Hardwood or Brickyard? : Shooting Skills Have Gone the Way of the Peach Basket

Ben Jones didn’t grow up during the short-pants-and-high-socks days of Jerry West, Rick Barry, Bill Bradley and “Downtown” Freddie Brown, but maybe he should have.

Jones, a 6-foot-7 senior forward from Sonora High, is a shooter lost in a generation of bricklayers.

His percentages aren’t mind-boggling--74% from the free-throw line, 60% from the field and 43% from three-point range. But by today’s standards, those qualify him as a pure shooter.

Of course in today’s aggressive, crossover-dribble, fly-to-the-basket game, it seems anyone who strings together a few jumpers or shoots close to 50% from the field is called a shooter. In the days of West and Barry, shooters weren’t pure unless their release was silky smooth and their jumpers consistently tickled the nets.

They didn’t become pure by watching television or going to the mall, they worked on their shot. Every day. Without being prodded by their coaches.

Jones knows the routine well.

“I don’t consider it hard work because I like to go out in my yard and shoot with my brother,” Jones said. “Growing up, I shot every day after school for a couple hours. My parents had a 9 o’clock curfew because of the neighbors. If it wasn’t for the curfew, I’d have probably been out there till midnight.”

Bolsa Grande’s Duc Nguyen is never far from a hoop either. His shooting percentage shows it. Nguyen, a 6-0 junior guard, is the county’s top three-point shooter at 49% (40 for 82) and is shooting 78% from the free-throw line.

“He shoots all the time,” Bolsa Grande Coach Mike Anderson said. “When he’s not involved in a drill, he’s shooting. And he can shoot from any spot, any position. He shoots on the run, off the dribble, falling away, left-handed off the glass from the right angle. If he’s not pure, he’s the next best thing.”

Shooting thousands of jump shots a day doesn’t sound as thrilling as working on 360-degree dunks. But Jones and Nguyen didn’t have a lot of options.

“I can’t jump very well, so I’m not going to be working on my dunking,” Jones said. “But I know there are a lot of guys who do practice their dunks. Say what you want about dunking, but college coaches pay attention to it. If they see a guy dunking in a game, you see them scribbling stuff down in their notes.”

Said Anderson: “At 6 foot, Duc is not going to get a lot of easy baskets. He’s got to earn most of his points by shooting.”

Shooting guru Tom Marumoto of Newport Beach said high school players are simply mimicking what they see in the NBA. Highlights rarely show a player curling around a pick and sinking a 15-foot jump shot or pulling up on a fastbreak to nail a 12-foot bank shot. Marumoto, who has run shooting clinics for 20 years, said the NBA is partly to blame for an era of bad shooters.

“The NBA is show business,” Marumoto said. “They try to create the spectacular. It’s a one-on-one game. I don’t want a spectacular shot. I want a shot that’s going to go in the basket.”

These days in the NBA, shots are going in the basket at a rate of 43%, the worst shooting percentage in 31 years. Scoring is down for the 10th time in 11 years and the league scoring average is down to 94 points, the lowest since 1954, when the shot clock was introduced.

“From watching the tapes of the olden days, I’ve seen that they shoot the ball a lot better than they do now,” Jones said. “They looked like they had a lot of pure shooters. Nowadays, you don’t have too many. Now it’s more concentrated on the inside game. A lot of pounding the ball inside.”

While it is virtually impossible to track the decline in shooting at the prep level because most teams don’t keep such statistics, county coaches say the problem is acute. Sonora Coach Mike Murphy said that, in his experience, it’s hard to find pure shooters in high school.

“I’m trying to think of who the best shooters in the county would be,” Murphy said. “I don’t know. I don’t think there’s been a pure shooter in the county in awhile. Clay McKnight [who played at Mater Dei two years ago] might be the last.”

Prep athletes follow the lead of professionals, coaches say. With most ESPN “SportsCenter” highlights dominated by the flashiest dunks, it’s no wonder Jimmy can’t shoot straight.

“I think it’s the way the NBA has marketed guys,” said Eric Musselman, coach and general manager of the Continental Basketball Assn.’s Florida Beach Dogs. “They market guys before their games are fully developed, so all you see are the dunks. Jordan is the most fundamentally sound player in the NBA, but all they talk about are his dunks. His flashiness overshadows his ability to shoot the ball.”

Musselman, an assistant coach with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 1990-91, said the NBA began feeling the effects of their marketing campaigns in the early 1990s.

“Five or six years ago, it started in the NBA with rookies coming in not being able to shoot,” he said. “That means it started before that in high school. Fifteen, 20 years ago, it was the exact opposite. You had all great shooters in the NBA. It was like the European game is now, all great shooters. Maybe that’s why we’re seeing an influx of Europeans [in the NBA]. Teams need shooters.”

Murphy said shooting no longer seems to be a priority for high school players.

“If you can get a kid to work 15 minutes a day on his shot, that’s a lot,” said Murphy, one of 15 coaches on Marumoto’s staff. “Kids just don’t work. Chris St. Clair [now at Cal State Fullerton] would work an hour and a half after practice. But now when kids get away from the game, there’s too many other things they want to be doing.”

Musselman, who played college basketball at the University of San Diego, remembers shooting at an eight-foot basket in his driveway.

