By Blaidd Drwg
Dwight Howard recently broke the NBA record for free throw attempts in a game with 39. Howard, a career 59% free throw shooter, managed to hit only 21 of his attempts but still scored over 40 points and lead his team to victory. It got me thinking, how well does the hack-a-Shaq approach work? There have been 29 instances of a player shooting 25 or more free throw attempts since 1985. Here are the results of them:
| Player | Points Scored | FTA | FTM | Career FT% | Game Result |
| Dwight Howard | 45 | 21 | 39 | 59.5% | Win |
| Shaquille O’Neal | 41 | 19 | 31 | 52.7% | Win |
| LeBron James | 47 | 24 | 28 | 74.4% | Loss |
| Shaquille O’Neal | 39 | 15 | 28 | 52.7% | Loss |
| Shaquille O’Neal | 40 | 14 | 28 | 52.7% | Win |
| Karl Malone | 32 | 15 | 28 | 74.2% | Loss |
| Willie Burton | 53 | 24 | 28 | 78.6% | Win |
| Kobe Bryant | 52 | 20 | 27 | 83.7% | Win |
| Kobe Bryant | 45 | 18 | 27 | 83.7% | Loss |
| Gilbert Arenas | 60 | 21 | 27 | 80.4% | Win |
| Allen Iverson | 60 | 24 | 27 | 78.0% | Win |
| Vince Carter | 46 | 22 | 27 | 79.7% | Loss |
| Charles Barkley | 26 | 22 | 27 | 73.5% | Win |
| Sleepy Floyd | 30 | 22 | 27 | 81.5% | Win |
| Michael Jordan | 58 | 26 | 27 | 83.5% | Win |
| Kevin Martin | 50 | 23 | 26 | 86.4% | Loss |
| Kevin Durant | 46 | 24 | 26 | 87.9% | Loss |
| Kobe Bryant | 40 | 23 | 26 | 83.7% | Win |
| Tracy McGrady | 62 | 17 | 26 | 74.7% | Win |
| Kobe Bryant | 47 | 23 | 26 | 83.7% | Win |
| Rony Seikaly | 30 | 12 | 26 | 67.9% | Win |
| Charles Barkley | 47 | 21 | 26 | 73.5% | Loss |
| Gilbert Arenas | 45 | 23 | 25 | 80.4% | Win |
| Kobe Bryant | 62 | 22 | 25 | 83.7% | Win |
| Gilbert Arenas | 43 | 21 | 25 | 80.4% | Loss |
| Jermaine O’Neal | 55 | 19 | 25 | 71.1% | Win |
| Latrell Sprewell | 41 | 22 | 25 | 80.4% | Loss |
| David Robinson | 71 | 18 | 25 | 73.6% | Win |
In cases where someone went to the line 25+ times in a game, that player’s team came out ahead 18 out of 29 times. It isn’t a good comparison, since in a large number of those cases, it was the team’s best free throw shooter, and that is usually the last guy you want to foul. If you saw that 75% is where you want an NBA free throw shooter to be, lets take a look at all of the guys under that mark. There were 13 cases in which the guy at the line was under 75% and they won 9 of those games.
I was also surprised that Shaq didn’t end up on this list more often. I then though, maybe teams only use hack-a-Shaq in the playoffs. So I looked at Shaq’s playoff numbers from 1993-2005 and here is what I found:
- Shaq played in 192 games and his teams sported a 121-71 record, good for a 63% win rate.
- In those 192 games, Shaq only shot 20+ free throws 7 times, with a high of 39.
- I lowered the threshold to 15+ per game, thinking that they played hack-a-Shaq later in the game and found that there were 41 games where he went to the line at least 15 times.
- In those 41 games, his team sported a 29 – 12 record, good for 71% win rate.
I don’t want to bother doing this for anyone else since I have to look manually through the game logs to figure this out, but I am willing to make at least one general assumption:
The moral of the story, repeatedly fouling the big guy really doesn’t pay off.
FlatbreadGarden 
Shaq wasn’t on the list often, but he has 3 of the top 5 totals of all time — still impressive.
Sleepy Floyd was a lot of fun. Good player too. His age 26 season was 18.8 points and 10.3 assists per game.
Something I didn’t know: George Karl was Floyd’s coach that year. Chris Mullen was in his 2nd season, so this would have been right before “Run TMC”. (Mitch Richmond, Tim Hardaway, Chris Mullen)
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Sleepy Floyd fun fact, from the wikipedia Golden State Warriors page:
After a subpar stretch in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the team had a brief resurgence with coach Karl, culminating in a famous 1987 Western Conference Semifinal match against Magic Johnson’s Lakers, which is still shown on TV in the NBA’s Greatest Games series.
In the game, the Warrior’s NBA All-Star point guard Sleepy Floyd had an amazing performance in the second half, which is still the NBA playoff record for points scored in a quarter (29) and in a half (39). Floyd scored 6 consecutive field goals in the fourth quarter, finishing the game with 51 points, and leading the Warriors to victory…
…The next paragraph after that refers to the Latrell Sprewell choking incident.
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