Some guys (Dwyane Wade, for one) don't have the best form, but they still know how to get the ball into the hoop.
View full sizeDwyane Wade's shooting form might not be technically perfect, but it works well for the Miami Heat star.When it comes to shooting jump shots, do you prefer cookies or BEEF?
When Mo Williams was a young player, perfecting that beautiful rainbow jumper of his, he was taught to flick his wrist at the end of his follow-through.
"I always was taught to get the cookie out of the cookie jar," he said, demonstrating how that wrist motion would put him in perfect position to raid the cookie jar.
But Daniel Gibson loved hamburgers, so when his dad was teaching him how to shoot, he used the acronym BEEF: Batter's Eye on the rim, Elbow in, Follow through.
Now Dwyane Wade is another story altogether.
"D-Wade is considered more of a slasher, a scorer instead of a shooter," Williams explained. "His shot is not textbook. He makes it work, just because he's so good."
As the Cavaliers saw in Wednesday's loss in Miami -- and many times over the years -- his jumper has no trajectory whatsoever. It's like a bullet that drops through the hoop so fast you could put a radar gun on it.
"We call that a flat jumper," Williams said.
"It's more like shooting darts," Gibson added.
Or daggers. How many of those shots has Wade hit against the Cavs -- or every other NBA team -- just when the Heat seems to need them most?
They're not pretty, but they are deadly.
"Once he gets going, it's almost like he can throw up anything and it'll go in," Williams said. "That's why he's so good. In a 3-point-shooting contest, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't win. But overall, he does so many other things. Players like that, if he was a pure shooter, he'd be the greatest ever."
Lots of teams feature great scorers as well as great shooters. Miami's shooting counterpart to Wade is Mike Miller. In Cleveland, Antawn Jamison is a scorer. But, take your pick -- Williams, Gibson and Anthony Parker are great shooters. Back in the day, Ron Harper was a scorer, while Mark Price was a shooter.
Williams and Gibson admitted there are guys in the NBA whose jumpers are so ugly, other players make fun of them. (Dallas' Shawn Marion comes to mind.)
But Cavs coach Byron Scott disagrees.
"You don't make fun of anybody's shot that goes in," said Scott, a great shooter in his day who still will challenge his players to shooting contests at practice. "It might not be textbook. It might not be the prettiest looking jump shot in the league. But if it goes in. . . .
"I had a coach say to me all the time, 'I don't care where you shoot it from, if it's going in on a consistent basis, you keep shooting it that way.' "
Like many young players are taught, Scott's follow-through was referred to as a ducktail or gooseneck -- the position of his arm and wrist at the end of his shot. (Remember the popular "goosey" or "goose eye" Cavs players made after a 3-pointer the past couple years?)
Now when the coach is teaching youngsters to shoot at his basketball camps, he tells them seven things have to be correctly aligned for the shot to go in: feet, knees, belly button, waist, elbow, wrist and confidence.
The thing about a great shooter is that the rim will forgive him, unlike Wade, whose misses bounce away hard.
"It's either in or it's not," Scott said. "There's no in between. Whereas Boobie or Mo -- guys who put a lot more arc on the ball -- sometimes it hits on the rim and it will bounce around and have a chance to go in. With DWade, if it doesn't go in, it's not going to bounce around the rim and go in. It will hit and probably be at the free-throw line somewhere."
Cavs legend Austin Carr walked by during this discussion about shooters and scorers, cookies, BEEF and ducktails and snorted.
"I just shot the ball," he said. "We didn't have terms back then."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: mschmitt@plaind.com, 216-999-4668