Is One Trip To The Free Throw Line Enough?

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/70581/hoopidea-is-one-trip-to-the-free-throw-line-enough



Is one trip to the free-throw line enough?
October, 1, 2014
OCT 1
10:00
AM ET
Arnovitz By Kevin Arnovitz
ESPN.com




The action stalls out when it's free-throw time. Would the NBA be better off granting just one shot?
I went looking for a photo of a free throw to accompany this story. Finding an appropriate image is tougher than you’d think.

A search for “Free Throws NBA” on Getty Images yields about 25,000 results, the majority of which are close-ups of the individual shooter, usually a name player. In a good number of those pictures you see a guy looking at middle distance wearing more than a blank look but less than a game face. A foul shot is one of the few moments during a game when a photographer can snap an unobstructed shot of a star. Absolutely nothing of substance or style is going on -- no acrobatics, broken ankles or rare feats. It’s a scene that could be re-enacted by any 10 fans in the crowd.

About 26 times per game last season, the action screeched to a halt and players shuffled to their spots to watch a 15-foot set shot. An NBA game featured 47 of these moments on average. It creates a world, as HoopIdea described more than a year ago, in which exhilaration quickly gives way to deflation.

Intelligent people can debate the virtues of the free throw, whether it’s an appropriate deterrent, a necessary evil, etc. But it’s hard to argue that the 15 to 20 minutes it takes to administer several dozen free throws in an NBA game aren’t the most forgettable moments of the night. Any editor charged with trimming the fat from the story would inevitably tag these blocks as the place where the narrative drags. There’s a reason rebroadcasts often skip over free throws, and why at games thousands of fans almost reflexively check their smartphones the instant a foul is whistled.


Around last season’s All-Star break, preliminary chatter began among the league’s basketball operations folks and rule geeks about the prospect of reducing all trips to the free-throw line to a single foul shot. D-League president Dan Reed and Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey were the closest thing to co-sponsors of a bill. Nobody was proposing anything to be fast-tracked, but an imperative to figure out ways to shorten pro basketball games gave the idea some life as something to consider implementing in the D-League.

The concept was this: A player fouled in the act of shooting or in a penalty situation would attempt only a single free throw. If that player was shooting a 2-point shot or in a penalty situation at the time of the foul, the free throw attempt would be worth two points. If that player was fouled in the act of launching a 3-point shot, he’d go to the line for a single shot worth three points.

By doing so, those 47 attempts per game would be whittled down to about 26. There’s no hard data on the average length of time it takes to shoot a pair of free throws, but my stopwatch clocks it at approximately 45 seconds from the sound of the whistle to the second shot reaching the rim. A trip to the line for a single technical or an and-1 situation, though, takes about 30 seconds. These numbers vary wildly. (Walking from one end of the floor to the other after a loose-ball foul takes an eternity, whereas a shooting foul in the paint is a short commute. You also have a fair share of Dwight Howards who can be timed with a calendar.) But we can fairly approximate a second or third free throw as a 15-second exercise. Using that estimate, scrapping 21 free throws from a game would shave more than five minutes of stoppage from the average NBA or D-League game.

“We’re an entertainment product, and the more free flow in basketball, the better,” Morey said. “All the surveying supports that. Basketball is better when basketball players are playing basketball. Stoppages mean less basketball, which is boring. It also means an over-instrumenting of the game. It’s a beautiful game and the closer you can get to two well-prepared teams playing back and forth without interruption or over-management, the better.”

Four rules last season ranging from reducing the number of timeouts to demanding that teams facilitate quicker substitutions trimmed a total of two minutes from D-League games. That’s not insignificant, but it’s a fraction of the five minutes that would be saved if the D-League went to a single free throw. And those five minutes come entirely during a stoppage of live play, unlike, for instance, a measure to shorten a quarter from 12 to 10 minutes, which would snip eight minutes of game action.


Reed kept the conversation about free throws alive on calls and informal conversations through the spring, and the D-League’s Basketball Rules Committee took up the issue at their August meeting. By that point Reed had departed for a position at Facebook and, without a vocal advocate, the committee decided not to pursue the idea any further.

“It’s an interesting concept,” said Chris Alpert, the D-League’s vice president of basketball operations. “But as we discussed it further with the basketball guys, we just felt it would be compromising the integrity of the game and players’ statistics. We didn’t want to skew a player’s free-throw shooting percentage and we didn’t want to compromise the purity of the game.”

