Are Detroit’s Upcoming Hires Meant To Avoid Hack-A-Drummond?
By Ti Windisch
According to Detroit Free Press, Detroit Pistons head coach and president Stan Van Gundy is planning to hire a couple of new specialists to help his team in the upcoming season.
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It’s important to note that these are not assistant coaches per se and it doesn’t seem like anyone currently under SVG is set to be fired; it seems more like these new hires are meant to be supplementary to the staff already in Detroit.
The first new staff member incoming is supposedly a “sports performance specialist,” meant to help with focus and to “help players overcome mental hurdles.”. Although it wasn’t stated specifically, it would seem that free throws are the most obvious candidate for a basketball skill that requires focus and is often only held back by mental hurdles.
Most bad free throw shooters aren’t terrible athletes, and some of them have a smooth release. They just get caught up in the moment at the charity stripe and biff. An example of this would be the atrocious Hack-A-DeAndre that’s been happening in the first two rounds of the NBA Playoffs to Los Angeles Clippers star DeAndre Jordan.
I highly doubt Jordan refuses to work on his free throws or is too poor of an athlete to make a basket; sometimes nerves can just throw you off.
The performance specialist is not the only hire Van Gundy plans to make, however. According to the report, the Pistons will also be bringing in a shooting coach for next year. So one coach to work only on shooting form, and one to work specifically on mental aspects of the game.
It’s almost as though the Pistons also have a center they don’t wish to see hacked repeatedly in close games due to his poor free throw shooting.
Oh that’s right, they do. Detroit’s franchise cornerstone is center Andre Drummond, and Drummond is lucky the Pistons didn’t make the postseason this year. He’s actually a worse free throw shooter than Jordan this season, which is pretty bad considering Jordan comes in at 39.7 percent from the free throw line.
Teams would’ve definitely sent Drummond to the line in close games, and barring a random and dramatic turnaround it would not have been pretty for Andre.
Even if Van Gundy isn’t worried about Hack-A-Drummond just yet, it still makes sense to want to work on Drummond’s awful percentage from the charity stripe. Those are quite literally free points that Andre essentially throws away by missing so many foul shots, and it does more than just lower his points per game. It also has an adverse effect on Drummond’s field goal percentage.
Not directly; missed free throws don’t count against a player’s percentage from the field like other missed shots do. But if defenses know a big center like Drummond can’t make two free throws to save his life, they’re going to foul him more than they otherwise could.
Think about it, would you rather make a 38.9 percent foul shooter try and make both foul shots or let him get a quality shot off close to the basket?
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Let’s do some math. Andre Drummond shoots just better than 50 percent from the field. If Drummond takes 10 shots from the field, he will score 10 points (on average). He makes about half, and each is worth two points. If he gets 10 trips to the line (we’ll assume they’re not and-ones, so 20 free throws), he scores less than eight points.
That means any shooting foul on Drummond that isn’t an and-one or on a really tough shot is a smart defensive decision by the numbers. If I can figure that out by using a single screen on basketball-reference and the calculator on my iPhone, you can bet NBA analytics departments are well aware of it as well. Thus we see a gaping flaw in Drummond’s impending superstardom.
Unless this free throw problem can be fixed, that is. I like these hires from Van Gundy. In the modern NBA you do what works, not what’s conventional. LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers do yoga instead of practicing before playoff games sometimes. Amar’e Stoudemire bathes in wine. The point is, you do what you’ve got to do to be as good as you can be.
And for Drummond, he can’t be as good as he can be if he can’t make his free throws. It affects the rest of his game, and I know no Pistons fans want to see their star player forced to shoot a couple dozen free throws on national television when everyone watching knows he won’t make more than a handful of them.
Hopefully for Detroit these new specialists can have Drummond at least break 50 percent from the line, or he won’t be able to live up to his full potential.
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