Where Have All The Shooters Gone? -- When Ex-Sonic Freddy Brown Says Shooting Has Become A Lost Art, He Isn't Alone . . . And Now The Stats Back Him Up

From his vantage point in the Columbia Tower building, the bank executive can see the part of Seattle from which many said he cast myriad jump shots during a prolific NBA career with the SuperSonics.

Just as clearly, he can see what is happening in the league he left 12 years ago.

Downtown Freddy Brown is not impressed.

"I watch guys and I see very little preparation behind their shots," says Brown, senior vice-president of community business at Seafirst Bank. "They're just putting it up. A majority of the people shooting today have very little thought process behind what they're doing.

"I'd say that shooting has become a lost art."

And he wouldn't even be the first to say it.

Offensive numbers throughout the NBA have plummeted to alarming levels. The average nightly point production per team dipped below 100 points last season for the first time in 39 years. This year, it has nose-dived to below 95 points a game.

Many reasons have been offered for the drought - improved defenses, slowdown offenses, playoff basketball being played during the regular season, rules interpretations. And they all contribute.

But some, such as Brown, suggest plain-old poor shooting as an underlying cause. The numbers do, too. Shooting percentages have dropped steadily for 13 years and have hit the lowest levels - 44.6 percent from the field, 72.9 percent from the foul line - since the anomalous 1968-69 season, a year that saw a fourth-place Boston Celtics team claim the franchise's 11th NBA title in 13 seasons.

Evidence of the cold front is not circumstantial. The fact that field- goal and free-throw percentages have dropped in tandem strongly suggests fundamental mechanical and mental flaws in today's shooter.

"Very few players take pride in stepping on the court and saying, `I'm a shooter,' " says Hersey Hawkins, who plays shooting guard for the SuperSonics. "Much more attention is paid to making the fancy play, dunking the basketball or taking it to the hole."

It starts early. Only 29 North American cities have their own NBA team. And the NBA is so gentrified, only an elite few in those cities get to view games live. So a vast majority of NBA fans here, and worldwide, get their basketball hits from highlight reels and SportsCenter-like television shows.

The consequence has been a generation of basketball players who value style over substance. It isn't enough anymore to just score two points. Three points, of course, is better.

Sometimes two points while splattering an opposing defender is even better.

Laker guard Eddie Jones recently was asked about the biggest flaw of Kobe Bryant, his 18-year-old rookie teammate and fellow Philadelphian.

"All he wants to do is go to the basket," Jones said. "When he gets the ball, that's all he thinks about. He doesn't even consider shooting a jump shot. All he's doing is making it hard on himself. As talented as he is, even Kobe can't beat an entire defense by himself, time after time."

Today's NBA player typically will either take the ball to the basket or launch a shot from beyond the three-point arc. In 1987-88, the year before the NBA's latest wave of expansion, 3.6 percent of successful field goals were three-pointers and 7 percent were dunks. Last year, 15.4 percent were three-pointers and 10 percent were dunks.

There is little in between. A whole range of shots has been forsaken in the modern game. In fact, the medium-range jumper is considered one of the toughest shots in basketball today.

Downtown Freddy Brown is aghast.

"When I played, those were the easiest shots," he says. "That's where we made our living. When you talk about touch, those were the touch shots. You don't get touch by banging down a 23-foot jump shot."

Houston broadcaster Calvin Murphy, considered one of the great pure shooters to have played the game, is equally aghast.

"That's bull," he says. "You can't tell me that the hardest shot in basketball is the 15-foot jump shot. That's where the foul line is."

Murphy surveys the court, catches himself. "Of course," he says, "most guys these days can't make a free throw, either."

In the realm of the real shooters, public enemy No. 1 is the shortened three-point line.

When the NBA instituted the three-pointer in 1979-80, it was introduced to an entire generation of players with carefully honed shooting mechanics. The length of the shot - 23 feet 9 inches - also was daunting enough that Brown led the league in three-point percentage that year with just 88 attempts.