In support of the skewed stats argument, the D-League brandished stats that showed that players convert the second of a pair of free throws at a better rate than the first (for D-Leaguers, 71.1 percent vs. 76.3 percent; for NBA players, 73.2 percent vs. 77.7 percent). The trend holds for three-shot trips, as well, as players get progressively more proficient from the first to third attempts. On single attempts -- which would be every trip to the line under the proposed reform -- the D-League shot 71.8 percent, while the NBA shot 72.8 percent.

Would eliminating second and third free-throw attempts drop the league’s overall free-throw percentage? If you believe the data would translate to a single-attempt system, then yes, slightly. But a reform would have absolutely no bearing on the competitive dynamics of the game. The foul line isn’t being moved out or in, and scrapping a second and third free-throw attempt would affect both teams equally. Free-throw percentages have been variable throughout time (they were added after the advent of basketball, and even then, their current point value and the location of the shot weren’t settled until 1895), floating from the low to high 70s for the last 50 years or so. Meanwhile, the D-League instituted international goaltending rules in 2010, which has resulted in additional field-goal and blocked-shot opportunities at the rim, particularly for big men. Individual stats have undoubtedly been affected.

A degree of randomness that didn’t previously exist would be introduced into individual games. For instance, a 75 percent shooting clip at the stripe wouldn’t necessarily yield 75 percent of the available points on a given night. Let’s say a guy makes four trips to the line -- three of those attempts for two points each, but one for only a single point (an and-1 situation). Hitting three of four (75 percent) might only yield 71 percent of the available points (if the miss comes on one of the two-point attempts). Or it might yield 86 percent of the available points (if the miss happens to come on the and-1 attempt).

But over the course of the season, this stuff evens out and the overall mathematical effect is close to nothing.


The more likely reasons the proposal didn’t gain more traction are more cultural than empirical. Apart from being at least marginally profitable for those who invest, the D-League has two central mandates as an enterprise:
Provide an environment in which talent can develop the skills to succeed in the NBA
Serve as the NBA’s research and development lab

These two missions are in no way mutually exclusive, but they coexist with an occasional degree of tension. Certain voices in the game place a higher degree of import on one objective over the other. A basketball lifer who experiences the game as a former player and is rooted in certain fixed truths might place a higher premium on continuity than a blue-sky thinker whose appreciation for pro basketball are driven by a passion for innovation and imagination for what basketball should look like two decades down the road. We’ve tackled many of these ideas over the last few years at HoopIdea.


Reed was squarely in the innovation camp and his departure has been met with some sadness among the league’s futurists. Morey and others have characterized Reed as a guy who understood how to fashion new ideas and how to temper the anxieties of those who might be nervous about their implementation.

That’s a difficult balance to strike and one reason why identifying Reed’s replacement is a very big hire for the NBA and the D-League. The hope in midtown Manhattan is to have a new president of the D-League in place before its season begins in mid-November. A bias toward innovation is essential, because the gravitational pull among much of the league still veers toward institutional tradition, even if new commissioner Adam Silver is a change agent at heart.

The dead-ball free throw conversation is instructive of these conflicts between tradition and innovation, development and research. It’s far easier to believe that this particular idea got shot down because a radical proposal that feels alien to the game we know and love requires some time to marinate before cautious people upset our perception of what a pro basketball game is supposed to look like. An idea often needs to work its way through the cycle of discussion and consideration a few times before a level of comfort can be achieved. Once decision-makers turn the concept over in their heads a few times, they can form a fact-based argument for or against.

For instance, those 15 or 20 minutes of dead time during free throw attempts could be vital to in-game recovery for players. That may or may not be true, but it makes more sense as a suggestion than the idea that eliminating dead-ball free throw would ruin the statistical integrity of the game.

The league could certainly get away with a safe hire and opt for a “weak executive” model in which decisions are made by the collective opinion of the most powerful voices. There are no shortage of people in the NBA world who feel they have the expertise to run a satellite league that exists almost entirely to accommodate the NBA.

