“The repetition has kicked in to where I feel like every time I step to the line, I should be making both of them. He started doing it as a junior in high school. They didn’t shoot like their dad did, but Canyon does, and it’s been a brilliant idea for him. Two of Rick Barry’s other sons, Jon and Brent, had careers as NBA role players. Barry, meanwhile, is shooting free throws about as accurately as anyone in college basketball. Onuaku used the underhand technique just to give himself a chance - he ended his college career as a 54.7 percent shooter from the stripe. It was only last year that Louisville big man Chinanu Onuaku brought it back to the mainstream at the college level and then in the NBA during his limited minutes as a rookie. Terrible free-throw shooters like Shaq and Andre Drummond publicly disparaged the idea. The underhand free throw has essentially been dead since papa Barry retired. Canyon Berry isn’t the first player at a big-time school to use it recently, but he’s the first one to do it well in a while: Getty, truTVīut the underhand free throw has more or less died off in the major college and professional game. Rick and Canyon Berry, shooting free throws. Barry’s father is Rick Barry, the former NBA player who became synonymous with that shooting form. The underhand foul shot is very much a family thing. Barry entered Thursday shooting 88 percent this year at the line, in his first year since transferring to UF from the College of Charleston. Barry takes granny-style foul shots all the time, and the reason it’s such a spectacle is that he’s really, really good at it. “You have a little bit more margin for error than when you shoot overhand.Florida's Canyon Barry shoots free throws like his dad. “From the physics standpoint, it’s a much better way to shoot,” he told the author Malcolm Gladwell in a recent interview. “This competition between the entry angle and speed underlies both the speed-accuracy trade-off and the relative accuracy of one style versus another,” said Venkadesan.įor the professional player, the analysis predicts, this trade-off is finely balanced and probably within the margins of error of the model, which did not consider the backboard.īarry, no doubt, would view the findings as confirmation of what he has argued all along. So the overarm shot, where the ball “sees” a smaller cross-section of the hoop, but is less likely to go wildly off course, is a more conservative strategy. In this scenario, a small error in the timing of the release can cause the ball to grossly overshoot or undershoot the hoop. However, in trying to achieve this straight down entry, the amateur risks lobbing the ball extremely high due to their mediocre control. This is good, as it means that if a throw is close to being exactly on target it has a very high chance of going in. When the ball approaches the net from directly above, as in a typical underarm throw, the cross-section of the target is large from the ball’s vantage point. But for amateurs who have only crude control, the release of the ball overarm is safer, sparing casual players the dilemma of choosing style or results.Īn important factor in comparing the two strategies was how the ball approaches its target. It found that if the player is capable of controlling the release angle and speed well, the underarm throw has slightly better odds of going in. The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, considered the chances of the ball being on target, depending on the style, speed and accuracy of a throw. ![]() “So what if some call it the ‘granny throw’? What matters is that the ball goes through the hoop! Rick Barry’s record does support the underarm throw.” “One suspects there are social and cultural reasons you don’t see that practised too often,” he said. Venkadesan acknowledges that it is a difficult case to make. But he struggled to convince his teammates due to the inescapable fact that shooting underarm “makes you look like a sissy,” Barry said. The retired NBA player Rick Barry, a pioneer of the underarm free throw, was one of the most effective shooters of all time and when he retired in 1980 his 90% free throw record ranked first in NBA history. However, it remains to be seen whether science will prove more persuasive than professional advocates of the underarm style.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |