One day and one blog entry after throwing John Calipari some praise, I'm throwing him some criticism. It's a dog-eat-dog world. The Memphis Tigers shot .597 on FT% for the regular season. It was the third worst in NCAA Division I (326 of 328). It does not help that Calipari has pandered to his players in allowing guys like Chris Douglas-Roberts (who gets to the line more than anyone on the team) to execute rank habits at the free-throw line.
Every time Douglas-Roberts goes to the line he whacks his shooting arm with his off arm in between dribbles. All this while leaning his body away from the basket in an unorthodox alignment that decreases any natural symmetry. With that style, he might as well be on a boat trying to skip rocks into the Pacific Ocean.
Douglas-Roberts is shooting .418 from the arc and yet he is only shooting .698 from the line. Bruce Bowen anomalies aside, that is telling of a lack of concentration and/or rhythm from the line.
Memphis's free-throw problem almost ended their season in the second round of the tournament. Against Mississippi State, Memphis missed more free-throws than they made. They missed four out of their last six free-throws as an eight point lead with 22 seconds to go nearly rotted away in their 77-74. Mississippi State was only a missed three away from taking the game into overtime.
Perhaps Calipari's complacency is due to the fact that his team is 35-1 and they coasted into a number one seed for the tournament. Perhaps with everything otherwise going so well, Calipari did not want to mess with his player's psyches. Pull the reigns to hard and the horse will buck.
He needed to make that horse buck, if not shoot it!
It's no secret that when a player or team is not making his free throws, that it'll come back to haunt them. There are notable exceptions. Wilt Chamberlain, Shaquille O'Neal and Tim Duncan were lucky enough to guide their teams to championships while weathering their atrocious free-throw shooting stretches.
If I were in Calipari's shoes, I would tell Douglas-Roberts to knock it off if he cannot shoot at least 85 percent from the free-throw line. Coach Bobby Knight would tell him to grab some pine and give him a solid verbal thrashing and then remind him that he's a basketball player at a big-time NCAA program, not a showboat on the playgrounds of Detroit.
Calipari is content with letting the inmates run the asylum. Sure his team has a chance of winning it all. Of course it's much more like placing a bet on the corner numbers of the roulette wheel than it is a matter of grabbing the bull by the horns.
No horses or bulls were harmed during the making of this blog entry.
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