Hacking-a-bad-FT-shooter
Personally, I don’t care so much about it, it never annoyed me that much. But thinking from the basketball perspective, the entertainment POV, I think the rule should change.
Sure, some idiot will say I’m biased just because the name is “L.A. Clippers Rater” and the Clippers have DJ but as I said, I could care less about whether the Clippers have a bad FT shooter or not, this is about basketball, moreover, I follow other teams as well.
Sh*t people say why it should change
Well, it should change because it makes basketball look bad, it’s quite the opposite from entertaining, it’s just terrible to watch. Nobody wants to watch a FT contest.
Yeah, Yeah, I get that but for me that’s not the reason you should change, it’s more than that, but first…
Sh*t people say why it shouldn’t change
You can’t change the rule just because some players are lazy and don’t train enough to become better FT shooters, there are X, Y and Z players that were able to improve, why can’t these guys train more?
The coaches are just following the rules, if it allows this strategy you can’t change just because a few guys can’t hit FT, it’s part of the game.
Because you are protecting the bad FT shooter, what kind of message you are giving to young kids? That you don’t have to work on your game?
That’s no different from a guy that can’t shoot well from the outside and you try to make him shoot bad from outside, or if a guy is turnover-prone and you put pressure on him, it’s all part of strategy. It’s no different.
- Lebron James
Let’s try to make some sense
Well, first of all, the “against” arguments are pretty sh*tty and full of fallacy. Fallacy is so charming and stupid, fallacies are for lazy brains. So I will start this by dismistifying the fallacies.
Players do train their FT. A couple of years ago the Clippers had two players with bad FT%, DJ, obviously, and Blake Griffin. They both trained after their normal training, they both had tips from the same coaching staff, mainly Bob Thate, the same guy that helped Jason Kidd going from a bad shooter into one of the top players in 3-pts made.
Blake started to improve and today is a decent FT shooter but DJ didn’t show the same improvement, they changed his shooting form several times and it never quite worked, at times his numbers even got worse. He kept working extra after normal trainings and at least during training his FT% was getting better but it wouldn’t quite translate into the game.
I think that since January DJ has been hitting around 50% of his FT, that should be enough to not harm the Clippers but not enough to stop it.
Do people really think that teammates and coaches would be ok with a guy that doesn’t train? Who would respect a player that doesn’t work on his weakness, even more one that is important to the team? Don’t people think that if a player was to behave like that somebody would already called him out about it? C’mon.
So, are there players that work hard and are able to improve their FT%? Yes. Are there players that train a lot and even so are not able to improve it? Yes.
It’s way too simplistic to say stupid things like “but he is a NBA player, it’s his job”, “I can hit more FT than him” or “it’s an open shot”. That’s so stupid and hypocritical. Basketball is much more than FT, it’s like demanding that every person in every job is great at everything, which is not true.
Players are not good at every aspect of the game, some are not good finishers, some can’t block shots, others are not good under pressure, everyone has their flaws.
What LeBron James said is too dumb. It’s nothing like forcing a player to shoot from outside or to pressure a guy into committing TO. There are ways to avoid having a bad shooter to shoot, there are ways to not let a bad ballhandler being the playmaker, hacking is nothing like that.
First because in all the situations LBJ showed, the players have the ball on his hands, so everyone would agree that fouling a bad FT shooter when he is completely away from the ball is VERY different from fouling him when he has the ball on his hands. THAT would be similar to the analogy that LBJ was trying to make, but in the end he compared apples and oranges.
Why teams and coaches hack?
That’s a very important question that somehow is forgotten by many when discussing the hacking strategy.
Coaches hack because either their team’s D is not good enough to stop the opponents’ offense and flow or because the player they are hacking is too good and they want him out.
So in the end, you are trying to explore a breach in the rules because YOU are not good enough. I could very well, use the same type of fallacy and say something like “is that the kind of message that you want to show to kids? When you are not good enough you just go there and find any means necessary to stop the other team, even if that’s not basketball?”.
Moreover, there should be other reasons as for why teams are using the hacking strategy like they are, because it’s kind of rare for the team using it end up winning the game when they are already down on the scoreboard. I mean, most of the games the Clippers were ahead before DJ being hacked, Clippers ended up winning the game anyway.
A couple of seasons ago, the broadcast team from the Clippers, Ralph Lawler and Mike Smith kept track of the hacking strategy effectiveness, I don’t quite remember the exactly number but if it ever worked it was only once, that if it even happened.
Let’s say that it worked once, with so many times it didn’t, the single time it might had worked was probably within the ordinary loss a team can get, so it means nothing.
Maybe it’s more psychological, be it for the player hacked or for the coaches. A player won’t ever say that they are affected by it, of course not, but we all know they are. Even if it hadn’t been proved to be effective, coaches probably think that if they are already down, it’s worth trying, even if it doesn’t actually translate into an actual W, this might get them a chance.
The truth is that a team rarely implements the hacking strategy because they are the ones dominating the game, most of the time it’s exactly the opposite. As they can’t overcome the opponent playing basketball, they use a strategy that has nothing to do with the game itself, except because it’s within the rules, so let’s talk about the rules.
Why the rules allow hacking?
Maybe that’s not even the right question but rather “why do the rules exist”?