“That’s all I did--shoot,” he said. “We used to play horse all the time. Sometimes for three hours. You just shot the ball. Now everybody wants to play games. They won’t even play half-court three-on-three.”

Said Anderson, who played at Los Amigos in the late 1970s: “Kids work on their jams, their garbage moves, anything but shooting. It’s a fact. Kids don’t shoot the ball anymore. Look around high school and college basketball, how many good shooters are there?

“I can’t wait till I’m a parent because my kid is going to be a shooter. Everybody wants to watch a dunk, but there’s always going to be a room for a kid who can shoot.”

Which is why Marumoto is still in business after 20 years. Although he teaches all phases of the game at the Marumoto Sports Training Center in Newport Beach, his specialty is shooting. Marumoto was an average high school basketball player in Santa Ana who wasn’t good enough to play in college. But he was passionate enough about basketball to study it in college.

A physical education major, Marumoto looked into the biomechanics of shooting. He read Bill Sharman’s book on shooting and anything else he could find that dealt with the physics of shooting. Marumoto, 59, began his 35-year basketball coaching career as a high school and college coach, but decided after 15 years that he could be more effective teaching individual skills in small groups.

During summers, he runs shooting camps. In season, he holds weekend clinics. Sometimes out-of-town students will fly in to see Marumoto if they are in a particularly bad shooting slump during their season. Five years ago, Marumoto worked almost exclusively with boys. Now, 60% of his students are girls.

Over the years, Marumoto has tutored Loyola Marymount’s Jeff Fryer (Corona del Mar High), who led the nation in three-point shooting two years in a row, UC Irvine’s Mike Hess (also Corona del Mar) and many of the top girls in Orange County. Last year, Marumoto said he worked with five of the seven girls who earned Division I college scholarships and the county’s top six girls’ free-throw shooters.

He used to tape his students and break down their shot on video. Now, he uses his eyes.

“Last year, I figured out I had looked at over three million shots,” Marumoto said. “I’m like a surgeon.”

Jones had Marumoto dissect his shot two years ago.

“I needed to get my form a little cleaner,” Jones said. “He helped me a lot with my backspin on the ball. He also gave me a lot of drills to work on when you’re not shooting well. I still use a lot of Marumoto’s phrases when I’m at the free-throw line. I think the guy knows what he’s doing and he can prove everything he tells you scientifically. I think he’s helped me.”

Marumoto wishes he could help more kids and he wishes there were more shooting gurus like him to relieve some of the burden from high school coaches.

“I don’t want to put down coaches at all, but it’s difficult for a high school coach to be a specialist,” Marumoto said. “They’ve got a lot of things going on. These days, they have to be a coach and a fund-raiser.”

Murphy said he tries to work on shooting for 30 minutes every practice.

“Gym time is so limited that it’s tough to work on individual skills,” he said. “But I make the time because I don’t think kids are going to put in the time on their own.”

If they put in the time, Marumoto said kids should work on three shooting fundamentals--rhythm, mechanics and balance.

“The most difficult one to teach and to work on is rhythm,” Marumoto said. “You can have the other two, but it won’t work without good rhythm.”

Marumoto said better rhythm would help Los Angeles Laker center Shaquille O’Neal’s free-throw shooting.

“The little I see of him, he’s usually dunking or shooting a short hook shot,” he said. “His free throws are out of rhythm and his mechanics are definitely poor. That’s a bad combination.”

A better combination of rhythm and mechanics is Larry Bird’s jump shot. Marumoto said he uses Bird’s shot as a teaching tool.

“He’s a totally fundamental shooter,” Marumoto said. “He didn’t play basketball until the eighth grade, but he made himself a great shooter by shooting 600 shots a day. As a pro, he did that too.”

Marumoto agrees with Musselman and believes few players today work like Bird. Most are too busy playing games to think about the rotation of their shot.

“You have to have the knowledge and skill before you can use it in a game,” Marumoto said. “They’re working backward by playing games first.”

Jones tended to agree with Marumoto.

“We’ve got a spring, fall and summer season,” Jones said. “That doesn’t leave much time for developing your skills.”

Musselman said if kids are developing shooting skills, usually it’s their three-point shot.

“There was no three-point shot when I played,” said Musselman, who played high school basketball in Cleveland in the early 1980s. “You shot the shot in your range that felt good. Now there’s a lot of guys that can dunk and shoot threes, but there’s no intermediate game.”

But Murphy said it’s difficult to fault some of his players’ work ethic.

“Josh Lien [a senior forward] is one of the greatest kids I’ve ever coached, but I guarantee you he won’t pick up a ball once practice ends,” Murphy said. “But he’s got a 3.7 GPA, and he’s got great balance in his life. Maybe they’re more well-rounded now. Maybe I’m the one that’s weird. I wonder why they would want to do anything else.”

Nguyen has found time to do both. He has a 3.6 grade-point average and he has one of the prettiest releases Anderson has ever seen.

“When he’s got it going, the ball is arched so high that when it comes down, the net barely moves,” Anderson said. “It’s beautiful to watch.”

However beautiful it looks, will the jumper ever replace the excitement of a slam dunk?

“I don’t see the trend going back to shooting,” Jones said. “The guys have gotten bigger and weight lifting is playing a bigger role. But I think that’s good for people like me. We won’t have as much competition.”

Said Musselman: “Basketball needs shooters, at all levels. It’s all cyclical. Shooting will come back.”