Yesterday, Kyle over at midmajority.com provided a link to an article written by Rice head coach Willis Wilson on collegeinsider.com. It starts,

It’s a lost art, a thing of the past. Many college basketball analysts use such phrases when describing the current state of free throw shooting. On any given night you can peruse the box scores to find the evidence. Percentages from the charity stripe have declined in recent years, but the question is why?

Readers of this blog know that this is simply not the case, and it’s not like one has to dig real far to figure this out. Just go to page 43 of the official NCAA Basketball Records Book. Percentages did go down slightly in 2004, but 2003 was the third best year ever for free throw accuracy. Even ’04 wasn’t too shabby, what with two players chasing the all-time single-season free throw accuracy record. Southwest Missouri State’s Blake Ahearn got the record by missing only 3 out of 120 free throws for a 97.5% success rate. Duke’s JJ Redick came up a little short at 95.3%.

When two people chased the home run record in the same season, fans immediately suspected that either the ball was juiced or the hitters were juiced. Some folks did the research and found out that balls were flying out of parks at an unprecedented rate. When two people chased a free throw record, nobody bothered to challenge the notion that free throw shooting accuracy is declining.

There’s a camp out there that thinks statistics are meaningless. Numbers can be twisted to say anything, sure. But intuition can be off the mark also. Here we have a case where I’m guessing most fans and coaches believe that free throw shooting is deteriorating, when actually the opposite is true. If our intuition can be off on a matter as simple as this, why couldn’t it be off on other fundamental basketball-related beliefs?