But the NBA and D-League’s current momentum is all the more reason to double down on the success. New York should find a forward-looking influencer who will continue to see the D-League as an incubator for experimentation, not because incubating ideas is more important than incubating basketball talent, but because the NBA and its affiliate already have plenty of smart people who develop players. Developing the consensus for change is far more challenging.




bob




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I like the idea of one free throw, with the number of points it represents tied to the action that precipitated the free throw. It would speed up the game without reducing the importance of good free throw shooting.  In fact, the role of a single free throw would probably be enhanced—just more concentrated.  Of course, if they'd lower the value of a dunk to one point, I'd be even happier.

Sam

This is hardly anything revolutionary. It's basically the approach I've seen used in high school summer and spring leagues, except the high schoolers also automatically count the extra point if you're fouled in the act of shooting and make the basket.

As far as using this for NBA games, no thank you.

To me, the time-wasting isn't the free throw itself but everything around the actual free throw, and much of that could be eliminated.

• No serial substitutions, where (horn sounds) player from team A subs in, 15 seconds elapse, then (horn sounds) player from team B subs in, 15 more seconds elapse, and repeat, exponentially more when the game is in the last 60 seconds. Coaches abuse this because they view it as a chess match, and the league enables it by allowing it. No subs once the ref hands the ball to the shooter, and the ref needs to move things along and hand the ball to the shooter more quickly.

• Speaking of which, hand the ball to the shooter already. Players fuss and fidget and want to touch the ball between shots. Just give the ball to the shooter already.

• Once the ball is in the shooter's hands, start the 10-second count. Ten seconds is plenty of time to shoot. I think I will be forever scarred by Adrian Dantley centering his entire offensive game around drawing free throws, being maddeningly rewarded by the refs with foul calls for contact he initiated, and then going through innumerable gyrations at the line once the ref gave him the ball. Dwight Howard's free throw routine isn't much to speak of, but he spends a LOT of time just standing there, staring at the rim, so that his free throw attempt takes 15 seconds. Dennis Johnson dribbling the ball one time for each season he'd been in the league got a little ridiculous at the end of his 14-year career. Just shoot the damn ball.

• Knock it off with the slapping of hands after every free throw, made or missed. Also knock off the excessive number of times players move from one side of the lane to another between free throws. I can remember Paul Pierce making a game of it, purposely walking from one side of the lane to another to interrupt the hand-slap by the other team.

• Don't allow the free throw shooter to wander away from the line. The video below shows what I mean.

Here's a video of Howard shooting two free throws. He receives the ball at the 1-second mark and doesn't release the ball until the 16-second mark. Then come the obligatory hand slaps after the unsurprising miss, followed by Howard wandering out to half court and not receiving the ball for the second free throw until the 42-second mark. The fan taking the video then pans around the arena, and we don't see Howard release the second free throw, but if you pause the video as it pans back at the 58-second mark, he still has the ball in his hands, a full 16 seconds after receiving the ball.



So it takes a minute from the time he's given the ball for the first free throw to the time he releases the ball for the second free throw, and that doesn't include any substitutions.

Contrast that with Steve Nash:



He does the most time-consuming part of his routine, the practice shots without the ball, while the ref is allowing everyone else to get set. The first shot takes six seconds, the second shot takes five seconds. From the time he receives the ball for the first shot to the time he releases the ball for the second shot -- 18 seconds.

Knock off all the nonsense, make them get on with it, and they could cut the time in half. The NBA can stop this problem because they're the ones who are enabling it.

Outside,

Why do I get the feeling the NBA would fill the new found time with 10 more commercials?



KJ

This is not the first time that changing the free throw rules have been introduced.

Does that mean we should change an and 1 to an and 2?

As we know players used to get 3 for 2.

Ha...if you want to see the game speed up this proposed change would do it.  Teams that are in the best condition and having depth could really take advantage of the hands on the knees rest period when they are waiting for the free throw play to conclude.

dboss

k_j_88 wrote:Outside,

Why do I get the feeling the NBA would fill the new found time with 10 more commercials?

Yeah, I had the same thought. But I think watching all that nonsense in the clip of Dwight's free throws bugs me more than another commercial. It drives me nuts.

Bored by free throw attempts now ? 45.6 free throws a game is the average for the last 3 years compared to an astounding 72.4 average for the 60's.
swish

And I'm quite sure that the running time in games of the 60s was shorter than nowadays.

I've always felt that wandering from the free throw line between freebies is beyond stupid.  The fact is that, whether or not the first free throw is missed, if the shooter maintains the exact same position for the second free throw, he can use the experience of the first free throw to make any needed corrections on the second one.

Sam