European Creativity

My upcoming VDARE article is about the NBA finals between the Miami Heat's Big Three of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh versus the Dallas Maverick's Big One of Dirk Nowitzki, but I finally found a picture to illustrate why the seven-foot German's fall-away jumper is, despite its awkward look, so hard to block. 

For a righthander, the right foot is the more adroit one, the one you prefer to balance upon while doing something delicate. For example, a righthanded baseball batter puts his weight on his back (right) foot while beginning his swing. Once he's committed himself, his weight shifts to his less-coordinated left foot. Similarly, if you are going to balance upon one foot while accurately hurling a ball overhand, whether shooting a basketball or throwing a baseball, the natural combination is to start by balancing more on the right foot. (When throwing a baseball pitch, a righthander pushes off his right foot but ends standing on his left foot. But the right foot is the dominant foot for a righthander).

During Nowitzki's NBA career, however, this righthander developed a a radically different shot where he takes a step back with his left foot, lifts his right leg, and jumps off his "wrong" (left) foot. 

One advantage to jumping off the left foot is you can get your right hand higher off the ground, so it's normally used in, say, open-court dunks. But the point of a dunk is to cut down on the need for precision by not releasing the ball until its inside the basket. So, for the difficult one-footed fall-away jump shot, using the left foot as the dominant foot is awkward.

The big advantage in leaping off the left foot, I believe, is that Nowitzki can simultaneously raise his right leg as a shield to keep the defender farther away. 

This picture, where the non-jumping defender is almost getting kicked in the groin by Nowitzki, represents an extreme example -- normally the defender leaps and Nowitzki keeps his knee bent more, his foot down, and his right leg more perpendicular to the flight of the ball so he doesn't get called for an offensive foul -- but the general principle is the same: Nowitzki's raised right leg keeps the defender too far away too block the shot. If the defender hits his upraised right leg, the ref might give Nowitzki two free throws. And even if the ref allows the defender some contact, Nowitzki's raised leg is more like a shock absorber than the torso or arm, so the bump is less likely to affect his aim.

Say you release your shot right-handed from above your right ear. If, like a normal step-back fall-away jump shooter, you jump off your right foot, you could try raising your left leg as a shield, but to get it in front of you where it's effective, you have to twist your body more unnaturally than when Nowitzki jumps off his left foot and raises his right leg. (Try it.)

Somebody must have tried shooting like this in the past, right? But I can't find any mention of it. Is it just too hard for most people to do accurately? Do you have to be kind of ambidextrous? Or do you just look too gawky doing it for it to be cool in America? Has anybody started to imitate Nowitzki? He's been hugely effective doing this.

Of course, just because a shot is effective doesn't mean it will be imitated -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar poured in about a million skyhooks on TV between 1966 and 1990 and the rest of basketball treated the shot as if Kareem has the intellectual property rights to it tied up until 70 years after his death. The skyhook is the ultimate example of jumping off the left foot to maximize the right hand's height.

Interestingly, Nowitzki says he came up with this shot on his own, not with his off-season coach, physicist Holger Geschwindner,

From an interview with Geschwindner on the unusually high arc on Nowitzki's shots:

The reflection behind it is quite simple. How do you have to throw the ball so that, despite committing as many mistakes as possible, it still finds its way through the net? It’s a question of error tolerance. But every college student should be able to make the same calculations. Take differential and integral calculus. Make some derivations and create a curve. Everybody can do it. It’s no secret. The optimal angle depends on the player’s height and the distance. I’ve calculated it for Dirk and my other players.

My impression is that European basketball players have generally been more creative than American players. This goes back to the first European I can recall, BYU center Krešimir Ćosić of Yugoslavia, who battled Bill Walton of UCLA in the NCAA tournament in the early 70s. Walton was an amazing basketball thinker, but the big Croatian made him look like a stick-in-the-mud when it came to on-court weirdness. As a convert to Mormonism, presumably Ćosić wasn't smoking as much dope as Walton was, but you couldn't tell from watching his game, which consisted of shots that maybe were old hat in Zagreb but weren't standard operating procedure in Pauley Pavilion and looked like something out of an H.R. Pufnstuf version of basketball.

I'm certainly not up to date on basketball, but my impression is that the 1970s conventional wisdom of black players as innovative and white players as fundamentalist was already outdated by the 1990s, partly because of the arrival of goofy Europeans, partly because blacks got much better at fundamentals, partly because white Americans got increasingly winnowed down to the ones who had something extra in their repertoire (not just Larry Bird -- anybody remember Jeff Hornacek and all the bizarre-looking shots he took?)

Forty years ago, Earl Monroe was doing all sorts of crazy spin moves, but I don't see that much statistical evidence they were overwhelmingly effective, which is why he remains a legend -- he didn't have that many successful followers. Moving laterally along the court in unexpected ways is cool, but it's mostly a distraction from moving up and at the rim. I watched a lot of Michael Jordan and, sure, he had a lot of "How did he do that?" plays, but not as many "How did he think of that?" ones. Jordan's game was fundamentally sound and (until, after his baseball exile, when he developed an effective fall-away jumper to save his body--here's MJ's video tutorial on shooting his two-footed fallway), his predominant instinct was the predictable but most rational one: to head for the rim.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer