Pressure Points

IF EVER a college basketball coach set himself up for a reckoning, John Calipari did one year ago this month. With his Memphis team in the midst of winning a single-season NCAA record of 38 games, the world chose to pick at the scab on an otherwise flawless complexion: the Tigers' inability to make more than 62% of their free throws. Calipari had his story and was sticking to it. "I'm not worried," he repeated, even wagering dinner with a call-in radio host. "We'll make 'em when it counts."

Calipari's Tigers famously didn't make 'em when it counted most. They missed four of five foul shots in the final 75 seconds of regulation in last April's NCAA championship game, permitting Kansas to force overtime and go on to win. But here's the thing: Calipari was worried, worried enough to try all sorts of things behind the scenes to remediate his team's results at the line. He adopted a variation of the tennis ladder, that country-club staple, to try to tap into his players' natural competitiveness. He fielded advice from old adversary John Chaney, the former Temple coach who once famously threatened to kill him. He even ordered the Tigers to stop practicing free throws altogether once the tournament began, substituting bedtime visualization. (Forget world peace; Coach Cal settled for 10 imaginary swishes in a row, from preshot routine to follow-through.) By March he was looking forlornly into an empty toolbox, like a Fed chairman who had already cut interest rates to zero. In the meantime, for public consumption, he kept repeating, "We'll make 'em when it counts," trying to build up his players' confidence. "It's a good message to send, that you have total faith when the time comes," says sports psychologist Jim Loehr.

But the failure of Coach Cal's guys to come through underscores both the outsized importance and confounding fickleness of the tournament-time free throw. Since the NCAA field expanded to 64 in 1985, only two teams have won a title shooting less than 66% from the line, and none with a free throw percentage below 62%. A National Association of Basketball Coaches' study found that, while foul shots account for about a quarter of the scoring in a typical game, winning teams score a full two thirds of their points in the final minute from the line, that place where, as former Texas coach Abe Lemons once put it, "you get to shoot unguarded."

Yet while every other act in the game is performed against defensive pressure, a free throw's very freedom can seem like psychological imprisonment—even more so when the shot takes place on the game's most public and pressurized stage. "It does not compute that you can be 30 or 40 percent from three-point range and only a 68 percent shooter at the line," says Loehr. "So the athlete begins to think about it. Where a pick-and-roll is instantaneous, time stands still during a free throw, and your mind can get active and interfere with what is a fine motor skill."

Regardless of whether the free throw is primarily mind or matter, over the next three weeks we'll impute an advantage to North Carolina, which not only shoots 76.3% but also reliably places the ball in the hands of two upperclassmen who shoot better than 80%: center Tyler Hansbrough, who has made more free throws than anyone else in collegiate history, and point guard Ty Lawson.

Usually, though, in the crucible of the game's final minutes, it matters less whether a team as a whole is accurate from the line than whether its guards are. Backcourt players shoot more than three percentage points better than their frontcourt counterparts, and a well-drilled team makes sure its guards handle the ball during a game's decisive moments. (Free throw shooting overall is demonstrably best at crunch time, with players sinking 72% in the final minute versus a meager 68% over the entire game—but that discrepancy is probably less the result of teams' delivering in the clutch than of their putting the ball into the hands of good foul shooters.) UCLA has the best free throw shooter in the field (box, page 44) in guard Darren Collison, who leads the nation at 91.2%, while swingman Josh Shipp sinks 78.5%; Texas will want to make sure that guards Dogus Balbay (45.0%) and Justin Mason (52.6%) yield to A.J. Abrams (84.0%) in a game's late stages.

OF COURSE, as the tournament progresses, we'll remind ourselves that brickitis at the line can be contagious. The two Memphis Tigers who missed those shots against Kansas, guards Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts, actually shot above 70% all season. Loehr calls the contagion of bad shooting "cascading energy," and points to the ritualistic touching of hands by players on the shooting team, after a make or miss, as an effective way to keep a negative outcome from spilling over.

We'll recall the episode that stood as last season's tournament cautionary tale until Memphis's Monday Night Meltdown. Forward Joe Alexander might have sent seventh-seeded West Virginia to the Elite Eight after forging a tie with third-seeded Xavier on an and-one turnaround jumper with 14 seconds to play. But as he strode to the line, Alexander took the bait of a boilerplate "You're gonna miss" taunt from Musketeers guard Stanley Burrell. Alexander replied with an expletive, took longer than normal preparing himself at the line and made Burrell a prophet. The Mountaineers lost 79--75 in overtime.

While Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim thinks it's a shopworn association left over from the days when Rony Seikaly and Derrick Coleman struggled at the line—the Orange shot 11 for 20 in their one-point loss to Indiana in the 1987 NCAA final, and Coleman missed what could have been a game-clinching one-and-one—we'll continue to regard any Syracuse free throw as an adventure. This season the Orange shot 9 for 18 in a loss at the buzzer to Cleveland State, and junior center Arinze Onuaku, who's shooting just 30.0%, went 10 for 60 during Big East play. If there's any consolation, it's Syracuse's 2--3 zone, which helps account for its opponents' collectively shooting just 17.0 free throws a game. (One advantage to that is that Orange players stay relatively free of foul trouble.)

Fourth-seeded Washington has had its troubles at the line, but it has learned from them. Last year the Huskies were the worst foul-shooting team in Division I, at 58.6%. Coach Lorenzo Romar couldn't indulge in any Caliparian rationalization, as his team finished below .500 and missed the NCAAs. A big culprit was 6'7", 260-pound center Jon Brockman, who beat a path to the line with his brutish style but sank only 51.9% once he got there. The main reason he's up to 64.9%—and the Pac-10 regular-season champs have soared to 69.9% as a team—is because of a drill introduced by assistant coach Jim Shaw. At the end of practice 13 Huskies gather around the key, alternating between two-shot fouls and one-and-ones, squeezing off their shots in turn until they combine to convert 19 of 26 one-and-ones or 20 of 26 two-shot opportunities (up from targets of 17 and 18 back in October). If the group fails to reach its goal, everyone starts over. At first the Huskies took up to 45 minutes to complete the exercise; now they finish in 10 minutes, max. It's critical that the drill not be introduced in January or February as a quick fix. "It's like an antibiotic you take," Romar says. "It builds up mental toughness over time. The numbers speak for themselves."