Basketball is usually a very dynamic sport,

but there comes a point in every game

when everything comes to a standstill.

Right here at the foul line for a free throw.

It's not a terribly difficult shot.

There's nobody guarding you,

you've got 10 seconds to aim and shoot.

The very best have career averages of around 90%,

that's over the course of thousands of official games.

But could that number go up?

Today, we're gonna look at why averaging 95%

from the foul line is almost impossible.

To find out what it takes, I shot with one

of the most consistent free throw shooters of all time.

Nice, there is is!

There we go.

Talked shot science with a dynamicist.

When you run these kinds of simulations,

you notice that there's an optimum angle,

which is actually the least effort angle.

[Robbie] And spoke with a cognitive scientist

about why even the best choke under pressure.

You can perform more poorly than expected precisely

because people are watching you,

or there's something on the line.

The free throw has been the same for decades.

It's 15 feet from the line to the basket,

which is a standard 10 feet off the ground.

The average free throw percentage for the NBA, WNBA,

and NCAA hovers around 70%,

but there are those players who can sink it time

after time, barely ever miss it.

The very best have career averages

of around 90%.

This player is one of them.

So we're here today with Steve Nash.

Steve is obviously a very talented basketball player.

I am not, right?

You've shot a ball a few times?

I did it for a long time.

Over the course of his career,

Nash toed the foul line 3,384 times,

and sank the ball 3,060 of those times.

His career record is the highest

of any retired pro at 90.43%.

He's gonna help us work on our free throw technique,

and see if we can't get a little better,

and also talk with us about what we think the upper limit

to free throw accuracy might be.

And I'm gonna kick his ass.

Also that.

So, got a little ritual here going.

Kicking my ass was not going to be difficult.

I'd barely touched a basketball in 20 years,

and I was rusty at the line.

Nash gave me some pointers on

how to shoot with my whole body.

Not bad, okay.

Let's try a few where you slow down a little bit,

you start at the bottom,

and you come up and shoot it all in one motion.

So your body comes up with the ball

and the ball releases before

or at the end of that motion.

[Robbie voiceover] Nash showed me his technique

for better shooting.

You know, I try to take all the extra movements

out of it, right?

And it's just swish.

One smooth, fluid motion.

One motion.

Yeah?

There's no strain.

There's no forcing.

There's no flicking at the rim.

It's a really smooth stroke if that makes sense.

So this is gonna sound like a dumb question,

but why can't people hit free throws all the time?

For exactly the reasons

that the best free throw shooters make 'em.

They probably don't have the best technique.

They probably don't take the most pride in it

or practice it as diligently as they should.

And then lastly some people emotionally,

especially if you haven't done the work,

it's gonna affect your technique more.

[Robbie Voiceover] One of the reasons Nash

was so successful was that he did the work

and he took pride in the shot

and he practiced a lot.

When I was younger, I would shoot a lot of them.

When I got older, I was just refining.

Sometimes it would be like 10 before practice,

10 after practice, 10 before the game

or maybe just a couple.

Just to refine it.

Get in that moment.

[Robbie Voiceover] Reproducibility is key.

To demonstrate why,

Nash and I each shot a series of free throws.

You can see here Nash had no problem sinking ball

after ball, after ball.

I, on the other hand, was throwing up bricks.

Lots of them.

Nash had given me great pointers

on how to perfect my technique,

but I wanted to know if the free throw

could be scienced into submission.

So I called up Larry Silverberg.

I'm a professor here at NC State.

I'm a dynamicist that means I study motion.

And I spend a lot of my time,

probably more time than I really should,

studying the motion of basketball.

[Robbie] Silverberg has written a number of papers

on the physics of the free throw.

To him it's an elegant problem.

It's a beautiful experiment.

You're not moving.

You just walk up to the line.

It's the same for every single player,

so you can actually look at the shot very scientifically.

[Robbie] What he's found is that players like Nash

incorporate four key parameters into their free throw.

First and foremost is the initial velocity of the ball.

The second thing is you have to line up the ball.

That ball has gotta go directly

toward the center of the hoop.

[Robbie] That second factor is called side angle.

You want to keep it as small as possible

to make the ball go straight.

The third parameter is a bit of backspin.

The backspin is very important.

It makes the ball land on the basket a little bit softer.

And more of a chance of the ball going in.

[Robbie] And then there's the ball's arc

which depends on your release angle.

When you run these kinds of simulations,

you notice that there's an optimum angle

which is actually the least effort angle.

That tends to be a release angle of about,

depending on your height,

of anywhere between 45, 46, and 53 degrees.

[Robbie] So not many players could tell you

what their release angle is but that may be changing.

While Nash and I shot,

we used an app he's helped develop called HomeCourt

which uses an artificial intelligence

to track and analyze basketball shots.

The app just released a new feature

that measures not only your makes and misses at the line,

but other metrics like release angle.

Our app is called HomeCourt AI.

It's a piece of technology, artificial intelligence

that can track not only your body movement

but also the flight of your ball, makes,

misses, arc, release time, angle, all those things.

So you were nine of 30 which is 30%.

Your best streak was two in a row.

It's really hard to be a great free throw shooter

but we gotta get you three, four, five.

Get some momentum, some confidence.

[Robbie Voiceover] How did Nash do?

Accuracy 100%. 34 out of 34.

Best streak was 34.

[laughing]

Release.

You're release angle range was only four degrees

so that means that the biggest difference you ever saw

in your release angle was just four degrees.

Right.

And mine was 20.

Yeah so that tells a lot, right?

I mean obviously, so this is such a great tool.

Makes and misses is only one part of the equation

but if I can see the variance

in your release angle is like wild

then we have a problem.

