Cards shot 18-22 against Wake. Can't get much better than that.
Really dude you haven't watched this team shoot free throws all year have you?
s more of the same in the second half at UNC. Those misses added up to a 4-of-13 performance from the free-throw line by Louisville, a team that could not afford to miss scoring opportunities during a 74-63 loss that all but extinguished Louisville's chances of winning an ACC regular-season title.
For Louisville, it wasn't anything new. This has been a trying season from the free-throw line, and it has been the latest in a long run of poor free-throw shooting teams over the past 16 seasons. The Cards have made 68.4 percent of their free throws, a figure that ranks 231st in major college basketball and stands as the eighth time in 10 campaigns that U of L has shot worse than 70 percent from the foul line.
That percentage is falling by the game: Louisville is 204 of 306 from the charity stripe in ACC play, with the 13th-worst percentage (66.7) in the 15-team league.
How does that happen to a team that is shooting 46.2 percent from the field in league play, the fifth-best percentage among ACC teams?
How can a good shooter struggle shooting free throws?
"In a big-picture way, it's mechanics, not mental," said Gary Boren, the Dallas Mavericks' free-throw shooting coach who has been consulting college and professional coaches on free-throw shooting for two decades. "It's all individual, one on one: 'This guy's doing six or eight things wrong, this guy's only doing five things wrong,' but they're different."
This late in the season, with Louisville (22-6, 10-5 ACC) 28 games into its 31-game regular-season slate, it'll be hard for much to change, Boren said. Practicing and improving at free throws requires time and persistent effort, and that work starts the first day of the offseason.
"Some of these things are really hard to change," Boren said. "They've already done it wrong for thousands and thousands of shots (through a playing career). Muscle memory is locked in. Even if they want to change, it's hard to. It's certainly not an overnight proposition."
That doesn't bode well for U of L, which has hopes of making a run in the ACC tournament and returning to the Final Four for the third time since 2012.
Louisville does a lot of things well – it has a low turnover rate and a high rebounding percentage on offense and plays some of the best defense in the country – but consistent free-throw shooting can be the difference between a close loss and a close win.
"The good thing about free throws is that it's something you can work on," said Donovan Mitchell, who added that he took Ray Spalding to the gym to work on their foul shots as soon as they landed in Louisville after the loss at UNC.
Boren, seeking statistical evidence to prove the importance of free-throw shooting, recently asked the Mavericks' analytics department to comb through every regular-season and postseason NBA game over the past four seasons and find out how many games were within three points with less than a minute to play.
The answer surprised him: In each of the past four NBA seasons, more than 31 percent of regular-season games fit into that statistical category. The postseason numbers were similar.
At the college level, free-throw shooting is even more important because of the one-and-one rule. In 15 ACC games, Louisville has missed 18 front-end free throws in one-and-one situations.
"It's huge," Boren said. "All you have to do is look at the box score the next morning and these teams that have all these attempts – (U of L) had 30 attempts (at Syracuse) and only made 16? That's a whole bunch of points left on the table."
Is there a short-term solution for Louisville? More practice will help, Boren said, but only if it involves tweaking mechanics, something Pitino says he and his staff work on with their players.
Arc is the key starting point for a good foul shot, Boren said. Many players who struggle with foul shooting have flat-line shots.
Whatever the issue with Louisville's players, they don't have much time to figure it out. But it's important that they at least chip away at it. Those valuable points could be the difference between meeting high postseason expectations and, as Pitino put it,
going on an early vacation.
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