Free Throws Should Be Easy. Why Do Basketball Players Miss?

The mechanics of a perfect foul shot are known … but it takes a LOT of practice to get them right each and every time—even for two-time MVP Steve Nash.

The basketball arcs through the air and donks off the front of the rim. Steve Nash, who has met me at a court in Manhattan Beach on a cloudy Monday afternoon to shoot free throws, glances over and chuckles at his miss. "It's been a while," he says. When he retired from the NBA in 2015, Nash, a two-time MVP, left with a career average 90.43 percent from the line—the highest in league history. But he hasn't worked on his foul shot since. For an instant, I feel anxious for him. An uncomfortable thought enters my head: What if he's lost his touch?

It is a dumb thought.

Nash grabs his rebound and returns to the foul line. He tries again, running through the rhythmic, pre-shot ritual he's performed the same way, tens of thousands of times, for going on 30 years: He aligns his toes behind the foul line, his left foot a couple inches behind his right; bounces the ball three times; fixes his gaze on the basket; lowers his body into a deep and unshakably stable squat; breathes deep; then rises steadily, elevating his arms and exhaling an audible puff of air as he lofts the ball toward its target. That earlier shot, the miss, must have been some kind of calibration procedure: This time, the ball goes in. So does the next ball. And the ball after that. And the one after that. For the next 90 minutes, Nash and I take turns shooting from the foul line. I miss more than I make. Of his more than 100 attempts that follow, Nash hits all but one.

For decades, elite players in the NBA, WNBA, and NCAA have averaged between 70 and 75 percent from the foul line. Most of basketball's sharpest shooters top out in the high eighties, with Nash being one of only two NBA players to retire with a career average above 90 percent. His consistency at the line raises some questions: For starters, why isn't everyone else better? But also: If Nash can show up unpracticed, four years after retirement, and drain 98 percent of his free throws in an impromptu shootout against a ham-handed journalist, what kept him from shooting that reliably during his career?

On paper, the free throw could not be more straightforward. It's a direct, unguarded shot at a hoop 18 inches across, 10 feet off the ground, and 15 feet away. Like a carefully controlled experiment, the conditions are exactly the same every single time. Larry Silverberg, a dynamicist at North Carolina State University, has used this fact to study the free throw in remarkable detail. "It's the same for every single player, so you can actually look at the shot very scientifically," he says.

An expert in the modeling of physical phenomenon, Silverberg has examined the physics of the free throw for 20 years, using computers to simulate the trajectories of millions of shots. His findings show that a successful free throw boils down to four parameters: the speed at which you release the ball, how straight you shoot it, the angle at which it leaves your hand, and the amount of backspin that you place on it.

Shooting at a consistent speed is the most important skill, and it’s the toughest to master. "It's a kinesthetic problem," Silverberg says. To dispatch the ball the same way every time requires a player to commit to memory the smooth, coordinated movement of multiple limbs and joints, from their knees, elbows, and wrists to the tiny points of articulation in their fingers and toes.

Shooting straight is the second most important parameter, and it’s easier to pick up. Silverberg calls it a geometric problem—one that, for most people, involves keeping their shooting elbow tucked and the ball correctly positioned in their hand, in relation to the hoop.

The other two elements—release angle and backspin—are less critical, but still important: The ideal rate of spin is three backward rotations per second, which, incidentally, is about how long it should take the ball to make the trip from a player's hand to the hoop. (That spin buys you some wiggle room, in the event you over- or under-shoot.) The best angle of trajectory is between 46 and 54 degrees from the horizon, depending on your height. The most advantageous release angle for a given shooter also corresponds to their lowest launch speed—a relationship that helps explain why shots that go in often feel like they require less effort than shots that don't. As Nash describes it: "There's no strain, there's no forcing, there's no flicking at the rim, there's just a really smooth stroke."

Surprisingly, Silverberg says there's very little separating players like Nash from those who average 75 percent from the line. The latter, in fact, are often plenty consistent—they're just consistent at the wrong things. That's actually good news, Silverberg says, because it suggests that sharpshooters are made, not born. Getting a player to shoot not just consistently but properly has little to do with their inborn talent or athleticism, and almost everything to do with hard work.

