|
Return to Newsletter Index page
ATTENTION: You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed to it. If you'd like to remove yourself from this mailing list, please see the instructions at the end of this newsletter. Our subscriber list is NOT made available to other companies or individuals. We value every subscriber and respect your privacy. PLEASE excuse the advertisement paragraph
you'll see at the top of this Newsletter. Because I have a "free"
service with the Mail List company (Topica), they insert that
ad to help them pay for the service. Sorry for the little commercialism. 1. Welcome from the Coach Welcome to my free Monthly Basketball Shooting
Newsletter. Each month I write about the skill of shooting in
the game today and how it can be more effectively learned and
coached. If you like what I'm saying, please tell others about
it and suggest they subscribe, too. Remember: Great Shooting
CAN be taught! This newsletter is a vehicle for communicating what I know about shooting and for a conversation on how shooting can be improved. With your help, I intend to shift the game and help players and coaches everywhere re-discover the Lost Art of Shooting. Thank you for reading this and subscribing to it and sharing it with your friends. ------------------------------------------------------------ As another NBA season approaches, I feel like a moth being drawn to the flame. I'm addicted to watching these amazing athletes play, even though it's often not great team basketball, and even though the shooting is usually less than desirable. Still I keep hoping to see great performance. The experience of the men's Olympic team this summer should be a wakeup call to the entire country. The emphasis on shooting and on getting good coaching of the skill should be on everyone's mind. How can it be taught better? How can players learn to practice more effectively? What's missing? What's the answer? Maybe many of you caught the article circulating in mid-October that said the NBA is going to de-emphasize 3-point shooting in their National Basketball Development League (NBDL). They're going to count all field goals as 2 points until the last five minutes of regulation and overtime. As quoted in the San Jose Mercury News, it's a step to combat the decline in shooting over the past 25 years since the NBA instituted the three-point line at 23 feet 9 inches. "If you look at the game overall, including the collegiate and high school levels since the inception of the three-point shot, it's been taken with increasing frequency, which in part has driven shooting percentages south," NBA vice president Stu Jackson said. "The three has become a real focal point of offenses, and we would like to turn the clock back and see what the game is like without it and the effect it has." Jackson said the league would log data on midrange jumpers, coaching strategies and field-goal percentages. The writer of the article concluded with this note, "We're going to love seeing those numbers on the midrange jumpers." MY GUESS CASE IN POINT THE WAY OF SHOOTING NEEDS TO CHANGE CHECK IT OUT Watch the better shooters of all time and I think you'll see they "step in" to the shots, their stances are open, instead of jump-stopping square and all that stuff. TRY IT YOURSELF "PURE SHOOTER" ISN'T EVEN KNOWN
MUCH THESE DAYS There may be additional characteristics (send any additions to me), but these seem to define it for me. Ask how many such shooters exist in the NBA today and you'll be hard pressed to name very many. Most of the greatest ones I can think of have retired: Chris Mullin, Jeff Hornacek, Detlef Schrempf, Steve Kerr, Mark Price, etc. Streaky Shooters? You'll be able to name a lot more of them. In watching a couple of the games as the new season starts, I see My Swish Method teaches Pure Shooting. It's a simple Method, but it really works in developing players who become "Shooters," and with practice and awareness, "Pure Shooters." ------------------------------------------------------------ A friend recently sent me the URL of an article on SI.com on Oct. 28, 2004 by John Hollinger called, "Dissecting the Demise." It's about the decline in shooting in the NBA and some of the reasons for it and possible solutions. The article is at: "Dissecting the Demise" Here's John's opening paragraph: "Just 20 years ago, the NBA was in the midst of an offensive renaissance that had teams filling the nets like they were on an Alaskan fishing boat. It's difficult to remember now, but in 1984-85, the average NBA team scored 110.8 points per game. Every team in the league scored at least 104, while the Nuggets, Warriors and Kings all averaged more than 117. For a bit of perspective on how far things have sunk, that's a total the world champion Pistons didn't achieve once in the 2003-04 regular season. In fact, last season, scoring plummeted to just 93.4 points a game for each team, a whopping 17.4 point decrease in two decades." He then analyzes some of the problems that created the slow decline in shooting: 1) The slowing down of the game, thus fewer shots per game these days. In his words: "In '84-85, the average NBA team used 104.8 possessions in a 48-minute game. By last year, the league had come to a screeching halt, using just 92.0 possessions per game. This is important because NBA teams score slightly more than one point for each time they have the ball. Those 13 chances could be expected to turn into about 13.3 points per game for each team. In other words, the biggest reason for the 17-point decrease in scoring isn't due to bad shooting, bad passing, changes in officiating or even the oft-cited increase in high-school aged kids entering the league. The main reason that offense has declined so much is because teams have stopped running. The change in pace alone accounts for 76.2 percent of the decline in scoring since '84-85. If the league reverted to the same pace it played at two decades ago, teams would average about 106.7 points a game. 2) The less efficient offense relative