People get lost in the “it’s in the rules, it’s part of the game” argument that they lose sight of the actual purpose of the rule and that’s when you lose sense of things and do it simply because the rules say so — and that’s plain stupid.
So let’s start with a simple question: were the rules made to measure how good a player can shoot FT? If your answer is “no”, then changing the rules have nothing with protecting a bad FT shooter.
The rules exist so a team that is fouling excessively can be punished by that instead of taking advantage of that. The rule is also made to make the game more interesting because you add another layer to it. If a team is on the Bonus, the opponent can be more aggressive on offense and earn some points exploring the defense, forcing players to be more careful and that’s completely within the game. On the other side, it also brings some balance to it since when on the Bonus, it’s worth fouling a player that is a bad FT if he is about to make a basket.
These are some of the reasons of why the rule exist, this was never meant to be used the way it has been used — most notably this current season. Hacking is actually a subversion of the rule, it’s like a loophole coaches found when a player was too dominant.
Is hacking strategy a basketball play?
It famously started against Shaquille O’Neal. Shaq was simply too dominant and coaches found a way to explore his wbad FT shooting. Recently it came back with Dwight Howard, then DeAndre Jordan but now it’s used on a whole different level.
Several other players have been hacked, the number of FT increased drastically, teams are even burning their fouls right in the beginning of quarters to get in the Bonus so they can implement the hacking strategy right away. There are even new tweaks to the strategy, like the one Doc used against the Pistons this season.
Reddick jumped into Drummond’s back and piggybacked him to foul, stop the clock and ensure that a bad FT shooter would be the one shooting the FT and you can say that this was key for the Clippers and also that this was already copied and replicated. This is a grey area since by the rules fouling in a rebounding situation is a loose ball foul but this just show how the hacking strategy has evolved.
I think that it will be hard to avoid the fouls when a player is considered as part of the play — like when screening or fighting for a rebound — but at least you will be able to avoid the ugly part.
Hacking is not really basketball, it’s a breach in the rule. It’s also hurting the game, the flow of the game, most fans don’t like it, it makes the game longer when the NBA is trying to make it shorter, it became a mockery and the tendency is to get worse.
How to solve this issue?
That’s the hard part and I’m sure that as I write here, there are some people from NBA working on it.
Initially I thought that you could tweak the interpretation of another rule to solve this. There is the rule about when a player is fouled and he initiates a shooting motion when he hears the whistle, but it’s not considering a shooting foul because supposedly that’s not a shot the player would normally take, he did so only because he was fouled and wanted to get some freebies.
What if, when a player is hacked without the ball, the player with the ball shoots the ball from whatever place he is and that is considered a shot? In this case, the player would be able to shoot FT and it wouldn’t be worth hacking after the opponent is already aware of it.
But players can foul even before the ball is inbounded and there is no way you can shoot before that, so I think this wouldn’t work. Plus, team would start to mask when going for a hacking foul, it would only get more sophisticated instead of actually solving the issue.
But there are some interesting solutions to this.
One is that the team that has been hacked has the option to either take the FT by whoever was fouled or to negate the FT and instead receive the ball back out of bounds.
You could use the same foul rule, so if the foul is commiteed under 14s, the clock gets back to 14s. This way the team wouldn’t be able to foul just to stop an on going play and burn some clock through the hacking strategy.
This would probably solve the hacking without changing the game too much, if the team gets the ball back as if nothing had happened, there is no real gain by the hacking strategy.
At first this looks like a nice solution.
I think that another solution would be to allow one or two “hacking foul” per quarter and after that you adopt the same rule as the last 2 min of the game, so you shoot FT and get the ball back.
Similary to that in the sense you are still allow hacking, there could be a way that you can do it but in exchange for something, for instance, if you do hack, you have to burn a 20s time out, if you do it again, you’ll lose a full time out, if you insist or don’t have any time out, it’s FT plus the ball back to the hacked team.
Or you could implement it all together, there is one hacking foul per quarter and after that, you have to burn time outs until the rule of the last 2 min.
Although the first option seems quite effective, I think that the second option is a middle ground between now and then, which would cause less controversy between those that don’t want the rule to be changed.
You can still hack and send guys to the line even when they are not part of a play, but it works like a gamble, if you think it’s worth it, you still have the option to do it. Nonetheless, the numbers of hacking fouls would certainly decrease a lot, and it would be used only on extreme situations, which should be ok.
I think these are pretty good suggestions and I hope that whatever Adam Silver and the league decide todo, it’s a well-thought change that doens’t allow more loopholes for some even more sophisticated strategy.
The change is coming
It’s pretty clear by now that changing the rule is inevitable, the hacking strategy is so wide spread that there is no more hiding from it. it has been used much more than any other season and there is no sign that this will decrease without a change in the rule.
It has been debated during NBA games broadcast, on interviews with coaches, players, etc. Regardless if there is a consensus or not, it’s clear that too many FT became a hot topic and you can’t avoid it any longer.
I think that the change should be announced before the next season and ideally, it should be ready before the Summer League.
I would assume that they are already working on that right now, so they should have a few months to make it well-oiled. And they better not screw that up, if not, it would be quite embarassing for the NBA to create another breach to be explored in the future.
