I’m an unabashed fan of basketball. I love how simple the game is, and how you don’t need to be a knock-out athlete to play and enjoy it. Sure, you don’t have to do that for most sports, but you’ll never get the same enjoyment out of it if you aren’t. Take football, for instance. The best version of football involves tackling, but good luck trying to find parents or people who want to play a game of light tackle these days without six thousand levels of padding. I played tennis in high school, which is slightly more analogous to basketball, but tennis requires you to be semi-competent in all areas of the game as a baseline; you can’t not know how to serve or rally. If you don’t, then you have to change up the game so you’re not playing tennis anymore, just a less fun version of squash. Whee.

Basketball just requires a ball. You don’t have to be a knock-down shooter or have to be able to dunk. You don’t have to be that coordinated. You don’t need to know six hundred pages of plays, or how to get the proper spin, or buy a bunch of extra shit just to get started; you get a ball and you go. You don’t need a second person, so you aren’t tied to someone else’s schedule, and you can find courts anywhere around the USA. James Naismith was a smart man indeed.

When I played basketball as a tyke, I was fucking garbage. It didn’t help that the coach I had kept teaching us to pass the ball to his kid, who was also terrible, and I never learned many of the necessary fundamentals to be good at the game. My experience was so bad that I was entirely turned off of physically playing and, to a much lesser extent, watching the sport on television for most of my life. Only within the last four years did I pick up a basketball again, and after having become an autodidact for much of what I now know, applying that to my lack of game lit a fire under my ass again like I was watching Jordan sail through the air as a tiny person-let.

As part of my self-teaching regimen, I spent a lot of time on YouTube, as most people do these days. One of the best channels I found was Pro Shot Shooting System, which was founded by coach Paul Hoover and recently taken over by Matt Wililamson. I’m not sure when the switch was made, however I did find an article about a sex scandal involving one of the employees at Pro Shot and a minor, and my guess is that Hoover likely wanted to distance himself as much as possible from the scandal, since he had been with the perpetrator during the trip the scandal happened on. Since this is a super-touchy subject (and rightfully so) to most people in the world and people who read this will naturally jump on the hate-train, I am not indicting Hoover of anything. The article and police statements indicate he had no idea of what was going down, so I’m leaving it at that. Besides, what I want to focus on is not some nuttiness to the north of us.

What I want to focus on today is how common it is for people to simply write a diatribe these days, send it out into the digital world full of fallacies and logical black holes and how such tripe is perfectly okay in the writing world and in general. Hell, it’s why our news media outlets have turned to mush and why ESPN is generally reviled among the sports community as they generally do very little investigative journalism and hold themselves to ethical standards, especially when it comes to speculative pieces. Seriously, how many times have you read an article that started with ‘Sources say’ from a sports news outlet and thought, ‘This is shit. What kind of moron is this writer?’ Lack of quality control and adhering to ethical standards is why that shit happens, and now that big outlets get away with it, hack nobodies who have an internet connection are doing it too, and all it’s doing is taking up space. You could argue that my writing is doing the same, but at least I do my goddamn homework for every post I make.

The title of the blog I want to pull apart is Basketball As It Should Be. Right of the bat, we know the author is a blowhard because the title of the blog is pretentious and opinionated as shit. A pretentious title only works if you’re a knock-out writer that brings his or her A+ game to every piece and you plan on running with a ‘I know all the shit in the world, get on my level’ persona, and if we read further on, we can tell the guy who runs this blog is not that kind of guy.If you want the best working example of how to do this kind of style right, visit Maddox because the man is a legend at this kind of writing and self-promotion.

The author, Katz, starts off by saying that the Pro Shot Shooting System is disingenuous and that he’ll be pointing out all of the flaws with the system. That seems fair; I mean, anything that is truly worth its salt must withstand critique and be able to produce results in defiance of that critique.

Now for the record, I have been coaching basketball for over thirty years, mostly on the high school and college level, and in that time I have changed philosophically from a slow down half court ball control coach, to a run, shoot and pressure full court type coach so I would say I have been more than open to change.

