Are free throws coachable? Can Craig Robinson make a lot of the same guys from last year’s team make more free throws?

I thought that one would be popular.

If I had known how upset you’d be, I would have voted for crooked rims…

In all seriousness though, free throws are about 50% coaching, 50% player. Go to any middle school AAU game, and those kids can generally hit at least 75% of their free throws. At some point, they stop practicing them. My uncle, an avid basketball guy, once told me that free throws are like a golf swing. You need to do the same warm up as always, and constantly be swinging to maintain proper form. If a guy doesn’t practice free throws, he will lose the touch.

OK, here’s what we have so far: Some guys are better at the line than others, but as a whole the team makes more free throws when they practice them routinely. Therefore, based on the evidence before us, it makes sense that if a coach makes free throw practice a priority, more points will be scored from the free throw line. So I submit that poor performance at the free throw line is mainly an outcome of poor coaching. But wait, I hear you saying, there’s only so much time for practice and time spent on free throws means less time perfecting offensive schemes and so forth. To that I say, a guy struggling at the line willing to improve will spend extra hours in the gym on his own time because he has pride and doesn’t want to hurt the team. This mindset is also an outcome of good coaching. Back in the day, one good scowl from Ralph Miller was all it took.

But as usual, I’m open to alternative views.

I agree with what VD said above. Free throw shooting is pretty much 50-50 as far as coaching and talent goes. However, it is alarming that the team as a whole has had that much trouble with shooting free throws. I mean there are usually at least 2-3 guys on every team that can consistently hit about 75% or more of their free throws. The low numbers suggests to me that the coaching staff has not put enough emphasis on it in practice in the past. I guess they figured that there were more pressing areas that the team needed to improve on. In my opinion though this was the exact opposite action I would have taken. I played basketball competitively all through middle school and high school, and whenever our team had a disadvantage in talent then the best way to play and stay competitive was to play good defense and hit your free throws. Doing those two things will help you from getting blown out and usually means you can steal some games also. It is a much better idea than to just try and jack up a bunch of 3’s and try to outscore a team that already has more talent than you do. I am sure defense and free throw shooting will be two areas emphasized by Coach Robinson and that is one reason why I expect this team to win 3-5 league games this year.

GO BEAVS!!!