BYU's FT shooting wasn't as bad as it looks
 

Overall: 454 of 688 (66.0%)

Plaisted: 96 of 195 (49.2%) -- Plaisted took 28.3% of all BYU FT attempts

BYU, less Plaisted: 358 of 493 (72.6%)


The 50th ranked (out of 336) FT shooting team shot 72.9%, so BYU was just outside of that, in the absence of Plaisted's FT shooting.

So my point is that 12 of 13 guys collectively shot pretty well from the line, it's just that Plaisted was so awful and had so many attempts that it really dragged BYU's overall percentage down.

Plaisted's mechanics aren't perfect, but they aren't fatally flawed. A little work on getting his mechanics fine tuned will probably lead to better confidence at the line and that will in turn help his mental approach, which IMO is the biggest problem with him right now.

It must be mental because he was in the sixties during his freshman year.

I was dumbfounded when Plaisted kept making the front end and bricking the second freethrow.

It's usually the other way around. People make adjustments.

Everything about Plaisted's game screams "I am not mentally put together to achieve my potential." Rose is going to have to do something more than he's been doing.

I think Plaisted needs a lot of positive reinforcement right now. In other words, Rose needs to use the anti-MikeWaters approach with him.

I can only imagine what a tremendous frustration it must be to coach someone like Plaisted. You want men, you want people who improve and achieve, you want people who can sort through their own issues, and instead you end up with Greg Ostertag.

If Plaisted never gets much better, it's not fair to put that all on Rose. Some players are not terribly coachable.

Indy, you're a sly devil.

You know you can't take out BYU's worst free throw shooter and then compare them to a dataset that includes everyone else's worst free throw shooter. How bout you take out Keena and Trent both, then compare us.

BYU's free throw shooting stinks. Along with an improved D, it should be at the top of Rose's list.

The point is so freaking simple, Jay: does BYU have a problem with FT shooting from top to bottom?

The above data would show that it isn't as bad as a superficial glance at the team FT% would indicate. Generally speaking, a guy who is not named Shaq that takes the most FTs on his team (50 more than Keena) doesn't shoot 23% worse than the rest of the team as a whole.

If JUST PLAISTED improves their FT shooting to 70% and no one else changes ONE IOTA, is FT shooting a legitimate problem for BYU?

Who is interested in that question?

Last I checked, basketball is a team sport.

BYU appears to be lowly placed and many missed free throws appeared to impact recent game results.

It seems, and you can verify it, that there have been years when BYU excelled at free throw shooting. That doesn't seem to be an unreasonable expectation from BYU: to do well in FT.

You and I both know it's not that simple. An average like a FT shooting average always has a distribution with highs and lows. The NCAA has many teams shooting above 75% as a team. BYU should always be near the top. Certainly Plaisted was a major cause of poor FT shooting, but it's not just him.

None of our guards were above 80%. Broadus was a bad FT shooter. Balderson, Burgess, and Murdock were all in the 60's. AA's the kind of guy you expect to be a 90% shooter, and he was 74%.

It definitely is an area Rose needs to improve.