lefty
05-25-2009, 09:16 AM
ORLANDO -- In the final 5 1/2 minutes, Dwight Howard (http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/players/profile?playerId=2384) was an 80 percent free-throw shooter and LeBron James (http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/players/profile?playerId=1966) shot 60 percent at the line.
Playoff scheduleNeat fact, eh?
Something almost nobody would have predicted -- nobody except James Kirkland and Chris Prothro, two of Howard's childhood friends ("my homeys," Howard calls them) who spent countless long nights over the past seven months at the Magic's practice facility, working with Howard as his designated rebounders, helping Superman overcome his own personal Kryptonite.
"Usually, practice ends at noon, he goes home and chills, then at 8 o'clock we all meet at the complex and get to work," Kirkland told ESPN.com. "We stay there until he makes 300 of them, and he has to make the final 20 in a row. And when he misses, the count starts all over again."
One of the primary chapters in the book on defeating the Magic is to make Howard earn his points from the free throw stripe, where he shot 59 percent in the regular season, missing 345 of 849 attempts in his 79 games.
He entered this postseason with a 52 percent career playoff average from the stripe, and his free-throw difficulties were so much of a concern for the Team USA coaching staff last summer that they turned to Chris Bosh (http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/players/profile?playerId=1977) as their go-to big man during the Redeem Team's march to the gold medal in Beijing.
Not that Howard wasn't practicing then, because he was.
As someone who covered that team from the day they assembled in Las Vegas until the night before they left China on a charter flight with gold medals draped around their necks, I can tell you that I have borne witness to Howard chipping paint off the rims at Valley High School in Vegas, at the arena tucked inside the massive Venetian resort on the island of Macau, at the tennis stadium in Shanghai that was converted to a basketball venue for a pair of exhibition games, at the American University in Beijing where the Americans practiced during their time in the Chinese capital, and at the Wukesong Indoor Arena where the basketball competition was staged.
Every day, you'd see the same thing: Howard standing at the line at the end of practice or at the end of warm-ups, trying his darnedest to get into a free throw shooting rhythm, and failing nearly every time. By the midpoint of the Olympics (where he finished at 47 percent from the line), he was struggling so much that the Team USA braintrust actually thought he was doing himself more harm than good by focusing on that part of his game instead of other areas.
"It was all mental," Howard whispered in the locker room before giving up the details of the secret of Sunday night's success.
The nightly free-throw shooting routine doesn't just involve Howard, Kirkland and Prothro. Howard's I-Pod played a part, too.
Typically, Kirkland and Prothro would plug the I-Pod into a speaker dock, choose a few tunes from Howard's playlist and crank the volume up to full blast in an effort to simulate crowd noise.
"We go for stuff with a loud bass line, mix it up with hip-hop and rock," said Kirkland, who has been friends with Howard since they were both 7-year-olds growing up in the East Point section of Atlanta and attending the K-12 Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy. "When his follow-through would drift to the right, we'd mess with him."
Playoff scheduleNeat fact, eh?
Something almost nobody would have predicted -- nobody except James Kirkland and Chris Prothro, two of Howard's childhood friends ("my homeys," Howard calls them) who spent countless long nights over the past seven months at the Magic's practice facility, working with Howard as his designated rebounders, helping Superman overcome his own personal Kryptonite.
"Usually, practice ends at noon, he goes home and chills, then at 8 o'clock we all meet at the complex and get to work," Kirkland told ESPN.com. "We stay there until he makes 300 of them, and he has to make the final 20 in a row. And when he misses, the count starts all over again."
One of the primary chapters in the book on defeating the Magic is to make Howard earn his points from the free throw stripe, where he shot 59 percent in the regular season, missing 345 of 849 attempts in his 79 games.
He entered this postseason with a 52 percent career playoff average from the stripe, and his free-throw difficulties were so much of a concern for the Team USA coaching staff last summer that they turned to Chris Bosh (http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/players/profile?playerId=1977) as their go-to big man during the Redeem Team's march to the gold medal in Beijing.
Not that Howard wasn't practicing then, because he was.
As someone who covered that team from the day they assembled in Las Vegas until the night before they left China on a charter flight with gold medals draped around their necks, I can tell you that I have borne witness to Howard chipping paint off the rims at Valley High School in Vegas, at the arena tucked inside the massive Venetian resort on the island of Macau, at the tennis stadium in Shanghai that was converted to a basketball venue for a pair of exhibition games, at the American University in Beijing where the Americans practiced during their time in the Chinese capital, and at the Wukesong Indoor Arena where the basketball competition was staged.
Every day, you'd see the same thing: Howard standing at the line at the end of practice or at the end of warm-ups, trying his darnedest to get into a free throw shooting rhythm, and failing nearly every time. By the midpoint of the Olympics (where he finished at 47 percent from the line), he was struggling so much that the Team USA braintrust actually thought he was doing himself more harm than good by focusing on that part of his game instead of other areas.
"It was all mental," Howard whispered in the locker room before giving up the details of the secret of Sunday night's success.
The nightly free-throw shooting routine doesn't just involve Howard, Kirkland and Prothro. Howard's I-Pod played a part, too.
Typically, Kirkland and Prothro would plug the I-Pod into a speaker dock, choose a few tunes from Howard's playlist and crank the volume up to full blast in an effort to simulate crowd noise.
"We go for stuff with a loud bass line, mix it up with hip-hop and rock," said Kirkland, who has been friends with Howard since they were both 7-year-olds growing up in the East Point section of Atlanta and attending the K-12 Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy. "When his follow-through would drift to the right, we'd mess with him."