At no point does Katz say where he has coached or even give a state or a region.  There’s two problems with this:

1. If we believe this statement, then we are essentially forced into believing his opinion because he is using the experience bias fallacy, or the fallacy that experience means you should listen to someone.
2. If we don’t believe his statement, he has chosen specifically vague wording that leaves us with no breadcrumbs to follow to see if these claims are true.

Second, changing the pace of play from a skilled center, athletic guard style to a skilled guard, athletic center style isn’t a philosophical change. A philosophical change is one done in the mind. You don’t need your mind to ponder the benefits of a high-pace offense because if you don’t adopt this style, you’re teams will generally be easy to pick apart. We can see explicit evidence of this in the league with how many teams are playing up-tempo basketball and how many teams are not. The teams that are not are the Spurs, the Grizzlies, the Celtics and, on occasion, the Cavs. That is a total of four out of thirty, or about thirteen percent (13%) or the vast minority (even less if you discount the Cavs). Third, this isn’t a philosophical change, it’s a reaction to how kids are growing up now. Centers aren’t slow giants, they’re fast and agile now. Shooting has become an art, and good shooting is much better than holding onto the ball and running ISO-plays or chucking it down to your center for twenty-four seconds and letting him go to work since modern centers generally have awful post skills. Calling a something like this a ‘philosophical change’ is disingenuous at best and completely ignorant at worst since it’s completely ignoring all the factors that have gone into why basketball is far more uptempo now than it was even twenty years ago.

I have seen fads come and go and have seen brilliant strategies and systems of play withstand the test of time. I would say I can tell the real deal when I see it. Conversely, I can tell a fad and or a mistake when I see it as well. Pro Shot is no innovation. It is poorly thought out, disingenuously presented and full of so many holes in its philosophy, you can play all the PGA majors on it.

Again, how do you know this? What are these brilliant strategies you’ve witnessed? Are you going to divulge any of this information, or are you just going to make a ton of statements without any means for us to verify them aside from using the whole ‘Trust me, I have experience and I know these things’ reasoning? It’s the last one? Sweet.

The Pro Shot system is based on one concept and one concept only. Players are never squared to the basket and therefore all players were LIED to when they were taught to be squared. In light of that fact, pro shot developed a “new” way to shoot a ball. The basics of the system are based on four concepts. Hop, Turn, Dip and Sway. There are one or two others, but these four are the basic ideas behind the revolution. Let me first try and explain each and then I will dive into the concepts and their presentation.

The fuck? Dude, you can’t say something is build on a single concept and then go on to explain how it actually is multiple concepts, up to six of them in total. Well, you can do it, since you obviously did do it, but you’d only do it if you were a moron since it’s a built-in contradiction. Proof-read your shit, man.

Katz then details the four main concepts, or at least the four of the six or so available he chose. I won’t detail them for you here since I’d just be reiterating what he says and what Pro Shot explains, and they do a much better job than I can.

Personally, as a teacher of players for over three decades, I have gone a few ways on this, but am always drawn back. I think the most fundamental way to teach the pivot foot concept, is to give players a clear cut option. That option is the weak-hand foot.

As someone who actually plays basketball and doesn’t coach professionally (i.e. stand around and lecture), this makes no sense whatsoever. First, the wording is garbage; the idea should be ‘non-dominant’ foot, not ‘weak-hand’ foot. This implies that one hand should be strong and one hand should be weak, which is an idea that will spell disaster for young learner’s as it will run completely counterpoint to the later lecture where coach tells his kids that both hands need to be trained to pass, dribble and probe. Second, clear cut option? You mean only option. If you teach kids one single way initially, then you need to later teach them out of it when you introduce non-dominant ball control. It is far simpler to let a player figure out how he or she wants to approach the basket. Saying that you should generally pivot on your non-dominant side is stupid since that will never happen in a game situation. You are preparing your kids to play in a real game, so teach them shit that will help them in a real game.

