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In 1966, Rick Barry entered the NBA and did something no serious player would consider — he shot free throws underhand, the 'granny shot.' Teammates laughed. Opponents mocked him. Fans snickered every time he stepped to the line, cradling the ball low with both hands and lofting it in a soft arc. But Rick Barry made 90% of his free throws across a 14-year career, one of the highest marks in league history. The NBA average hovered around 75%. The physics actually favor the underhand technique. The ball follows a higher, softer arc with more backspin, producing a larger effective target at the rim. A 2017 study from North Carolina State confirmed it: underhand shooting reduces the variables that cause misses. So who adopted Barry's method? Almost nobody. Wilt Chamberlain — the worst free ...
Popular framing: Players refuse the underhand technique because of ego and fear of mockery — if they were simply more rational or confident, they would adopt the superior method. It's not just 'stubbornness'; it's a rational calculation that social capital is more valuable than 5% more free throws.
Structural analysis: The refusal is not individual irrationality but a stable Nash equilibrium in the NBA's status economy: each player's incentive to conform is maintained by every other player's conformity, making unilateral defection costly regardless of evidence. The norm is self-enforcing at the system level, not the individual level. Chamberlain's explicit admission that he knew it worked but stopped anyway is a data point about system-level lock-in, not personal weakness. The 'Skin in the Game' aspect—why Rick Barry could do it. He didn't care about his 'brand' as much as he cared about his 'craft.' He was an outlier who valued objective results over social feedback.
Framing this as an individual rationality failure misplaces the intervention target. No amount of evidence or encouragement to individual players will shift the equilibrium — what would shift it is a change in the signaling system itself (e.g., a respected coach mandating it for a team, a rule change creating new incentives, or a generation of youth players trained without the stigma). Understanding it structurally reveals why the Barry case has repeated for 60 years without resolution.
