Free Throw Follies: Andre Drummond Doesn't Need to Get Better from the Line

"How can you be a professional basketball player and miss over half your free throws?"

As the "hack-a" strategy becomes more widely adopted in the NBA, that question gets asked more and more often. The answer is surprisingly simple: because they can be.

The scene is as familiar as it is numbing. An opponent of the Rockets, the Clippers, or the Pistons decides that they'd rather simply send Dwight Howard, DeAndre Jordan, or Andre Drummond, respectively, to the free-throw line than defend straight up. For the next several minutes of game time—and seemingly hours of real time—the action slows to a crawl as the targeted big man takes painful free throw after painful free throw.

This practice reached its apotheosis (or, more accurately, its nadir) during the Rockets-Pistons game Wednesday night. After losing Howard to an ankle injury in the first minute of play, Houston sent Drummond to the line 36 times, where he missed 23 free throws, a single-game record. The Rockets even started the second half with little-used reserve K.J. McDaniels, who immediately committed five fouls in nine seconds to force Drummond to the line, and ultimately to the bench.

According to ESPN's Kevin Pelton, who has been extensively tracking and discussing the issue, through January 20 there have already been 223 intentional, off-ball fouls this season, compared to 164 in all of the 2014-15 campaign.

Without re-entering the intertwined debates about whether this is good strategy (in most circumstances, it's not) and what, if anything, is to be done about the practice (it's complicated, not least because imposing severe penalties for intentional fouling almost certainly means replay reviews, and all of a sudden, there goes the time saved by not fouling), it is important to address the issue that makes this strategy viable in the first place: Just how is it that someone with such an extreme deficit in the fundamental basketball skill of hitting an uncontested, (largely) untimed 15-footer can make it this far?

It comes down to specialization, demographics, and how the two interrelate in today's NBA.

Modern NBA basketball relies on a division of labor amongst the five players on the court. In other words, there are positions. Though many of these roles have become more elastic during the "positional revolution" of the past decade, teams and lineups still need a mix of several discrete skills to be successful. Ball-handling and creation. Rebounding. Outside shotmaking ability, and so on.

One of these bundles of skills has come to be known as rim protection, which is based on the premise that layups are the easiest shots in basketball but become much harder if attempted in the vicinity of a very tall (even by NBA standards) man. Certainly, a good rim protector will possess other abilities in addition to great height and/or wingspan—anticipation, vision, lateral and vertical quickness, discipline—but the importance and impact of just being big is, for lack of a better term, huge.

Here is where demographics come into play. Extremely tall people are such a small segment of the population that precise estimates are hard to find, but according to this calculator (which is based on Centers for Disease Control data), a 20-year-old male standing 6'10" or taller is in the 99.9997th percentile of height for men his age. That's about three rim-protector-sized young men for every million. Meanwhile, someone 6'5'' or taller—roughly the minimum height for a NBA wing—is in the 99.5339th percentile. That might not appear to be much of gap, but it's the difference between choosing from hundreds of potential players and hundreds of thousands. Lower the height requirement to 5'10'' and suddenly you're choosing from 45 percent of the population, a pool of tens of millions. While the set of "potential NBA players" is far smaller than that, there are still vastly more candidates at guard size than there are for centers.

While not a perfect comparison to those demographic breakdowns—both because official league heights are often slightly fictional (as in "6-foot-13" Kevin Garnett, who didn't want to be seven feet tall and thus forced to play center) and because people often grow somewhat taller even after age twenty—the height distribution of NBA players is telling. According to NBA.com, 124 of the 447 players who have appeared thus far this season are listed at 6'10'' or taller. By comparison, 212 players are between 6'5'' and 6'10'', leaving just 111 under 6'5''. Those numbers change year to year, but generally speaking the NBA as a whole will give jobs to a higher proportion of 6'10'' players than 6'1'' prospects, in large part because of the importance of skills like rim protection and rebounding, and due to the advantages sheer size gives in accomplishing those tasks.

So while a 6'1'' point guard or even a 6'7'' small forward who can't hit free throws is unlikely to clear the many hurdles a player needs to leap to reach the NBA, a taller player is far more likely to get some leeway. A seven-footer needs to be an extreme outlier in terms of explosiveness and coordination to a degree far lower than that of his shorter peers—he's already an outlier by virtue of his size. Smaller players don't tend to be quicker, or better shooters, or more skillful because of their size. Rather, the relatively smaller players in the NBA are those things because they had to be in order to stand out sufficiently.

Does this mean many taller players advance up the ladder from high school and AAU to big time college to the NBA without honing their skills and understanding of the game to the same degree as their peers? It certainly does. Through that process, bad habits develop, habits that are hard to undo by the time players reach the NBA level. Rajon Rondo has been little more successful improving as a shooter than have Drummond, Jordan, or Howard.

Furthermore, there being so few players of sufficient rim-protecting size and agility allows these players to stay in the league despite whatever skill deficiencies they may have. Perhaps the most surprising part of Hassan Whiteside's rise to prominence over the past year or so is the fact that he was out of the league to begin with—players of his physical stature tend to find a spot somewhere, as demonstrated by the likes of Kendrick Perkins, JaVale McGee, and Ryan Hollins finding spots year after year.

Perimeter players seem to improve as shooters as their basketball careers go on. Some of this indeed represents the players' own efforts; some of it is due to the fact that, aside from the top stars—Rondo with his playmaking, Dwyane Wade with his athleticism and shotmaking—players who do not become competent shooters tend to find themselves on the outside looking in (creating an effect known as survivorship bias). That competitive pressure does not apply to the professionally very, very, very tall to quite the same degree.

To bring it back to specialization of skills: the rim protection, rebounding, and physical presence provided by those few players who happen to both be enormously tall and prodigiously athletic moves things like free-throw shooting from the "required" to the "preferred but not necessary" section of the job description. So when it comes to hack-a-big-man, NBA fans have two choices: stop complaining about players missing foul shots, or start complaining about there not being more seven-footers in the world.