Nobody builds an offence around free throws any more, and it shows

Foul-drawing is the one form of scoring a defence cannot contest, yet it has become an accident rather than a plan.

A free throw cannot be blocked, contested, rushed, or rebounded away from you. Two of them beat almost any shot you can manufacture in a stagnant halfcourt. And somewhere in the last few years, drawing them stopped being a design goal and became something that merely happens to players who happen to be strong.

Part of this is officiating. The tightening on jump-into-the-defender moves and the rip-through cleaned out a genre of foul that had become embarrassing, and rightly so. But the reaction from offences was strange. Instead of finding legal ways to keep generating contact, plenty of teams simply stopped trying and settled into a diet of catch-and-shoot threes and rim attempts finished away from bodies.

The teams that still hunt fouls do it in specific, coachable ways, and none of them require a superstar. Post seals against a smaller switch, where the defender either fouls or gives up a layup. Offensive rebounds, which draw more shooting fouls per possession than almost any other situation because everybody is off balance and reaching. Attacking the second defender rather than the first, so the help arrives at speed and has to make a decision in a tenth of a second. Slow, deliberate drives into a closeout, where the offensive player's momentum is under control and the defender's is not.

There's a version of this that annoys me specifically. Coaches tell a young wing to stop settling and get to the rim, then say nothing whatsoever about what he does when he arrives. Finishing through contact is a skill with mechanics like any other. Where you plant. Whether you go off two feet to absorb a hit or off one to beat the rotation. Whether you keep the ball high or bring it down into the swipe that's waiting. Nobody drills it, because free-throw rate isn't a number anyone brags about.

And the payoff compounds in ways a per-possession model tends to miss. Fouls put opposing rim protectors on the bench in the third quarter. They make a defence play the next four possessions at eighty per cent aggression. They give you points on nights when nothing else is falling, which is precisely when playoff series get decided.

If your offence's entire identity is shot quality, you've built something that works beautifully right up until an opponent takes away one action and dares your third option to create. Free throws are the floor under all of it. Build the floor first, then worry about the ceiling.