Last year, Chicago's Steve Kerr was the league percentage leader and he made 89 three-pointers. Boston's Dana Barros, No. 3 in percentage, attempted 425 threes. Why? Before the 1994-95 season, the NBA moved the line in to 22 feet. Now everyone feels compelled to let fly.

"If they'd left the line where it was," the Sonics' Hawkins says, "then only the real shooters would be taking the shot."

This season, the NBA is on track to smash the record for threes attempted, even though players are hitting about one of every three. Do the NBA's new math.

"I watch the Rockets play every night, and every night they will attempt 25 three-pointers," Murphy says. "Their opponents will attempt 20. And the most both teams will make (combined) is 17. That's not a good-percentage shot."

The three-pointer has had an even more pervasive effect on shooting than just tempting shooters into taking bad-percentage shots. It probably has changed the mechanics of shots taken inside the arc.

Brown sees examples every summer and Christmas break, when he runs basketball camps for kids.

"Get a group of kids together, throw out some basketballs," Brown says, "and I guarantee the first thing they'll do is go beyond the three- point line and start shooting. That's not the way to learn how to shoot."

Ask Steve Gordon about the best shooter to come out of this area and he has to strain. The director of basketball at the Pro Club in Bellevue has worked with every significant player to have played high school, college or professional basketball in the region. He has to harken back to Carl Ervin, who came out of Cleveland High School in 1980.

The three-pointer nearly has been the ruination of every shooter since Ervin, Gordon reckons.

"When golfers practice their putting, they don't start out with 60- footers," he says. "They start close and work their way out. The great shooters do the same thing.

"The three-point shot is a totally different shot. There are very few pull-up three-point shooters. Mostly everyone else is a standstill set- shooter. And that shot doesn't translate well closer in.

"The college three-pointer (19 feet 9 inches) is what ruined it. The normal offensive spacing is one step in front of that line. Now you see kids getting the ball off a pick and instead of attacking the basket, they're stepping back and shooting the three. That just messes up the mechanics."

When first introduced, the three-pointer promised to open up halfcourt offense, giving the post-up players room to maneuver and the great one-on-one scorers more room to operate. Initially, that's what happened. But shortening the line changed all that.

When the Houston Rockets won back-to-back NBA titles by arraying around Hakeem Olajuwon in the post, their rivals moved quickly to emulate. Fewer perimeter shots, as a consequence, come off the dribble or moving off a pick, motions that more naturally allow shooters to square up to the basket. More and more, the NBA has become a league of standstill shooters.

And, increasingly, those standstill threes are not wide-open, uncontested shots.

"Because of the line, offensive spacing is not that good anymore," says Bernie Bickerstaff, president of the Denver Nuggets. "Defenses can guard the guy on the post and the guy at the three-point line now. That extra two feet makes a lot of difference. You have guys now with arm spans so wide, they can almost touch the post-up player and the spot-up shooter at the same time."

More nimble than ever, NBA defenses find ways to take out or slow the opposition's best scorers. Because trapping, double-teaming defenses have to yield shots somewhere in their effort to stop the stars, there are more and more mediocre shooters taking mediocre shots.

It used to be that point guards were the natural players to double- team off because they were thinking pass first.

"It's necessary now to have a point guard who can make open shots," Bickerstaff says.

The result has been a new breed of shoot-first point guards, heralded by the likes of Tim Hardaway and Kevin Johnson, passing on to Gary Payton and now to rookies Allen Iverson and Stephon Marbury.

Once, the position was the purview of a John Stockton, whose mission was to get his shooters going. Dale Ellis was a shooter who benefited from playing with pass-first point guards such as Nate McMillan, Avery Johnson and now Mark Jackson. His down years came with shoot-first ballhandlers such as Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf.

