A free throw shooter’s secret weapon

Why do players give their teammates a high or low five after missing a free throw?

I’ve played a good number of basketball games and watched plenty more over the past 29 years and over that, I had never really considered such a thing. The ponderance was brought to my attention this past week as the NBA regular season comes to a close and it gave me some pause.

When I thought about it, I suppose it was a bit odd. A high five after making a free throw? Okay, makes sense, they did something good. But after missing? These players probably aren’t congratulating their teammates on failing. And yet, the action is fairly pervasive throughout the sport, you can see it from youth basketball all the way up to the NBA.

The answer, of course, isn’t really that deep. The high five isn’t a gesture of “great job buddy” in the case of a missed free throw, but rather one of “don’t worry, we still have your back.”

Basketball, like many sports, is based around a team, with most plays occurring with all five players involved in some form or fashion. But free throws put one player on an island, slowing what is otherwise a free flowing game to a halt and pushing the spotlight solely on the player shooting. These shots from the charity stripe can be extremely important, especially at the end of close games where one team is fouling on purpose, and as such, they can also be some of the most stressful in the game.

Which, again, is why you will see teammates giving the shooter a high five even after they miss, as a way to show comradery in a moment where it is otherwise impossible. But a gesture is just that; in reality, the next free throw is still entirely on the shooter.

Or is it? A recent paper published in the scientific journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise found that this simple act of making some sort of physical contact with a teammate actually has an effect on the next shot. The study, in combination with others, found that after missing the first free throw the shooter was more likely to make the second free throw if their teammates gave them a high five or made some sort of other similar physical contact. Interestingly enough, this physical contact did not seem to have any effect on shooters that had already made the first free throw, suggesting that encouragement from their teammates actually helped relieve some of the stress the shooter put on themselves after missing the first.

This particular study used data of 835 free throws from 60 NCAAW games, but referenced and used information from other studies that had similar data from other levels of basketball as well. Controlling for other factors that have, according to these other studies, shown to also impact free throw shooting percentages in these situations, such as a player’s overall free throw shooting percentage, home versus away games, how much time is left and how close the game is, they found that players receiving encouragement through physical “taps” from teammates would shoot better on their second free throw after missing the first to a statistically significant degree. I won’t get into all the numbers here, but the paper is available for free online if you want to check it out for yourself.

With how many superstitions often fly around sports, making sure to encourage a teammate after a missed free throw certainly seemed to always fit into the “okay, but does this actually do anything” category. The fact that this paper seems to point to there being some sort of tangible psychological benefit to such actions was a pretty interesting discovery for me.

So next time you are down on the blocks and your teammate bricks the first free throw, make sure to give them that all important low-five; apparently it will do wonders for their next shot.

A C ertain Point of V iew