NBA Players are getting better at free throws -- and maybe everything else

I noticed early in the season that Victor Wembanyama, who just so we're all clear is a 7'4 human being, was shooting over 90% from the line and nobody was talking about it. (He's currently at "just" 88.0%, and actually did miss a huge one on Sunday night.) They were focused on his FG% and 3PT%, which is understandable, but I thought that his FT% was both:

1) An indicator that he'd get out of his early-season shooting slump (really wish I'd posted this when the idea first occurred to me)

2) A sign that players being excellent from the line is more commonplace than it has been in the past

So far this year, 9 players are shooting 90% or better from the line and 38 are shooting 85% or better. 10 years ago, 5 players shot 90% or better and 25 shot 85% or better. In 04-05, there were 4 90%+ guys and actually 29 85%+ guys, and but in 1994-95 there were just 2 90%+ shooters and 18 85+ shooters.

One weird thing about them is that the NBA, as a whole, hasn't gotten much better at them -- the league average FT% was 73.5% in the 1951-52 season and 75.0% in 2014-15.

When you look at it decade-by-decade, the progress looks absolutely glacial: The NBA shot 75.4% in the '70s, 75.8% in the '80s, 74.6% in the '90s, 75.4% again in the '00s, and 76.0% in the '10s.

Recently, though, free throws have been getting better. Around 10 years ago, the league started shooting consistently better from the line in a way we've never really seen before. The five best free-throw shooting seasons in NBA history was the last five seasons -- this year, players are shooting 77.9% from the line, which is just a little down from last year's 78.4%, which was the best in league history. (It was also a little worse than the 22-23 mark of 78.2%, the second-best mark in league history.)

After hovering at around 75% for nearly a half-century, the NBA league free throw percentage is at over 78%, and a league average of 80% seems extremely possible if this trajectory continues.

If I can invoke the Broadway play The Pajama Game for a second, that’s a big deal. Teams are shooting 22.6 free throws per game this season. (Which is nearly an all-time low, by the way – for all the talk of flopping, the rise in 3-pointers has seen FTAs per game go down consistently through league history.) At 78.1%, they make 17.6 of those free throws. At 75%, that number would be 16.9. At 80%, it would be 18.1. An extra point per game in differential is usually all that separates teams in the standings, and how often do you wish your team had just one more point during the last minute of a game? The change from making three out of every four free throws to four of every five is significant, just like one more hit a week is significant in baseball.

So the NBA is, finally, getting better at free throws. The real question is why. It’s truly bizarre that the league-wide free throw percentage stayed stagnant for so long. Most of the time, NBA trends can be explained by external factors.

Larry Bird didn’t shoot a lot of 3s because he grew up playing without a three-point line. Players after him didn’t shoot a lot of threes because their coaches grew up without a three-point line, or were coached by someone whose own coach grew up without a three-point line. And it took another generation (at least) for big men to get “permission” to let it fly from deep. Remember when Andrew Bynum attempted a wide-open three trailing the break? He was instantly sent to the bench, and everyone acted like he had just ritually decapitated a puppy at half court.

If Kyrie Irving had walked onto the court in the ‘70s, he likely would have been called for forty different double-dribble violations before being tried for witchcraft. Modern NBA defenses (and, by extension, offenses) can only exist because of the abolition of the illegal defense rule, as well as the ban on hand-checking.

But the free throw, the one thing that’s stayed absolutely the same since the beginning of basketball, took over 50 years for players to get better at. Why is it happening now? All I have are guesses. First of all, if you want to play in the NBA, you’ve got to be able to shoot.

It used to be that being tall would get you in the league – 17% of American seven-foot males made it to the NBA. A big man being able to shoot wasn’t expected, and as we saw with Bynum not that long ago, it was often actively discouraged in a lot of ways.

And there were plenty of other roles for non-shooters. Defensive specialists and dedicated slashers have long had places open for them on NBA rosters, even if they were well under seven feet tall. It’s not like anyone was ever encouraged to be bad at their free throws, but there were far more players who didn’t feel the need to develop a mechanically sound all-around shooting stroke – the kind which rarely falters at the line. It should also be mentioned that as the league has evolved from mostly post-centric offenses to more pick-and-roll centric offenses, a lower proportion of shots, and therefore free throws, have been taken by big men.

The question of “why can’t the big guys shoot as well as the little guys?” was always pretty simple to answer. Sure, there were the physics of smaller guys being able to get a more ideal arc more easily, but much more important was this: if the little guy couldn’t shoot, he wouldn’t be in the league. The big guy was able to get away with it. Now, the big guy (and the lockdown defender) can’t. Even someone like Ben Simmons, who is as talented in non-shooting areas as any human being alive, has nights where he’s barely playable because of his complete inability to shoot.

