Hi guys, need some opinions from all you vets out there.

Here is the situation. You've just become the coach of D1 school. Your AD tells you that your goal is to lead the nation in free throw attempts. How do you build for this?

Would it be better to run fastbreak or uptempo motion? (or other?)

Recruit guards with high ath, lp, and bh right?
Bigs with high ath and lp?

What else??


Thanks guys

HoboBaggins
Future Duke Coach

Why is your name HoboBaggins?

Uptempo Fastbreak, with 12 solid players.

If you want the team to be good, you should have one or two guys who can hit perimeter shots, but if the goal is simply lots of free throws, for whatever reason, leave everyone at -2, and focus distribution on guys with LP higher than PER. You don’t necessarily need *high* LP guards, but if LP is higher than PER, they will tend to see more FT attempts.

Speed is important for minimizing turnovers if you’re going to go uptempo and/or fastbreak, and will increase your FTA. Don’t leave out speed.

Stamina is important for outlasting the other team. If your guys are always fresh or fairly fresh, and the other team is tiring, they will foul more.

you'd want to be running press (even if it means you have to run normal tempo IMO), as this will on average significantly increase the fatigue of your opponent. this leads to more fouls. also, it makes stamina even more important on your end (and speed).

i agree with most of what shoe said. just keep in mind if you have a 3pt scorer type guard, setting to -2 doesn't go make him drive. you need to take shots close to the basket to draw lots of fouls, and a top notch spd/per/bh guard isn't going to take those no matter what you set him to. -2 just makes him take a **** ton of a long 2s. i might be oversimplifying a bit, but for sure you can't get a 3pt scoring archetype guard to draw fouls well. so you'd want to avoid those.

if you want to be good, like shoe said, you'd have a 3 pt scorer or two helping balance the team. but if this would also invite a more reasonable defensive sag against you, maybe a -1 or -2. you want that -5 if you are going for fouls. if you want to be good AND get the most free throws, you only have 1 option - fb/fcp, scoring 100% from the inside especially from the back court. they can run that -5 at you, and your shooting % will be awful, but they'll struggle to field a viable team by the end of the game. even if you have to run normal, i'd take it over uptempo fb/man on foul drawing. you could probably swing uptempo with 85 team stamina and an even 12 man rotation.

Shoe3 and Gillispie1, thank you very much for the info! That’s exactly the type of stuff I wanted to know!