What that means is-and this is extremely important for all that is to follow in dissecting Pro Shot-a right handed shooter would be best served by using his left foot as his pivot foot almost exclusively.

You are a bad coach. This would make a player incredibly easy to read since this player, if they used this all of their life and never expanded to using both feet to pivot, he or she would be stuck driving the same way every time. Doing so directly hampers a player and it means they are only one-dimensional. They will shoot the same say, drive the same way, pass the same way and dribble the same way, and being one-dimensional is nigh useless in a game situation.

Coach John Chaney once told me to try and stay away from shooting jumpers off the jump stop because the odds are that the player will go either left or right in the air, usually not straight and he would therefore be shooting at a moving target.

This is due to a player transferring momentum poorly. You only move laterally on a jumpshot if you cannot transfer the momentum into the shot correctly, not to mention that a shot is always a moving target since you aren’t standing still when you shoot it. You are jumping, so you’re always moving in the vertical plane. In fact, there’s a point where you could jump high enough and make the ball path a straight line into the back of the net and that is, theoretically speaking, the best shot. However, nobody can jump that high in real life, so we stick with arcs instead. The point being that while I appreciate the sentiment, it just shows that you aren’t looking at biomechanics at all, and biomechanics are a huge part of any professional sport, especially basketball.

In his Kyrie Irving shooting form video, the author goes to great lengths to point out that Irving is a hop shooter. That is until roughly the 3:52 mark where the next two shots he puts up are off the 1-2 step. Now, that just caused me to laugh as did earlier in the video when he talked about pulling the 3 off the dribble and he showed a clip of Step Curry doing exactly that…except he did it off the 1-2 step. Ooopppsss

I love when a person acts like they’ve found the glaring hole in an idea because they always immediately start gloating like they’ve found the keys to Fort Knox when, really, they have trash-ass reading comprehension skills. If you shoot your shot off of the hop, or the motion where you catch the ball in the air and land on both feet, then immediately launch into your shot, you are a hop shooter. If you are a 1-2 step shooter, or catch the ball and then place your feet down in a 1-2 motion, then jump into your shot, you are a 1-2 step shooter. Notice how my explanation doesn’t tie exclusivity in like Katz implies? That’s because if you’re a good shooter, you don’t just use one type of shot starting motion. I personally prefer the hop to the 1-2 step, but I use both with in similar frequencies. Again, if you use the hop, you are a hop shooter and if you use the 1-2 step, you are a  1-2 step shooter. There is no exclusivity as Katz is trying to imply here like a tool.

He inserts clips of Jim Carrey and others to illustrate and leave no doubt, that anyone who teaches or claims to use this concept as a shooter is an outright liar (ie Kevin Love and Steph Curry who evidently are not only liars but too ignorant or stupid to realzie they are).

This is the equivalent of watching a train derail. I’ve seen this happen countless times and it always happens when a writer gets really pissed off and emotional and is too hyped on emotions to proof their bit. Appearance is everything, and writing grammatical, misspelled garbage like this ruins what might have been a salient point if it was a salient point.

Yes, make no mistake about it, players are sqaure to the basket, but most any coach who teaches to be square to the basket, will be demanding in a shooting foot forward concept. That player, even with his right or left foot extended, is still very much square to the basket.

And a couple more wheels went off the track. Christ man, calm down. You didn’t find the lost city of Atlantis, so put a fucking lid on it. Also, this straight-up confirms you are a horse-shit coach. Look at this:

Look at this poor girl.

This is someone who is square to the basket. The term ‘square’ means that your legs are parallel to each other and at hypothetical ninety degree angles, which means your toes point directly towards the backboard. If you were a ‘right-hand, right-foot’ shooter, you would simply put your right foot forward, similar to a stopped frame of you walking, just with a super large gait. Katz confirms this with this:

The heel of my right foot (being a right footed shooter) should be just above parralel to the toes of my left foot or to be more accurate the side of my left foot, should fit right into the groove of my right if I bring them together. Some of course will have other ways to teach lead foot forward, but that is how I do it and to date, my players have been pretty successful.

