bad company.
My takeaways
Emotionally, I feel like an 86% free throw shooter.
On that third day, I felt in rhythm when I made 86. Every other day, I was searching for that lost feeling. It always felt like I was ‘off’ and something wasn’t clicking the way it should. Even when I would find that rhythm for stretches, I couldn’t capture it consistently over 100 free throws.
I am not an 86% free throw shooter.
The data tells a pretty consistent story. I am a ~74% free throw shooter with a high variance (according to the data, if normally distributed, 95% of the time when shooting 100 free throws, I will make between 61% and 87%). My performance on day 3 was an outlier - if you assume my performance is normally distributed, making 86 out of 100 or more happens less than 4% of the time.
By the way, a normal distribution looks sensible.
The first graph just plots the scores against the probability of their occurrence given a normal distribution. It should reflect a bell shape, which it generally does. The second graph compares each daily score to what it would have been if the distribution was perfectly normal. The closer the blue line is to the orange, the more it reflects a normal distribution. Looks pretty close to me. (Believe it or not, I used to be more statistically savvy. At this point in my life, this is the deepest statistical analysis I can pull together.)
Free throw shooting isn’t as easy as it looks
I came away from the experience with more respect for NBA players. Free throw shooting isn’t easy. The best shooters, making over 90% of their free throws, is remarkable. Every time the ball doesn’t feel quite right in your hands. Where your wrist doesn’t snap the way you intend. Where you feel a bead of sweat on your forehead at the wrong moment. Where you’re thinking about the shot you just missed. All of these things can lead to misses, and the fact that NBA players make so many so consistently is now more impressive to me than ever.
Improvement does not happen overnight (or in two weeks)
Even though my first day was 65 and my last was 82, there was no plausible way of looking at the data that showed improvement over time. My first week average (75%) was higher than my second week (73%). No matter how you slice the data (believe me, I tried), I did not statistically improve over these two weeks. So, whatever the training program, make sure it’s longer than two weeks.
Are slumps real?
I was left pondering this question. When you think you are in a hitting slump in baseball or a shooting slump in basketball, is this real? If in 100-shot batches (not a small sample size), there was this much variance, what does that say about slumps? Could what we call a shooting slump just be natural variance playing out?
I don’t know the answer, or even how best to test this, but my experience left me asking the question. In the meantime, you can find me in the driveway working on my Giannis dunks.