One-handed master: San Antonio rookie Jeremy Sochan’s weird fix for free throw woes

Then Sochan found a fix — in the form of one of the stranger tactics to grace a professional basketball floor recently.

The change came in a mid-December game between the Spurs and the Houston Rockets, when Sochan stepped to the line at the end of the first quarter. Instead of using his normal stroke, with his left hand supporting the ball as he launched it with his right, Sochan hoisted it up from his waist with his right hand alone. He then held it at shoulder height, in waiter-with-platter posture, and spun it up toward the rim.

There were no immediate dividends — Sochan missed that first free throw and went 1-for-4 overall from the foul line against the Rockets — but the debut was a blip in what has since proven to be an astonishing statistical turnaround. Over 26 games since the switch, Sochan has improved his free-throw percentage by more than 30 points, to 77.5%. The technique gets him sideways looks. It may also save his career.

The idea came from Gregg Popovich, the Spurs’ five-time champion head coach, and assistant Brett Brown, who approached Sochan during the pregame shootaround and suggested he try the new routine right away. “They were smiling when they said it, so I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” Sochan said. When they insisted that they were, the rookie quickly got over his hesitation. “I’m already shooting 40-something per cent, so I don’t think it can get any worse than that,” he said, and flashed his own gap-toothed grin. “So why not?”

Sochan’s reworked free-throw stroke mimics a practice-floor regimen Brown assigned him at the start of the season, intended to break a shot down into component parts. Taking the left hand away forced Sochan to centre his right arm under the ball, and once he did, Brown noticed that every other element — balance, left-right precision, arc — clicked into place.

“The thing that was most apparent when he shot one-handed at the free-throw line, he not only made it, it looked fundamentally damn near perfect,” Brown said.

Taken alone, the boost provided to San Antonio by Sochan’s higher hit rate is marginal. Sochan shot one free throw a night, on average, before the switch, and has shot 2.7 since. The accuracy uptick means that the Spurs get about a point and a half more out of his trips to the stripe than they did before. Unsurprisingly, that margin hasn’t made much difference to their present fortunes; the team is 14-47 and has lost its last 16 games.

But for a young player and rebuilding franchise, the benefits extend beyond specific box scores. Sochan — a 19-year-old whirlwind with rangy athleticism, an ever-updated dye job, and the nickname “The Destroyer” — plays at full-bore, driving hard into the lane to drop off short-angled passes or launch himself through defenders for dunks. The approach is the kind that can animate an ascendant team, but is also susceptible to a scaling back, if the player carrying it out frets over trips to the foul line.

“There needs to be a mentality that you’re just dying to get there,” Brown said. “He’s been excellent at attacking. He doesn’t fear going to the free-throw line at all.”

NBA history offers warnings of what can happen when that fear creeps in. The most notorious may be Ben Simmons, who entered the NBA as the top draft pick in 2016 with a supercharged version of Sochan’s skill set. Simmons’s free-throw percentage never rose above 62, though, and his career has been marked by a decreasing willingness to go to the basket. This year, Simmons’s first with the Brooklyn Nets, he is shooting worse than ever from the foul line. His field-goal attempts and scoring numbers — 6.9 points per game — are also at career lows, and teammates have on occasion had to beg him to assert himself on the court.

Though basketball players have been hampered by free-throw struggles since the first stripe was painted on hardwood, they have been willing to go only so far to solve them. The Hall-of-Fame guard Rick Barry, who made 89% of his free throws in the ABA and NBA in the 1960s and ’70s, has bemoaned the scarcity of players copying his iconic underhand form. Wilt Chamberlain made more than 60% of his free throws only once in his career, when he adopted the “granny shot” technique during the 1961-62 season. He dropped the approach shortly thereafter because, as he would later write, it made him feel “silly.”

Helpfully, Sochan has an appetite for the unorthodox. “One of his strengths is, he doesn’t care about what the outside world might think,” said Scott Drew, Sochan’s coach during his one college season at Baylor, where he shot 59% from the line. “The fact that someone would make fun of something, that it’s unique or different, would prohibit it for some players.”

Popovich has said that Sochan shows courage in being willing to try the one-hander. Even switching hands altogether is more common; the big men Tristan Thompson and Mason Plumlee have both done so in recent seasons. But Sochan himself considers the shot a mark of self-expression, as distinguishing as his green-then-pink-then-blond hair. “It just shows who I am,” he said. “I think it’s cool.”

In a game against Phoenix on January 28, Sochan offered the clearest glimpse yet of what he might eventually become as an NBA player. He scored a career-best 30 points — by way of bruising lay-ins, a smattering of jump shots, and one thunderous jam — to go along with eight rebounds and five assists. The excellence of his all-around box score might have made one particular stat go unnoticed, were it not for how he tallied it. Sochan made all five of his free throws.

– Wall Street Journal