Theories Abound On Why Players Just Can’t Shoot

Why, Americans want to know, can’t our college basketball players shoot anymore? Hoops is, after all, our game.

Bricks and air balls have become all the rage as America’s game races toward the millennium. And everybody has an opinion as to why, at midseason, Division I shooting accuracy was just 43.8 percent, the lowest it’s been since the 1968-69 season.

Theories abound. Searching for answers, the Philadelphia Daily News talked to all the Division I coaches in the city. Most importantly, the paper talked to Herb Magee, the coach at Division II Philadelphia Textile. Magee, a recognized authority on shooting, is the man who made a shooting video called “Swish.” He knows shooting. And he knows the bottom line.

“The 3-point shot and the emphasis on the ‘three,’ ” Magee said succinctly. “That’s the major reason.”

He’s right, of course. Still, this is a complicated issue.

The decline of shooting accuracy from a historical high of 48.1 percent in 1983-84 can be directly traced to the advent of the trey in the 1986-87 season. The percentage dropped more than a full point that first year, held steady for a couple of years and then started its precipitous decline.

Why? Easy. Coaches were reluctant to use the new shot the first year. Teams attempted just 18.3 treys per game between them in 1986-87. This season, they are attempting 34 “threes” per game.

In ‘86-87, one of every 6-1/2 shots was from beyond the arc. This season, one of every 3-1/2 shots is a bomb. Take more shots from 19-9 and beyond, and you aren’t going to make as many shots. Elementary.

Still, that does not really explain why teams shot a historical high of 38.4 percent from the arc in ‘86-87 while shooting a historical-low 34.1 percent in ‘95-96.

What has changed? Kids should be practicing the trey more than ever.

What has changed is coaching. With so many more treys taken, coaches have put a huge emphasis on defending the arc. Where once shots were conceded from “out there” and there was a lot of defensive help inside and very little recovering to the outside, now there is both help and recover, even if it means running all the way to the arc.

“Maybe it’s just a different game, in terms of athletes vs. athletes,” St. Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli said. “And it’s true that kids don’t practice their skills. They’d rather play games from an early age.”

And the “three” has totally changed the style of play.

“You never saw people on a three-on-one in transition pull up from the perimeter,” Villanova coach Steve Lappas said. “They were always going to the basket. Now, a three-on-one ‘three’ is a pretty good shot.”

Lappas has changed with the game.

“When I was in high school, all we shot were layups,” he said.

The shot clock, introduced at 45 seconds in the season before the “three,” also has hastened the decline of shooting percentages. No longer were the “control freaks” able to coach every possession, spread the court and wait for layups and wideopen, 12-foot jump shots.

It essentially eliminated some tactics such as the four corners of North Carolina’s Dean Smith and some coaches - like Rollie Massimino - who never were able to adapt.

When the clock went to 35 seconds in 1993-94, there were more rushed shots, more bad shots and more misses than ever before.

“The rush with the clock has forced a lot of players to try to develop a shot, but they are in a hurry,” Temple coach John Chaney said.

In his own way, Chaney was saying that too many of the wrong players are taking shots. In his system, there always have been designated shooters. Now, too many are designated.

“Life presents youngsters with hurried decisions,” Chaney said. “That’s the way it is nowadays. Everything’s microwaved. They don’t pay attention to details.”

Villanova has two great shooters in Kerry Kittles and Eric Eberz. Still, until center Jason Lawson really got his inside game in gear last month, they struggled.

“We concentrated more on getting the ball inside,” Lappas said. “I think that’s helped us get a better quality of three-point shot … When you get your chemistry going, a lot more shots just seem to go in.”

All this bad shooting needs perspective. Consider this: When the NCAA started tracking shooting trends in 1947-48, Division I players shot 29.3 percent. Now, that was bad shooting.

“What a boring game that must have been,” Lappas said.

The game was so much different then. Fastbreaks didn’t happen. It was walk-it-up basketball, with shorter games. In 1948, the average college basketball score by two teams was just 106.5 points per game.

As the athletes got better in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, the game changed dramatically. John Wooden’s great UCLA teams pressed and ran teams dizzy. And Wooden also taught the now all-but-dead art of the bank shot. Think maybe he knew something?

Shooting accuracy hit 40 percent for the first time in 1960-61. A decade later, it was 44.4 percent. By 1980-81, it was 48 percent.

By 1971-72, scoring reached a historical high of 155.3 points per game. Then, the game changed again.

Freshmen became eligible the next season, and a single foul shot on the first six common fouls was eliminated. So, scoring went down by nearly five points per game.

In 1976, Indiana and coach Bob Knight won the first of three national championships. And defense, which Knight taught better than anybody, was in.

