Riffing off the review post from a few days ago, I've been thinking more about why Clemson FT shooting has been so bad for so long, when just about every other statistical aspect of Clemson’s play has improved rapidly or gradually under Oliver Purnell. In fairness, he inherited a pretty lousy group of free throw shooters so it’s not like he had a lot to work in the beginning.
Let’s think this through—when he arrived at Clemson, we know he went out and recruited athletic guys who could play solid defense. This is likely due to the high premium on offensive talent; schools with lousy reputations are going to end up fending for sub prime offensive talent scraps. For all the free-marketeers out there, Purnell was exploiting a classic example of a market inefficiency. We all know it takes both a good defense and offense to win championships, so why not start building the less expensive necessity first? You’ll get it done much faster.
So in signing a bunch of athletic guys who lack much of a shooters’ touch, Purnell has to know the team is going to struggle at the line. So why not more FT shooting practice? Well, here’s the thing—there’s a limited number of hours the team can hold practice. Is it worth spending the time to bring, say, a 58% shooter up to a 63% shooter or is it worth more to implement a new defensive scheme, or tighten up an existing one? This is a decision he most certainly had to weigh at some point, and I think from the results we can infer he went with the latter. I’d have to say he made the right choice; the cost in terms of practice time to bring a team lacking pure shooters up a few FT percentage points has to be enormous, particularly when weighed against the value that could be derived from using the time to improve other areas.
Now, I’m sure Purnell encouraged everyone to practice on their own time, particularly in the offseason (I imagine the strides Booker has taken comes from this) but these are (responsible) college students with a lot of things on their plates—schoolwork, social life, girls, in some cases families. So yeah, its not entirely surprising that improvement didn’t come over the years. Improvement has finally come because now Purnell is in the position to attract superior athletes that can play defense and shoot the ball.
Looking back, I can now see Purnell basically giving lip service to the media at the beginning of each year, promising a better FT shooting team all the while knowing that real improvement was X number of years away. I don’t say this to criticize Purnell, I mean, what is he supposed to say? Every sports journalist/broadcaster in the country would tear him to shreds if he admitted to intentionally running out a 59% FT shooting team because he thought it was the best way to try and win games.
This is all speculation, of course, but if it’s true—think about it for a second. Clemson has a coach willing to buck conventional wisdom (or put more strongly, commit basketball blasphemy) because he thinks it will help the team win more games. And you know what? Looking back it’s hard to argue he wasn’t right. It’s strange to say it, but it turns out that years of crappy FT shooting are just another example of why Purnell is a really intelligent basketball coach, and why Clemson basketball is headed in the right direction.
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