Five questions about The Big 5,000
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A career 52.5 percent free-throw shooter, Shaq is up to a less gruesome 58.7 percent this season.
Clang! Doink! Boing! Rat-a-tat-tat!
It's been an amazing career for
Shaquille O'Neal in most respects, but hanging over it is the specter of his greatest weakness -- free-throw shooting. The Big Brick has made only 52.5 percent of his career attempts, the second-worst percentage among those who have attempted 5,000 free throws or more, and rivaling Wilt Chamberlain (51.1 percent) for the cellar. Oddly, he has become worse with age, missing more than half his shots for five straight seasons before squeaking by at 51.3 percent a season ago.
Shaq's tragic flaw will loom a little larger in the coming days, because he's closing in on an amazing milestone. With eight more misses, he'll become just the second player in history to miss 5,000 free throws; at his 2008-09 rate of 2.7 misses per game he'll hit the mark in his next three games -- perhaps even on Christmas Day against San Antonio and coach Gregg Popovich, who has a penchant for the Hack-a-Shaq strategy. Only Wilt Chamberlain has bricked more, and he played in the turbo-charged '60s when the pace was much, much faster than it is today (see chart).
Mind you, this only includes regular-season games. In the playoffs, Shaq has bricked another 1,131 free throws, more than doubling every other player in history except Chamberlain. Despite his claim that he makes them when they count, he's actually significantly worse in the postseason (50.1 percent) than the regular season (58.1 percent) -- the low point came when he helped Miami to its only title despite shooting 37.4 percent during the playoffs.
To put 5,000 missed foul shots in perspective, consider that it's nearly 50 percent more than any other player in history save for Chamberlain. The next player on the list,
Karl Malone, went to the line more often than any other player in history but is 1,591 misses behind Shaq; to miss 5,000, he would have had to shoot 62.1 percent instead of his 74.2 percent career mark.
Or consider that Shaq has
missed more free throws than Hall of Fame center Bob Lanier
attempted, and also is closing in on inductees Bob McAdoo, Nate Thurmond, Bill Russell and
Robert Parish. With reasonable health, he'll catch all of them by the time his contract expires at the end of next season.
So in tribute to Shaq's 5K milestone, and with a big assist from the ESPN Research team, let's tackle our own big 5 -- the five biggest questions on Shaq's free throws:
1. Anyone else who might miss 5,000?
To hit 5,000 requires a confluence of two skills at historic levels -- the ability to get to the line, and the inability to convert once there. A player needs to miss more than 300 free throws a season to get there within the time frame of a reasonably long NBA career; that, in turn, requires him to get to the line at least eight times a game, since even the worst foul shooters in history make about half their attempts.
Eight attempts per game is an amazingly high standard -- only nine players average that many this season, and they would have to keep it up for another 15 years or so before they would have enough attempts to rival Shaq.
Nonetheless, at least two players have enough going their way in terms of attempts, misses and youth that they could plausibly catch Shaq in free-throw misses.
The first is an obvious one:
Dwight Howard. The imposing Orlando center has already misfired 1,142 times, and at just 23 he has plenty of time left to get the remainder. He's making up ground fast, too, by missing 5.0 free throws per game this year.
At that rate, he'll shatter Shaq's mark, not to mention Chamberlain's. Howard would hit the 5,000 plateau by the time he was 32, and presumably have several years of wayward shooting left to pursue greater heights.
Of course, the key phrase is "at that rate." Howard needs to continue both drawing foul shots and missing them at a prodigious rate in order to move up the charts. It's possible, especially considering that his free-throw-attempt rate has gone up every year while his marksmanship has stayed in the high 50s, but if Howard pulls a Malone and gets better from the stripe with age, he'll fall well short.
Howard's example makes it seem easy, but to show how hard it would be to get to 5,000 misses for most players, consider
LeBron James. He gets to the line more than almost anybody else, averaging more than 10 foul shots a game last season, and is one of the game's least accurate stars at 73.3 percent for his career; additionally, he started playing at 18 and has time on his side in a major way in terms of pursuing career records.
Even so, at his rate of the past two seasons, James wouldn't clear the 5,000-miss mark until he was 42 years old. And if his early-season improvement to 79.6 percent from the line this year holds up, you can kiss even those slim odds goodbye.
2. All-time team of players with fewer than 5,000 FTAs?
The example above dovetails into another discussion of what an amazing feat it is to miss 5,000 foul shots -- namely, that most players don't even
attempt 5,000, much less brick that many. Combining NBA and ABA history, only 68 players have attempted 5,000 free throws.
Dikembe Mutombo, for instance, has played 17 years and is still 49 short.
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Entire article:
ESPN - John Hollinger: How Shaquille O'Neal got to the brink of 5,000 missed free throws
