Through 12 games, Gonzaga’s free throw shooting on par with best teams in school history

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Dec. 24—A few days before Gonzaga’s nonconference home swing against Nicholls State and Bucknell, Graham Ike and Braden Huff decided to get in some extra work on their short game after practice at the Volkar Center.

Huff and Ike broke out their clubs — regulation-sized Nike basketballs in this case — wandered over to the first hole — or, free-throw line — and teed it up.

Gonzaga players normally split off to separate baskets and adhere to individual free-throw routines, but from time to time Ike and Huff like to make things interesting and test their accuracy from the line in “free-throw golf.”

There are no tee boxes, no pitching wedges and thankfully no bunkers in this iteration, but there are other elements of the popular pastime. Ike and Huff play a traditional 18 holes, keep a scorecard and employ a conventional scoring method.

Swishes are scored as a minus-2, made free throws that touch any part of the rim are minus-1 and made free throws that ricochet off the back rim/backboard are counted as zero. Any missed free throw is scored as plus-1.

Sitting next to one another during a postgame news conference on Dec. 18, Ike and Huff relived their latest match — an 18-hole thriller that came down to a few clutch shots on the back nine.

“A classic,” Huff said. “Absolute classic.”

“Yesterday was a good battle,” Ike said.

“We had a good battle,” Huff agreed.

“I feel like we’ve got to play more if we’re going to keep shooting the free throws like this,” Ike said.

“I’m just saying, it was a good battle the other day. I won’t speak too much on that,” Huff said, sporting a wry grin.

The final verdict?

“I’m just an honest man,” Ike laughed. “He won on the 18th hole yesterday. It happens.”

By and large, free-throw shooting has been a point of pride for Gonzaga, and a topic the 14th-ranked Zags have no trouble talking about after 12 games. As a team, Gonzaga is making 81.1% of its free throws, ranking No. 7 nationally, No. 1 among Top 25 teams and No. 1 in the West Coast…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/12-games-gonzagas-free-throw-030200948.html

Author : The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.

Publish date : 2024-12-25 03:02:00

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