The international influence should also be talked about. As recently as 2008, the USA was able to win the gold medal at the Olympics while ranking 11th out of the 12 teams in free throw percentage. International players do seem to focus more on the “fundamentals” – less poor shooters who are on the court simply by virtue of being giants or absolute athletic freaks seem to come from overseas, although it does happen. (Giannis is currently 117th out of the 1118 qualified players in free throw percentage, for example.)

I would argue that the rise in free throw percentage, and shooting aptitude in general, is due less to the influx of international players than America’s approach to player development becoming more like what was previously only seen overseas.

Skills training for basketball players is much more widespread, it’s starting when players are much younger, and it’s getting better. The philosophy about great shooters used to be that they were born great shooters, and each one was as unique as he was spectacular. Reggie Miller flared his elbow, knocked his knee, and slapped his wrists together. Larry Bird had that high release that allowed him to see the basket through his own arms as he shot. Ray Allen flicked out a laser beam with the backspin of a high-90s fastball. Michael Jordan (and Kobe after him) kept the ball perfectly cocked above their forehead with their elbow at 90 degrees, even if their body sailed away from the basket. Peja Stokjakovic kept the ball on the left side of his body before everything clicked into place just before release, and Kevin Martin, in the words of a journalist whose post has been sadly lost to time, “leaned further left than Al Franken on his jumper.” (It was a long time ago.) Shawn Marion did – that thing, and he made 81% of his career free throws. Just like there was no one perfect golf swing, there was no one perfect shot, and for many the free throw line seemed as inscrutable as the opening tee is to many a golfer.

Not even shooting coaches could agree on what to do – some common axioms, like “keep ten toes pointed at the rim at all times” and “always jump straight up and down” seem to have been proven wrong. We knew that JJ Redick had “textbook form,” but the “textbook” hadn’t actually been written yet.

Nowadays, there seems to be much more of a blueprint. The best shooters have been exhaustively studied, and the commonalities between them have been found. There’s still no cookie-cutter answer for what the best shooting form is for everyone; the human body is fascinating like that. However, there certainly seems to be more of a consensus than ever on what the best practices are. The shot should be “one-motion,” with all of the body’s energy being transferred cleanly into the shot, which should be released before the apex of the jump. The feet should be tilted, and if they aren’t, players should rotate their hips mid-air a la Klay Thompson or JJ Redick to alleviate the tension that would otherwise build up in their shoulder. The hip, the elbow, and the wrist should remain in alignment to ensure a clean transfer of energy.

And so on and so forth. YouTube sites like ShotMechanics, SplashLab, and many others are there to explain the intricacies of the process to outsiders (as well as prospective students) and, more importantly, countless coaches, from youth coaches to skill-development superstars like Drew Hanlen, are out there instilling those best practices in top prospects as well as established NBA players.

It’s not like the idea of skill coaching, or even “shot doctors,” is a new one. Shooting gurus like Dave Hopla and sharpshooters like Mark Price have been brought on by NBA teams to fix wayward shots before, with varying degrees of success. On some level, those were band-aid fixes – I think what we’re seeing now in the NBA is the result of a ground-up approach to both how and how often players are coached, at both the NBA level, where skill development is a year-round job, and the youth level. In some ways, the American youth development system will be hampered by coaches with win-now interests – from travel ball to high school, a lot of attention is paid to winning teams, and it can be unattractive to have a player dominating with sheer athleticism take a temporary step back in order to overhaul his shot.

NBA players are getting bigger, stronger, and faster. That’s just a fact of life we see in every sport. They’re getting better at shooting from distance – that was inevitable from the moment a shot behind the arc was made 50% more valuable than a shot taken inside of it, even though it took the league to realize just how powerful that extra 50% is. Now it seems like they’re getting better at the skills that serve as the building blocks for an effective NBA game. The free throws are just the canary in the coal mine. Is every player eventually going to come into the league like Wembanyama, throwing Shammgod crossovers, hitting step-back threes, and yes, draining nearly 90% of their free throws while standing 7’4? No. But the blueprint is out there now. It’s being studied. And players at every position, at every level, are finding out that there’s no ceiling on what they’re capable of doing on the court. We’re not going to have a league full of players like Wembanyama, capable of doing anything at any time, but we’re getting closer. And we see that in the one place where every player is forced to do the same thing: the free throw line.