Scores plummeted, all the way to 135.1 points per game in 1981-82. Remember the classic 1982 NCAA championship game between North Carolina and Georgetown? Some of the best players in the history of the sport were in the Superdome that night.

There was Patrick Ewing for Georgetown. Carolina had James Worthy, Sam Perkins and a relatively unknown freshman named Michael Jordan, who just happened to hit the game-winner.

With all that explosiveness, the final score was just 63-62. Jordan had 16 points.

The answer, five seasons later, was the three-point shot. Scoring was back. It got as high as 152.9 points in 1991, but has leveled off to 145.3 this season.

None of the rule changes, however, can explain the sorry state of foul shooting. Back in 1947-48, players shot just 59.8 percent. By 1978-79, foul shooting reached a historical high of 69.7 percent. Guess Larry Bird and Magic Johnson really were that good.

Free throw shooting has dropped ever since. The 15-foot distance hasn’t changed. The rim remains 10 feet high. The ball didn’t get bigger.

At midseason, Division I players were shooting 66.6 percent from the line, the lowest since the 1957-58 season. Through games of Feb. 12, only four teams (Utah, Weber State, Brigham Young and Virginia Military) were shooting better than 75 percent from the line.

“The more foul shots you shoot in practice doesn’t mean you’re going to get better at it,” Magee said. “The biggest problem with kids is that the simple, basic techniques are wrong because they don’t go about learning them correctly at an early age.”

Magee’s team is shooting 74 percent from the line this season, which is about what Textile has been shooting forever.

“The worst team I ever had at the foul line in my 29 years was the team that won the national championship,” said Magee, referring to the 1969-70 team. “You know why? The subs played all the time because we beat the bleep out of people.”

What also can’t be explained is that the two-point accuracy this season is just 47.8 percent. Since all those 20-foot jump shots that now are counted in 3-point percentages have been eliminated from the mix, there can only be one answer: bad shooting.

If all those 20-footers counted in 1984, when players shot 48.1 percent, why do they shoot just 47.8 percent when they don’t count? Bad shooting.

“If they made the basket 11 feet tomorrow, I would take like an hour to become just as good a shooter,” said Magee, who knows the correct technique.

As of last Monday, just six teams (UCLA, Louisville, Colorado State, Coppin State, Montana State and New Mexico) were shooting better than 50 percent from the field. UCLA (53 percent) was two percentage points better than anybody.

So many teams play the motion game now. The ball can get inside, but it’s a jump-shot offense. Watch Jim Harrick’s UCLA team and you’ll see a different game. They are the anti-jump shooters, pounding the ball farther and farther inside.

Contrast the 50-percent shooters with the 20 teams that are holding opponents under 40 percent shooting. Defense matters.

Just 13 teams shoot better than 40 percent from the arc. Anything close to 40 is excellent. On a points-per-shot basis, 40 percent from the arc equals 60 percent inside it.

When is the last time you drove by a playground and saw kids practicing their foul shots? When is the last time you drove by a playground and saw kids playing? “When you’re recruiting kids in the summer, you look for their edge,” Martelli said. “One of the things I find, individually, is kids who just go play, away from camps, AAU, showcases. But if you call a kid and say, ‘Where are you playing next Tuesday?’ every kid, and these are at the highest level throughout the country, says, ‘I don’t have a game.’ So it’s like, unless they’re organized, they don’t hoop.

“There was a place - a park, a playground, whatever - where you’d meet at 4 each day or 6 each day and you played. Now, it just doesn’t happen. You can actually stretch it out that youth sports are so organized, they don’t play for the real joy of playing anymore.

Magee can teach you, can teach anybody - if anybody wants to learn.

“When’s the last time you drove by any place and saw a kid with another kid just shooting jumpers and moving to spots and trying to shoot up off the dribble?” Magee said.

You do not learn shooting by yourself. You need a partner to lead you to the spots.

“In the game of basketball, you don’t shoot the ball and run after it,” Magee said.

And you need to know how to shoot.

“When I speak about shooting, I talk only about technique,” Magee said. “We go four parts. The first part is about your shooting hand. I spend 15 minutes on the proper way to hold a basketball.

“Then we add the guide hand. That’s one of the biggest problems that kids have. They don’t put their guide hand on the ball correctly and it ends up messing up their shot.

“The third part is the proper use of your legs, which doesn’t just mean that you bend your knees. You’ve got to learn to move your shoulders forward. You don’t just go straight up and straight down. If you shoot from right behind the three-point line, you should end up in two-point territory.

“And the last thing is the target. You ask a kid, ‘What do you aim for?’ and they say, ‘The rim.’ No, no. You aim for the front of the rim.”

All great shooters have one common denominator.

“It’s the snap of the wrist with the shooting hand,” Magee said.