Shooting a Basketball - Correct Hand Placement

Arthur Jackson: Hi! I am Arthur Jackson from One on One Basketball. Now, we are going to talk about stance and hand position. I think one of the most important keys to be the good shooter is form and being consistent with your form. When you talk about great shooters the reason they are great shooters, they make a lot of shots. Players like Ray Allen, Michael Ray, Jason Kapono, they are known as some of the best shooters in the country and they have great form and they are very consistent. So, we want to make sure when we are working on our form that we are very disciplined and practicing the correct way and breaking it down. We are going to start off with our foot placement. We want our feet about shoulder width apart, maybe just a little bit wider. We want out right foot; if you are right handed, just a little bit in front of the left. We want our weight little bit forward, kind of on the balls of our feet, our knees are bent a little bit, nice and relaxed, hips are nice and low. The next thing we want to talk about is our arm and one of the ways to make a consistent form -- again there is lots of different instructional methods for shooting. One of the methods that I use and I really like is the Right Angle method. If I have my arm down by my side and I pull it up at 90 degrees of the elbow and I bend my wrist back at 90 degrees and I place the ball in my hand there, I want to make sure that my hand is centered on the basketball, right in the center, very important. A lot of the people place their hands a little bit to the side, which means they rely too much on the left hand. With my shooting hand, I want to place it right in the center of the basketball; I want to put my opposite hand lightly on the side, so that as I drive up, I am not relying on the opposite hand; I can drive the ball up and keep my arm in straight forward pattern. I also keep my angles as I am driving up through my shot. So, this is something that is very important. A lot of people lean one way, bring the ball too much over, but we want to make sure we drive it up. So, just revealing our feet about shoulder width apart, we want to have our right foot a little bit in front. If you are the right handed shooter, our knees are bent, our hips are low, we want to make sure we are not rocking our shoulders forward or backwards; you loose a lot of momentum that way; our hand comes up at right angles; we place the ball in the center, hand right in the center, opposite hand on the left and then we are going to drive the ball up. So, next we are actually going to talk about the shooting motion.