What fucking players? The only hope you’ve given us of finding out any sort of information is you quoted a really old coach from Temple back when they were Division II. That’s super unhelpful and, if anything, proves that you are teaching old-hat methods. That’s fine, but considering I taught myself out of those methods, where I was shooting miserably from everywhere on the floor including the free throw line, which this stance was specifically developed for, and became a very respectable shooter across the entirety of the floor after running through the basics of Pro Shot, I’m inclined to say your methods are fucking gah-bidge. Keep using them if you want, but I don’t believe that any of these kids you’ve coached have ever gone on to play professional basketball anywhere for any length of time, probably because they can’t shoot for shit.

Pro Shot actually ignores totally, right foot forward. What he does instead is claim that players turn and therefore are never square. No, they don’t turn per se, but right foot forward-or shooting foot forward-naturally leans the body in such a way that yes the player is leading with his right shoulder BECAUSE HE IS A RIGHT FOOTED SHOOTER.

No, you half-wit, you do turn under the Pro Shot system. The body does not naturally turn using the ‘squaring up’ method. Instead, what happens is shooters force themselves to shoot like Reggie Miller, or with their hands tucked so far in that the shot comes from the center of the body, which would be the proper path-line the ball would need to take to always make it into the hoop. Since Reggie’s shot is fucking goofy looking and extremely difficult to master, most good coaches know that it is far better instead to aim with your elbow. Doing so forces your body to turn so that the elbow and arm are aligned to the basket and that the ball will follow that path- line.

Courtsey of Getty Images from some place, whatever.

Look at his fucking toes. Are they pointed towards the backboard? No. This is because his shooting arm and elbow are, and to do this, your hips need to turn which turns your feet. If he were fucking square to the basket he would never make this shot because it would force his arm to move to the right, which puts it off-target from the hoop.

All you have to do is stand in front of a mirror, spread your feet and push your lead foot forward just a little. Are you going to claim you are not squared? That is in and of itself ridiculous.

Yes, I am. The fact you keep arguing this is proof you have not actually tried any of what Paul Hoover had said and that you are indeed, as he correctly assumed, are butt-hurt that he has come in and found a better system that is tied directly to biomechanics and not to tradition. If you do not form an imaginary square (an infinite rectangular plane would be more correct, but whatever) with your feet and the backboard, then you are not squared up, and Pro Shot does not square up. You are wrong.

One-most of the time, he is catching the ball in his shooting pocket because he gets the pass from an NBA player passing it to him and therefore what seems like a dip is actually Steph catching it in rythm, NOT CREATING THE RYTHM WITH A DIP.

You are actually mad, and that is hilarious, and even more so considering you are wrong. Robert Morrow is someone who almost never dips. Kevin Durant always dips. Steph Curry dips infrequently. Also, catching it in the shooter’s pocket, or at the hip, doesn’t mean you still shouldn’t dip. Dipping helps you orient your hand on the ball for optimum backspin and a solid release point. You don’t have to dip far, likely around an inch or so, but the point is that it is a fluid motion. The whole process is a transfer of momentum, not a transfer of energy. Granted, they’re very similar, but a standard jump-shot forces you to jump high, which is a transfer of energy from your core into your legs and then from your core into your arms and into the shot. The Pro Shot method is designed so that you are taking momentum you already have in your legs and core and pushing it through the legs and arms to make a fluid shot.

More importantly, it is retarded to think every single pass, NBA or not, will land in the shooter’s pocket. The shooter’s pocket is a very small volume of space, right about where you would holster a gun on your hip in a Western movie. It is not some belt around your waist, it is not some zone where your hands are, it is at your hip and nowhere else. If you get a pass that is not there, and there are millions of passes that never end up in the shooter’s pocket, you need to dip to help transfer the momentum to create a fluid shot. If you’ve been watching Channing Frye this year, he is a perfect example of a guy who dips and shoots. Very rarely will he just up and shoot the ball and that’s usually if the pass is on point.