Likewise, here in Seattle, Hawkins is a shooting guard who doesn't really get to shoot a lot. Payton, the Sonics' point guard, averages about seven more shots a game. It's difficult for a shooter to get into a rhythm if he doesn't shoot.

"As an offensive player, if you're shooting the ball more, you can develop more of a rhythm," Hawkins says."Sometimes I'll go a long time without getting a shot, and I'll turn down a three-pointer because I didn't feel in rhythm.

"That kind of stuff never used to happen. If I was open, I shot the ball, without hesitation. Now, if I miss a few, and I know I'm only going to get eight or nine shots, I start putting pressure on myself to make the shots I take. That's not the way a shooter's supposed to think."

How much do shooters think now anyway?

"The one thing that made a Larry Bird so great was that he always knew when he had you, when your body weight had shifted enough for him to get his shot off," Bickerstaff says. "He knew what he had to do, how to set you up. You just don't see that in the game much anymore."

Expansion has drained much of the talent - diluted it, at least. Much of the shooting numbers started taking a clear dive after the NBA began a three-round wave of expansion in 1988-89.

There still are good shooters and good players, but they aren't congregated as much as they used to be. Chicago continually is cited as a superteam and the Utah Jazz as one that executes and plays well together. The list isn't long.

"There are only about five good teams in the league," says Houston's Charles Barkley. "That's it. . . . There's Utah, us and Seattle in the West and Chicago and Indiana, if they're healthy, in the East. The rest are terrible. Expansion has something to do with it.

"Three-quarters of the league is terrible. You look at the Pacific Division and you've got four terrible teams. There's four teams in the Midwest that are terrible. In the Central you've got four teams that are terrible and Atlanta and Charlotte are inconsistent. And the whole Atlantic Division is terrible. That's three-quarters of the league, even if you give New York the benefit of the doubt."

The consequences are teams that don't create good scoring opportunities. The NBA is being Fratello-ized because of the success of the Cleveland Cavaliers at slowing tempo to make up for talent disparity. The copycats, sprouting at an alarming rate, don't get easy shots in transition and end up with hasty shots as the 24-second clock is about to expire.

Quick.

What's the best way to get to the NBA All-Star Game?

"I practice," says Detroit's Joe Dumars, a career 84-percent shooter from the foul stripe. "I've always considered foul shots to be free points that I don't have to struggle for."

It seems today's NBA player prefers the struggle.

Bickerstaff says the toughest thing in basketball is to practice one's shots, because it requires a routine, plus the self-discipline to shoot 200 to 300 shots a day. Because players don't make that commitment, he says, they tend to shoot the ball differently every time they attempt a field goal.

Danny Ainge, who recently took over as head coach of the Phoenix Suns, is starting to make that discovery.

"As long as I played, I came out and shot the ball for an hour or so before every game," Ainge says. "I had great role models - Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Scott Wedman. I just thought that was the way it was. Sometimes today you can't get guys to practice their shooting."

Many can't see the payoff.

Money has something to do with it. Players are paid more than handsomely for playing the way they do. But Murphy says this also is the point to which the game has evolved.

"Players are so much more athletic, they can score without being great shooters," says the former Houston Rocket. "So that's what they do. Now everybody goes to the basket. I didn't have the luxury of jumping over people. I had to be a pure shooter."

Those were the days.

They abounded with John Havlicek and Jerry West. Oscar Robertson and Lou Hudson. And on and on.

Downtown Freddy Brown would hound them all. He'd incorporate their styles, pick their brains on shooting. The NBA, in his time, was one great shooting laboratory.

"Shooting is an attitude," Brown says. "You have to cultivate it. There was a real evolution I had to go through about where I wanted to go with my shot. I talked with guys all the time about shooting. I bugged them about the subject. Every team had somebody you could talk to about shooting."

And now?

"Honestly?" Brown asks. "Now everybody knows everything. And I couldn't honestly say that each team you'd play today has a guy who could really shoot the ball. I really couldn't."