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Cause for Concern? KU's Free Throw Percentage in Close Games

A frequent concern KU fans have mentioned with regard to this KU team is their Free Throw percentage. Some have tried to downplay the concern, citing the fact that our primary ball handlers (Taylor, Selby, Morningstar, Reed) all shoot 75% or better. Others have noted that many of our games are simply uncompetitive, so what does the FT percentage really matter, anyway?

I decided to take a look at the numbers to see if there was a marked difference between our FT shooting in blowouts and in closer games.

I broke down the games based on whether the final score margin was fewer than 15 points (maybe not the perfect method, but I needed a decent enough sample size to do the analysis). Here's what I came up with:

Opponent Score FT FTA %

Arizona 87-79 20 29 68.9%

UCLA 77-76 16 30 53.3%

Memphis 81-68 11 19 57.9%

USC 70-68 21 31 67.7%

Michigan 67-60 23 31 74.2%

Iowa St. 84-79 19 31 61.3%

Nebraska 63-60 10 19 52.6%

Texas 63-74 11 18 61.1%

Colorado 82-78 14 18 77.8%

Total: 145 226 64.2%

Other games: 205 299 68.6%

All Games: 350 525 66.7%

As you can see, our FT percentage is about 4.5% lower in close games than it is in blowouts. One question that comes to mind based on these stats is kind of a chicken/egg scenario. That is, are these games close because we're not hitting our free throws, or are we missing more free throws because the games are closer and our players wilt under pressure?

Frankly, I'm not sure if there's any way to figure that out. Likewise, I'm not certain it matters. Either way you look at it, it could be problematic, especially come tournament time, when games tend to be closer.

What do you think?

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