Of course he offers no evidence to support his claim other than a video of a girl with bad shooting form missing a shot short-off the 1-2 step of course.

Yeah, that’s called evidence. It’s not great evidence, but it’s better than you, who has shown zero evidence at all, Katz. Good god man, practice what you preach. And no, sealioning like you keep doing is not a valid argument tactic. It is a goal-post moving bitch-grade maneuver that people who have no argument but just want to try and seem intelligent use. You are batting zero for one-thousand right now.

Play it forward at game speed. Say what you will about the hop, but it is far less stable than the plant foot/shooting foot concept otherwise known as 1-2.

No, it isn’t. I use it all the time and I’m a fat sack of crap, which means I’m carting around more mass and this will create more momentum to be transferred. This also presupposed the idea that kids won’t know how to properly stop, which is what you should be teaching them. You should be teaching and conditioning them to use moves to put less stress on their ligaments and extremities so they can last longer, not use techniques simply because they’re comfortable to you.

What the plant foot does is force the player to gather himself and if taught correctly, the player will be in a shooting position on the plant because he is playing low.

And in that time to gather, you will have been picked up by someone, defeating the whole purpose of being a good shooter. Are you telling me you want all your kids to shoot contested shots like J.R. Smith all the time, because that’s super-strength retarded.

Here’s what seals the nail in the coffin, if this already wasn’t dead already:

However, what Pro Shot never takes into account, is that shooters who can really shoot, NEVER CATCH HIGH. Most players who understand shooting are already bent ready to receive the pass and before it reaches their hands are stepping in to shoot. If you play high, yes, bending your knees will take longer. However if you catch and play low like every player should, you are already shooting the basketball on the catch, without rushing it, sacrificing your mechanics and or balance, and you surely have ten toes to the rim as much as possible.

Katz, you have got to be one of the dumbest basketball coaches to ever walk the Earth. Shooters who can ‘really shoot’ can ‘really shoot’ because they are consistent with their shooting process, not because of where they catch the damn ball, you moron. If you catch the ball high, it’s because the pass was inaccurate and you’ll need to create space for your shot if you want to shoot it instead of drive it or pass it on to someone else. The catch of the pass has zero to do with the process of the shot because they are two separate events that, when looked at with glazed eyes, appear as one fluid motion because NBA players can make stellar passes.

What you are teaching kids is to put more stress on their bodies because you refuse to actually try something new. If your post had actually did a compare and contrast with video evidence, statistics, histograms and real data instead of your bullshit hearsay and unsubstantiated opinion, then you would have the grounds to say ‘Pro Shot sucks’. But you did none of that, so you don’t. Additionally, comments like

I have been to plenty camps with plenty people who paid plenty of money and would go back even though what was taught was elementary or sometimes nonsense. The Washington redskins still sell out and people keep coming back so attendance evidently means nothing.

shows you don’t have a damn clue of what you’re even saying yet you’re so full of yourself that you’ll believe anything that you say. Apples to oranges, mate, apples to fucking oranges.

We’ll end on this gem:

Really CP? That’s all you’ve got? Name calling? Lets be clear here-I have never claimed to be an expert only that I know enough to know who is not one. Second, if I am not mistaken it was coach Hoover who ridiculed and continues to disparage

So a guy who claims to not be an expert somehow knows when there is a phony expert in our midst. Fucking gold, ladies and gentlemen; I’d say I was surprised but when you have a bio like this:

This is a blog on the game of basketball and all that surrounds it. In general I am pretty easy going and positive. However, I will not play nice when nice is not warranted. If you are shameless, wicked, mean, phoney I will call you on it. I am signing my name to this blog and will stand up and be counted, not hide behind an alias. I’m too old for that. Someone has to have some integrity. I vote me!!

well, I really can’t be. Stay strong, Holden Caulfield, and keep safe from those phonies! Idiot.