If I can see that it's tightening up

but you're not necessarily getting better

I still feel positive

because there's a breakthrough coming.

[Robbie Voiceover] Now before Nash had arrived,

I had actually shot just over 50%,

but shooting with one of the world's greatest point guards

is a little intimidating.

As soon as he showed up,

my percentage dropped by 20%.

I talk about it as paralysis by analysis.

You start paying too much to the details

of what you're doing in a way that's counterproductive.

[Robbie] That's Sian Beilock.

I'm a cognitive scientist

and I'm President of Barnard College at Columbia University

and I am an expert in why we choke under pressure

and what to do about it.

Pressure can affect the pros too.

Nash took well over 100 free throws with us.

He said that was more than he'd taken

since he retired in 2015.

And of those shots, he missed two.

It's been a while for me too.

That's greater than 98% accuracy

and yet over the course of his career,

he averaged closer to 90%.

And that's because performing in a game

is way different from performing in practice.

What we often forget is that it's important

to close this gap between training and competition.

And what I mean by that is practicing

under the kinds of conditions you're gonna perform under.

I think we've all had the experience

where we can hit that shot when no one's watching

or 50% of our free throws when no one's there

but when all eyes are on us we fumble

and so the idea is to get used to how we're gonna feel,

how our body's gonna react in that moment,

if we're gonna have important people come to an event

like our parents watching us play basketball.

Make sure that they're there

during practice at some point too

so we're not all of a sudden

entering a new situation when it matters most.

The free throw,

if you've done all your homework

and you have the right technique,

it becomes an ability to believe

and to cut out all the distractions

and put yourself back on the practice court

in the heart of a big moment.

[Robbie] To make the most of his shot,

Nash was always practicing even during games.

Before the referee gave me the ball,

I would take two, if I could,

practice shots without the ball.

That's like a rehearsal.

Yeah. Right.

So I got two practice shots in before I shot the ball.

I think sports psychologists say now

that even better than visualization

is actual physical recreation, you know.

Even without the ball.

[Robbie] Clearly I needed to practice

so I took HomeCourt with me to my local court

and shot, and shot, and shot.

Could I improve?

Could an amateur like me ever achieve NBA level accuracy?

Well this guy has.

All it takes to become good is three things:

knowledge, practice, and time.

[Robbie] This is Bob Fisher.

I'm like a million guys.

I played high school basketball.

I played recreationally til I was 44

and quit because young guys like you

just got too quick.

[Robbie] Except that about 10 years ago,

Fisher really started practicing free throws.

In September of '09,

I went to the gym and started going to the gym everyday.

After a month I noticed I was getting considerably better.

And then I started making 100 everyday in a row

and then I switched over to speed.

And four months later, January 10th,

I set my first record, most in a minute.

[Robbie] Today he has 25 Guinness World Records.

Most in 30 seconds with 33.

Most in a minute with 52.

Most in two minutes with 92.

Most in 10 minutes with 448.

[Robbie] You get the idea.

Fisher, a long time coach,

has also written a book

and made an instructional video

on how to shoot more accurately.

If you focus on the high point

of the ball and apply force,

control the high point of the ball

in relationship to the center of the basket,

it's gonna go straight.

[Robbie] Fisher is no NBA legend,

but his free throw percentage?

I made 99 out of 100.

So if a guy like Fisher

can sink the ball 99% of the time,

I should be able to put it in the basket

a little more often, right?

Now might be a good time to mention

that there's another way to shoot from the line

and that's underhanded.

One of the best practitioners

of this technique was Rick Barry.

Over the course of his career,

he average 89.31% from the line.

Rick Barry is obviously one of our all-time great players

and was unbelievable from the foul line underhand.

He swears that it's wiser to shoot 'em underhand.

[Robbie] Let's just say, it has its trade offs.

What happens in the underhand shot

is the body motion is very, very smooth.

It's inherently smooth.

There's just this single motion

from down low all the way up high

that can be committed to memory I think pretty easily

so it's easy to perfect.

On the other hand,

you do have a disadvantage

because you're releasing the ball low.

So you have this trade off

between releasing the ball low

and having smooth body motion.

The smooth body motion means that you can

become much more consistent at it.

I think there's something about the ball

starting down here and ending up there

that feels more awkward than finishing above your head,

but I can see how it would limit

some of the kind of extraneous and unnecessary movements

that creep in from time to time.

[Robbie] I'm gonna stick with the overhand.

In a week of shooting with HomeCourt tracking

and analyzing my shots,

I managed to increase my free throw percentage

from around 30% to 75%.

And my release angle went from

varying by more than 20 degrees

to varying by less than eight.

So I got better, but what about the pros?

With better practice and preparation,

could the pros edge the record even higher?

It turns out Steph Curry recently surpassed Nash's record,

but only by a couple hundredths of a percent.

The NBA in particular is in incredible demand.

Like you're traveling, changing time zones,

playing three games a week.

You may be carrying an injury.

To corral all these factors

is why we don't see someone

shooting high 90s or 100%.

Now is there gonna be some outlier that comes along?

Why not?

It's actually remarkable to me

that Steph isn't more of an outlier.

[Robbie] The real outlier is Elena Delle Donne

who plays for the WNBA's Washington Mystics.

Her career free throw percentage is a monstrous 93.4%.

But remember, neither she nor Curry has retired yet

so those records aren't set in stone.

So many games are decided at the free throw line today.

It's very possible that as we become more sophisticated,

more technological that a shift could take place

where some coaches might start to actually pay attention

to the free throw.

But until that happens,

remember that what players like Nash do at the line,

time after time after time is already almost impossible.

[upbeat music]

[Nash] We good?