Report: Andre Drummond dismisses talk of underhanded free throws
Pistons center believes he's found a strategy to fix his woeful free-throw shooting
We know that Andre Drummond has been spending his off-season working on his free-throw shooting.
But it appears the Detroit Pistons center continues to reject the idea of shooting free throws underhanded, at least according to a report from the Hartford Courant.
"I'm just really just continuing to work on back-to-the-basket stuff," Drummond told Dom Amore of the Courant, "and working on getting better from the foul line. I'm going to stick with the formula I have now."
Drummond was back at UConn, where he played a season of college basketball, last week and was on hand Friday for Jim Calhoun's Charity All-Star Game at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., along with many other fellow ex-UConn stars.
Drummond is riding high this off-season after signing a max contract extension of five years and more than $125 million, making him the highest-paid player in Pistons franchise history.
But with that comes extra work to do. Though Drummond was an NBA All-Star for the first time in 2015-16 and put up 16.2 points and 14.8 rebounds per game (the latter of which led the league), his free-throw shooting got even worse, dropping to 35.5% from 38.9% the previous year.
That raised questions as to how Drummond and coach/president Stan Van Gundy would address his free-throw shooting, especially since Van Gundy had to keep Drummond out late in games so opposing teams wouldn't intentionally foul him.
Though the NBA last month tweaked its "Hack-a-Dre" rule, it was only a half-step toward addressing the problem that won't help Drummond much.
“At the end of the day, I still got to rise up and make free throws," Drummond said last month. "We’ve tried different things, we’ve found something that works and I’m going to stick with it when the season starts and just roll with it.”