In his book, STUFF Good Players Should Know, the late great Coach Dick Devenzio shares a simple, powerful acronym on how to score points in basketball games: LONHOBIRS
It means to get Layups Or (open looks with) No Hands (in your face), On Balance and In Rhythm Shots.
It’s a simple rule on how to score more points in basketball games at any level: less bad shots, more good shots.
Kyle Korver, for example, makes his layups about 64% of the time, and he makes his outside shots about 50% of the time. That’s not much of a difference considering most of those outside shots result in 3 points for his team.
Of course shooting more layups would be ideal for him, but that’s not his strongest skill set and that’s not what his team needs him to do either. The point is he shoots a ridiculously high percentage all-around because he remains patient, works within his team’s offensive sets and when he gets his LONHOBIRS, he makes them at a higher caliber than any other player in the league, including Steph Curry, who is more of a volume shooter.
Speaking of Steph Curry, the Warriors just decimated the idea of ‘live by the jump shot, die by the jump shot’ theory which has proved right over decades of NBA basketball. For Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, LONHOBIRS takes on a whole new meaning because to them, it doesn’t matter whether you put a hand up in their face or you don’t. It doesn’t matter if they’re in balance and in-rhythm at every shot attempt: they emulate these game-speed / high-difficulty shots enough in practice, that they’re just as relatively easy to make.
For the rest of us, however, we’re wiser to remain far away from consistently taking the types of shots Steph Curry and Klay Thompson take and make. If you feel you work on them hard enough so that the difficulty of easy or hard shots feels the same, earn your coach’s permission to take those shots more often.