![]() ![]() “They’re gonna make fun of me.” But he ultimately decided results mattered more. You don’t really like to do things guys aren’t receptive to.”īarry resisted, too, when his father instructed him to use the form in high school. “Everything was considered,” Pistons Coach Stan Van Gundy said. And yet he has refused to attempt an underhand free throw. This off-season, he vowed to try anything, including virtual reality training. “He never had the guts to do it when he went back to the team.”ĭrummond is the Detroit Pistons’ best player, but his dismal, NBA-worst free throw percentage - 35.5 per cent last year - sometimes causes coaches to pull him in late-game situations. “I had him shooting 80-90 in practice,” Barry said. Opponents intentionally foul mammoth bricklayers such as DeAndre Jordan, Andre Drummond and Dwight Howard, believing they will effectively steal a possession once the targeted player misses two free throws.īarry once tutored a poor NBA free throw shooter, whom he will not name, to shoot underhand free throws. His reason? “I felt silly,” Chamberlain wrote in his autobiography. “After I came out of it,” Chamberlain later joked, “the psychiatrist was a better free throw shooter than I was.”īut Chamberlain never reverted to the Granny-style form. He converted 51.1 per cent of foul shots in his career and tried everything to become better at making them overhand, even visiting a psychiatrist for a month. The next season, he went back to shooting overhand, with a form somewhere between a drunk throwing a dart and an overgrown child hurling a rock. Chamberlain made 61.3 per cent that season, including the night he sank 28 of 32 in his landmark 100-point game. His best season came in 1961-62, at age 25, the one year he utilized the underhand technique. He spent the season’s first two months with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, Houston’s NBA Developmental League affiliate, where he has shot 67.4 per cent from the foul line - more than a 20 per cent leap from his freshman season.įoul shots have vexed many of basketball’s greatest big men, most famously Wilt Chamberlain, who may have been the greatest. The Rockets selected Onuaku in the second round of last June’s draft. “I don’t really care what people think,” Onuaku told Sports Illustrated last year. When he returned to Louisville a sophomore, his percentage rose to 58.9 per cent. Onuaku debuted the form in Greece, while playing in an international under-19 tournament for Team USA, to snickering, bewildered teammates. After the season, Louisville Coach Rick Pitino showed him video of Barry shooting underhand and suggested he copy Barry’s technique. “Unfortunately, his technique leaves a lot to be desired.”Īs a freshman at Louisville, Onuaku made 46.7 per cent of his free throws. “I admire the fact he was willing to try to something different,” Barry said Tuesday in a telephone interview. The greatest Granny-style shooter of all time was less charitable about Onuaku’s form. ![]() ![]() Barry appreciates Onuaku’s commitment to improve in the face of possible derision. Or at least they had until Onuaku made his debut Monday night and made both free throws he attempted, shooting them underhand.īarry himself had studied Onuaku since last year, when he switched to shooting underhand as a college sophomore. Players uniformly resisted it, afraid of looking foolish, standing out as childish or unmanly. Onuaku, a six-foot-nine 20-year-old from Upper Marlboro, outside Washington, D.C., had broken a stigma, or at least shown he would not be victim of one.ĭespite evidence it can improve free throw shooting, especially for big men, the form has remained foreign from the NBA since Hall of Famer Rick Barry retired in 1980. They had witnessed the return of the “Granny-style” free throw, a relic unseen at the sport’s highest level in decades. What remained of the Toyota Center crowd erupted. Teammates cheered and pointed on the bench, stars made rapt during a walkover. Except Onuaku held the ball at his waist with both hands and hoisted the ball at the hoop in an underhand motion, his arms spreading apart. Making his NBA debut, Chinanu Onuaku of the Houston Rockets drew a shooting foul and stepped to the free throw line, typically the blandest portion of a game. In the waning minutes of a blowout victory Monday night, a largely unknown rookie unleashed a specific brand of momentousness. ![]()
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