to the shots they do put up: "That goes to underscore that the 3-pointer has, on balance, not had much of an effect. On the one hand, players shoot the long bomb much more accurately than twenty years ago -- improving from 28.1 percent to 34.7 percent -- which has added 1.9 points per game to scoring. "But there's a hidden cost to all of those 3s. Because they're bombing away instead of going to the rim, teams are getting to the line much less often. Teams took 0.33 free-throws per field-goal attempt back then, but only 0.30 last season, a change that cost teams about 1.7 points a game -- giving back nearly all of the difference from the increase in 3-point accuracy." [Editor's note: The writer didn't analyze free throw shooting percentages. I would guess that this factor is down quite a bit from '84-85.] Besides finding a way to increase the tempo of the game, Item c) above is the one we need to look at. As he puts it, the above study "... leaves the lion's share of the responsibility in decreased offensive efficiency at the doorstep of a common complaint: Declining shooting." His study concludes with, "Our study tells us two things about the state of scoring. First, pace is a much bigger factor than the decline in offensive efficiency. Second, the main cause of the dip in efficiency is the sharp drop in 2-point field-goal percentage." [Editor's note: This agrees with my "guess" above that the 2-pt FG stats may not rise as much as the NBA hopes with the no-3's-counted-until-last-five-minutes test in the NBDL. We will see...] John's last line is a bit skeptical: "The one remaining hope may be that the players themselves become better shooters. Based on the brickfest in Athens, there's a better chance of Billy Squier making a comeback." ------------------------------------------------------------ In watching myself and others shoot, it intrigues me what allows for great control of ball flight. The best shooters have a way to control what they're doing so they're always around the basket, and when they're most focused, their shots land near dead center almost every time. I came up with three qualities of great
shooting I've written about many times: "Accuracy" means your shots find the basket with great control of direction and distance. "Consistency" means you can do it over and over, not just occasionally. And "Repeatability" means to me a higher form of Consistency. It means the motion can go on automatic! It is so learned and integrated and trusted you can now take your attention off how you do things and focus, instead, more on the thing that makes for the greatest performance: where you're going, the target! If you have these three qualities in your shooting, you're bound to be making a high percentage of shots. So how do you get them? I. ACCURACY II. CONSISTENCY If you hesitate any before shooting, then you'll start to lose that power and stable action and the shot has a greater chance of missing. I even wrote an article a long time ago called, "The A-B-C's of Great Shooting." It seems kind of silly now, but it has some truth to it. I thought to call shots that use 80-100% of the UpForce (the quickest shots) "A" shots, and 60-80% "B" shots, and 40-60% "C" shots, etc. From watching shooters, I just felt that A Shooters make more shots than B shooters, and B's make more than C's, etc., down to the "F" shooters who shoot at the top of the jump and shoot the worst. I don't have statistics to back it up, but you might look at shooters with that qualification and make your own judgments. I still stand by the logic, though I haven't thought to describe shooters that way for awhile. If someone wanted to collect statistics, I'll bet money the simple conclusion I made is correct. The point is that to be Consistent, shoot from the energy of those big muscles and rely less on the smaller muscles, like those of the wrist and hand. III. REPEATABILITY In the case of shooting, I feel relaxing the wrist and hand, so they aren't in the action of propelling and guiding the shot, is the key to repeatability. Of course you could use those smaller muscles (wrist, hand, fingers) to add to the power and control, but they're not as reliable as the bigger muscles. They can propel the ball a little long, a little short, or a little to either side very easily. In practice, when you're calm, focused and trusting, you'll find you can shoot pretty well with those smaller muscles, maybe even shoot great for awhile and think you've really "got" the shot. But when there's pressure, I think you'll find the smaller muscles are more prone to over- or under-acting. They're called "fast twitch" muscles because they react so fast. When you're trying to put the ball into the basket you don't want a "twitch" in your action. You want sameness, predictability, reliability. Thus I recommend you take the wrist and hand out of the equation. Let the Release be just an arm thing, letting the arm-straightening action do the power work. The wrist and hand have the job of just keep the ball on line and then they let go. To tell if wrist and hand are involved in powering the shot, watch them after a shot. Are they tense or relaxed? If you flip your wrist, the hand cannot also bounce or flop. If you plan to flop or bounce the hand, you cannot also flip it. Try it and see if you can do both. On TV, you can't see what's happening in full speed, only in the slow motion replays. Most players today have been told to "flip their wrists" so they will have tight wrists and hands (and shoot flat and hot and be, at best, streaky shooters). But if you watch the few great shooters, you will usually see that the hand bounces or flops a little in the follow through. That's because they've figured out what I'm saying above: that those little muscles are unreliable. CHECK IT OUT YOURSELF I coached him some in my way of shooting, but it was hard for him to "get" my technique and relax his wrist and hand. We didn't have enough time to work on it. But he could see that his shot was not as relaxed, as high, as soft, as spin-beautiful and, ultimately, as predictable and repeatable as mine was. He agreed that, though he could do his method well, it