FOUL PLAY

By BILL PLASCHKE

Jan. 25, 1997 12 AM PT

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The old coach rests his elbows on the wooden table high above the Forum court, watching the Lakers with a gentle smile of a man with his grandchildren. He points, chuckles, clasps his hands together in delight.

Then someone asks him about his team’s free-throw problems, and the old coach is on the sideline again, arms stiff, lips tight, somebody about to get his hair mussed.

He balls up his aging fist, slams it down on the table.

“It’s killing me,” Bill Sharman says.

He is asked what he can do about it, and the fist uncurls, the old coach sighs.

If he has learned one thing about today’s NBA players, it’s this:

Just because you have something to say doesn’t mean anybody is willing to listen.

The Lakers, who eventually defeated Golden State on Friday, are the worst free-throw shooting team in the NBA.

Sharman, the team’s special consultant, is the sixth-best free-throw shooter in NBA history.

Yet he has not counseled them once.

He has not talked to them about his mastery of concentration, of muscle memory, of release, of follow-through.

He has held no practices, conducted no clinics, performed no tutoring.

He has not even spoken to Shaquille O’Neal since meeting him several months ago during training camp in Hawaii.

Why?

Why do you think?

The Lakers have left such matters in the hands of the players.

And the players have not asked.

“I would like to mention some things right now that would help the entire team,” he says, pausing. “But I shouldn’t do that. I don’t like saying anything to anybody. I’m not going to second-guess the coaches.”

Those coaches admire him. “He is one of our valuable resources,” Del Harris said.

The owner respects him. Sharman watches games from Jerry Buss’ private box, watches many practice, turns in reports.

The players?

“Well, Shaquille always seems so busy, so many things to do,” Sharman says. “I don’t get involved.”

Sharman, a 70-year-old treasure who spoke his last critical word sometime in the early 1980s, does not say this with anger or remorse.

But somebody should.

The Lakers can dazzle as they did Friday against the Warriors, and it won’t matter.

If they don’t shoot free throws better than in the first half of the season, they cannot win an NBA championship.

They cannot even advance to the NBA finals.

They will lose because, late in pressure games, they will be missing more than free throws.

They will lose because they will be missing O’Neal, who cannot be trusted to touch the ball in the clutch because he cannot be trusted to turn the predictable fouls into two points.

Sharman won’t say exactly that.

But he will say this: “If we don’t shoot better, it’s going to hinder our chances and make it very difficult.”

The most important free throw number in the first half of the season is not the Lakers’ .643 foul shooting percentage, worst in the league and on a pace to become the worst in franchise history.

It is not O’Neal’s embarrassing .476 free throw percentage, including .432 in the team’s 12 losses.

It is not even that the team would have won four of those games if they had made a league-average 73% of their free throws during them . . . and sent two other games to an overtime.

The most important number is six.

That is the number of shots O’Neal attempted in the fourth quarter and overtimes during losses to East powers Chicago and Detroit.

He took six of his team’s 69 shots, or 9%.

During the rest of the first half of the season, O’Neal took 21% of the team’s shots.

If O’Neal doesn’t improve, he could be the league MVP and still play the final minutes of the team’s final playoff games as an $120-million floor lamp.

The things Bill Sharman could tell him.

He could tell him about shooting free throws every night against a barn outside his childhood farm in the Central California town of Porterville.

“First thing I would do with any free-throw shooter is line him up against a wall and have him shoot against that wall, over and over, to get a straight release, to memorize it,” Sharman says.

He could tell him about leaving his house every morning on the day of a game to shoot free throws alone at a local high school.

And not when he was high school--when he was a star in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the Boston Celtics.

Is it any wonder he won the free throw championship a record five consecutive seasons?

“I would bring my own ball, chase my shots,” he said. “Heck, it was in the morning and I didn’t have anything to do in the morning.”

Sharman asked his entire team to do the same thing when he became Laker head coach. When that 1971-72 team won 33 consecutive games, every team copied him, resulting in today’s shootarounds.

O’Neal works hard on his foul shots during shootarounds.

Byron Scott said he walked in twice this week to discover him shooting before practice. Visitors were forced to wait for him long after practice because he was doing the same thing.

But is he doing enough? Is he memorizing those muscles? Is he standing against that wall? Should he talk to the old coach?

“He’s so busy, he’s not practicing as much as he should to get better,” Bill Sharman said. “But today’s players, they play more games than we did. It’s a lot harder for them.”

The old coach chuckled. “Maybe we just had more time on our hands.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

LAKER FREE-THROW PERCENTAGES IN ‘90s

*--*

1989-90 .787 1990-91 .798 1991-92 .766 1992-93 .756 1993-94 .717 1994-95 .735 1995-96 .746 1996-97 .643

*--*

WORST FREE-THROW SHOOTING TEAMS SINCE 1950

*--*

‘67-68 Philadelphia .635 ‘63-64 San Francisco .638 ‘64-65 San Francisco .640 ‘96-97 Lakers* .643 ‘68-69 Lakers .650

*--*

Season in progress: 1996-97 AT A GLANCE

Best free-throw shooting teams