5/3/2023 0 Comments Underhand throw granny style![]() Shooting underhand creates a slower, softer shot, because a two-hand shot, gripped from the sides of the ball, allows a player to impart more spin than a shooter launching the ball forward with one hand. There are physics behind the form as well. One argument in favor of shooting underhand, compared with traditional overhand, is that it requires less movement and is therefore easier to repeat. The NBA average this season is 76.6 percent. He led the NBA in free throw percentage the last three seasons of his career, topping out at 94.7 in 1978-79. In his professional career, Barry drained 89.3 percent of his free throws. “I hear this guy in the stands yell, ‘Hey, Barry, you big sissy, why are you shooting like that?’ The guy next to him, I remember hearing him so clearly as if it was yesterday, says to him, ‘What are you making fun of him for? He doesn’t miss.’ That’s the bottom the line. “My first time doing it, I was in Scotch Plains, New Jersey,” Barry said. 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 percent 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 percent 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 percent from the foul line – more than a 20 percent 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 percent. ![]() 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 percent 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 6-foot-9 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 National Basketball Association 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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