That might explain why the best free throw shooter on earth isn't a pro basketball player, but Bob Fisher, a 62-year-old soil-conservation technician from Centralia, Kansas.

By his own admission, Fisher is no standout athlete. "I'm like a million guys," he says. "I played high school basketball, and I played recreationally till I was 44." A few years later, in his early 50s, he started practicing free throws every day at his local gym. That was September 2009. Within a couple of months he was consistently sinking more than 100 shots in a row. In January 2010 he set his first world record. Since then, his speed and accuracy from the foul line have garnered him an additional 24 Guinness titles.

Fisher happily shares the secrets to his success. He attributes his accuracy and precision to something he calls the centerline technique (it involves aligning the lower palm and middle finger with the rim of the basket), the details of which he has recounted in a book and instructional video. His consistency he attributes to preparation. For years, Fisher has spent hours a day refining his shot. "All it takes to become good is three things: knowledge, practice, and time," he says.

But even the pros don't have hours a day to practice free throws. There's more to basketball than foul shots, after all. The average free throw percentage across the NBA, WNBA, and NCAA could almost certainly increase, Silverberg says, but it probably won't. Not unless coaches make it a priority by hiring personal trainers to work with all of their team members individually, or equipping players with new shot-tracking tools that allow them to practice on their own.

Those tools—which used to be expensive and cumbersome to operate—are becoming a lot more accessible. While Nash and I shot, we used an augmented reality app he helped develop called HomeCourt, which uses machine vision and AI to analyze basketball shots and body position. The app tracks not only makes and misses, but things like how much you bend your knees and how much arc you put on the ball. The reasoning behind it is that players who practice with feedback will improve more quickly than those who practice blindly.

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I trained with HomeCourt for a little over a week. In that time, I boosted my free throw percentage from an abysmal 30 percent to a passable 75. Was it the app or the practice? Hard to say. But with HomeCourt, I was able to monitor my improvement much more closely than I would have without it. The biggest change was in the consistency of my release angle. When I started out, it often varied by more than 20 degrees: I'd release one shot at 38 degrees and the next shot at 60. After a week, I had tightened my variance to just 6 degrees, and I was averaging close to an optimum release angle of 54 degrees.

Here's the thing: Could I average 75 percent in a game? Probably not. Nash told me he almost always shot better in practice than he did in competition. So do most people.

"I think we've all had the experience where we can hit that shot when no one's watching, but when all eyes are on us we fumble," says cognitive scientist Sian Beilock, president of Barnard College and author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. Beilock attributes those mistakes to something she calls paralysis by analysis: When a player overthinks a task, it interrupts the working memory they've establish through hours of practice. Remember the hyper-coordinated movements required for releasing a free throw shot at a precise speed? They're exactly the kind of thing that overanalysis tends to screw up. Closing the gap between training and competition, Beilock says, is a matter of practicing under conditions that simulate high-pressure scenarioses: Training under a watchful eye, or competing against the clock.

With better practice and mental preparation, basketball's very best shooters could, in fact, edge the all-time record higher. They're already beginning to. Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors' star sharpshooter, recently unseated Nash as the league's all-time free throw leader, edging him out by a couple hundredths of a percent. But the real phenom at the foul line is WNBA player Elena Delle Donne, small forward for the Washington Mystics. A career 93.4 percent free throw shooter, Delle Donne is an outlier among outliers. But she, like Curry, is still early in her career. Whether either will retire as the all-time free throw leader remains to be seen.

Until then, Nash reigns supreme. Watching him shoot is akin to watching a stunningly elaborate automaton at work, his body moving with an exactness more reminiscent of clockwork than a fallible human being. At one point in our afternoon together, he homes in so precisely on his target that he stops having to move to retrieve the ball; instead, time after time, it descends through the rim in such a way that the fwip of the net sends it bouncing back to him, as if by magnetic force.

Does it ever get boring, I ask, making so many in a row? "No," Nash says, sinking another shot. He says he takes pride in it. Derives confidence from it. "Honestly," he says, "I find it meditative."

So no. He hasn't lost his touch.

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