Nothing But a Backboard: Why Some Korean Basketball Players Love the Bank Shot

As the basketball player steps to the free throw line, the crowd watches in silence. With one sweeping motion he bounces the ball off the backboard and through the net.

Wait, he banked it? On purpose?

The fans erupt in celebration. The shot isn’t a fluke, it’s just another free throw, South Korean style.

The free throw should be an easy point after a foul: a direct, unguarded shot 5 meters from the backboard. But there is an art to it. Most players and fans would say the ball should leave the fingers gracefully, make a wide arc, avoid the rim – and “splash,” as NBA sharpshooter Steph Curry called it, straight into the net.

Of the help of analyses, other shots have evolved in professional basketball. But not the free throw, and over the past thirty years the success rate in the NBA has barely budged from around 77.

The stagnation of the shot comes from the ridicule that any variation on the ‘nothing but net’ technique faces in the United States. Bank shots – where the ball bounces off the glass before falling through the net – are derided as amateurish for anything but layups.

But a dedicated group of players in the Korean Basketball League, or KBL, have embraced the unorthodox technique.

“When the camera pans to the crowd, no one is smiling, no one is grinning at a player who used the backboard,” said Eric Fawcett, a Canada-based basketball analyst who consults with a U.S. college team. He said he did recently noted the trend of bizarre free throws while watching game footage. “There is only confident applause from the home crowd.”

And research shows that the bank shot has clear advantages.

The technique has been an important part of South Korean basketball players for years. Experts say about half of the top 10 free throw shooters regularly set aside their free throws. Players they benched exclusively have pushed their free throw percentages into the 80s and 90s.

Curious to learn more about this phenomenon, Fawcett delved into the statistics and history of the technique. Sure enough, several players shot over 80 percent using the backboard on virtually every free throw over the course of their careers.

Some, he said, even improved dramatically after switching to bank shots, like Yoongi Ha, who jumped from 57 to 80 percent.

How did this unorthodox style become so popular in South Korea? Experts point to some pioneering players in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Legends like Kim Hyun-joon and Moon Kyung-eun first popularized the bank shot,” said Won Seok-Yeun, a South Korean reporter covering KBL. Since then, the bank shot has been recognized by a growing number of people. amateurs and professionals across the country as a valid way to improve free throw average. “A lot of current players who throw bank shots are heavily influenced by it.”

Even some American players who didn’t reach the NBA and went to the KBL, such as Rod Benson and Dewan Hernandez, learned the shot while playing in South Korea and have dramatically increased their free-throw percentage, Won added.

Jeon Seong-hyen, a guard for the Goyang Sono Skygunners, is a top scorer in the KBL and saves his free throws. Since high school, Jeon says, he has idolized Moon for his bank shots. Despite resistance from coaches over the years, he stuck with engineering.

Jeon calls the technique his “signature move.” Now, he said, he never takes free throws without hitting the backboard — and hits on nearly 90 percent of them.

“Psychologically, the shot from the bank is easier than the clean shot because I can see where to aim,” he said. He can concentrate on the rectangle on the board instead of relying on his muscle memory.

Effectiveness is the most important thing on the field, Jeon added – not the style points.

“The shooter can choose a side shot over a direct shot, with an advantage of as much as 20 percent,” said A study by Lawrence Silverberg, a professor of engineering at North Carolina State University, and his colleagues, who used computer simulations to compare bank shots and direct shots.

By first bouncing the basketball off the backboard, a bank shot eliminates much of the ball’s momentum, allowing it to fall into the net with a softer, more controlled trajectory, Silverberg said. He found that this dampening effect significantly reduced the margin of error.

Such small improvements can make or break a game, Silverberg added. Shots from the free throw line often account for about 20 percent of a team’s total score. And “games are generally very close.”

But even with these benefits, the bank shot has not caught on outside South Korea. Experts point to the sport’s deep-rooted culture, which prizes the perfect, high swing. The “nothing but net” shot is the perfect shot in basketball culture, both aesthetically and technically.

“If you shoot a nice swish, it dances just a little bit,” Silverberg said, “and then you get that sound.” He added: “It’s beautiful.”

Coaches also tend to stick to traditional techniques; Very few take the time to break old habits and learn to shoot the bench from the ground up. Silverberg added that most basketball players start with direct shots because they don’t have enough arm strength to bounce the ball off the backboard.

“This is really something unique happening in South Korea,” he said. “You don’t see these kinds of changes very often in sports.”

It’s not the only underrated shooting technique in basketball. Another unorthodox method, the underhand free throwwas made famous over half a century ago by NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry.

But neither the underhand nor the oblique technique seems poised to gain widespread traction.

Despite the greater statistical success, Jeon says, controlling the bank is not easy. Each board has a unique elasticity, so players must adapt their technique to each new playing field, he explained.

And Jeon is fine with the bank shot remaining unconventional.

“I actually don’t want other people to follow,” he said. “I want to be the only one doing this.”