was not a method that would be easy to teach to others. (He still plays basketball, by the way, at age 60! I was very impressed by that fact. I quit playing in 1975 and never got back into it, so lost the muscle tone needed to play this physically-challenging game, even at the slow pace older guys do. I wish I were still able to play a little.) ------------------------------------------------------------ Here's an answer to a question I was asked recently. Q: hey tom i got a question, can you have 2 intentions at the same time? for instance if i want to shoot earlier in my jump and i also want to make the shot .... can i have both of these intentions? or will one intention take over and i wont be able to do the other. in other words i can only focus on making the shot or shooting earlier or can i focus on both. i hope this made sense. thanx in advance for the reply. A: Good question. My answer is "Yes," but really it needs to be answered by yourself. Play with it. See what is your truth of the matter. THE OFFICIAL DEFINITION A DIFFERENT MEANING Here are some examples of what I mean. First, in the example you gave, if you use it in the dictionary way then you are determined to both make the shot and shoot earlier in the jump. There are two things you want to "DO." You might achieve both, you might achieve only one, you might get neither. Whichever intention is stronger will dominate. Usually, in something like this, the desire to perform well (to make the shot) will be the dominant intention. The "shooting earlier" will be used by the mind to try for the second intention, to make the shot. If you focus gets too strong on making the shot, it could imply "any way you can." You might shoot early, you might shoot late. Note that it is an act that you can fail at!!! The possibility of failure might inhibit your actions. In this case, shooting earlier in the jump is an easy thing to do compared with making the shot but probably isn't the strongest underlying desire. AS A POSSIBILITY, AS A GENERAL DIRECTION
WITHOUT THE HEAVINESS INTERFERENCE IS THE PROBLEM Determination implies to me a kind of "Wanting." E.g. -- I am determined to highjump 6 feet! I want to jump 6 feet high! My definition of wanting implies the possibility of "trying," of failure, of disappointment along with the possibility of success. However, if I "intend" to make the effort to jump over the bar at 6 feet rather than "want" it, it can inspire a marshalling of all the resources I have without the fear of failure, without the emotional baggage that goes with not achieving. The point is to change the definition, if you choose to do so. I don't know if this makes any sense to you. Play with it and see what you find out. Can you "intend" to do something, even two or more things, and let those intentions inspire and challenge you without any sense of worry or failure if you don't do them, or if you achieve them only partially. This is called "Detachment," detaching from the end result. Great performance happens more, I feel, in a state of relaxed concentration, in a state of trust and joy and love, and in a state of "possibilites" rather than "have to's." ------------------------------------------------------------ In my shooting clinics I'm aware that my way of coaching (asking the students to increase their own awareness of what's happening), can come across as "boring" to a lot of kids. This approach takes more time, and it requires the student to be more active in the learning process. Thus it isn't as easy as just listening to a bunch of words. I thought to say something about what might be going on in your head and suggest ways to increase the potential for learning. THE START IS EASY; SUSTAINING THE INTEREST
IS MORE DIFFICULT HOW YOUNG DOES THIS WORK FOR? OBSERVATION OF OTHERS IS VERY HELPFUL As you increase awareness, both of others and of your own shooting actions, you will learn. Learning can be very quick, and it can take varying degrees of time. A lot depends on your level of interest. Older people like your parents and your grandparents (and me) tend to get "set" in our ways and become slower learners. At young ages like you, kids can learn very quickly, and feel and awareness are part of that. MAKE THE EFFORT -- MINIMIZE THE DAYDREAMING ASK FOR EXAMPLES FOCUS, ASK QUESTIONS, TRUST YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE CHERISH THE THINGS YOU "GET" ENJOY LEARNING Enjoy your learning!!! ------------------------------------------------------------ I invite you to bookmark my Website (http://www.swish22.com) so you can go there easily to catch my latest comments on shooting. You can read about my video there (including endorsements, testimonials, reviews and an overview of the video), my coaching, and the many articles on shooting I've written. You can see video clips and archived back issues of this Newsletter and, of course, subscribe, if you're not already getting this on a regular basis. Please tell others about this newsletter, my site, and my video. Forward the newsletter to them and suggest they read it and the many archived issues. Send them the URL (http://www.swish22.com) and let them know there's a proven method for powerful shooting. ------------------------------------------------------------ As the season is upon us, few, if any,
clinics are being planned right now. If you'd like to organize some shooting
clinics or camps, contact me.
To SUBSCRIBE to this Newsletter, click
on the link below. The first option is to click on a link to Topica where they will ask you open a free account with them. This is okay to do, as they have good free mailings lists, discussion groups, etc., but I think most of you just want to subscribe to the newsletter. You do that most easily by the second option, just REPLYING to the email. That's all you need to do, no need to key anything. Click on this email -- it will start the subscription process: Subscribe. Remember to expect the Confirmation email. To UNSUBSCRIBE from this Newsletter, just
send a blank email to the following: ------------------------------------------------------------ |