How to mess up a free throw shooter

Basketball season is just around the corner. So I thought I'd post this snippet from an article on the NBA that I found over at the Duck blog on the Oregonian. I know, I know. I don't know how I got there but at least something productive came of it.

This should be handed out at games in the student section behing the basket. Read on:

ESPN.com: Lies, damned lies and NBA myths

6. The Crowd Can Affect Free-Throw Shooting
A few words for everyone sitting behind the basket: Sit down. Shut up. For the love of John Wooden, lay off the Thunderstix.

Fact is, you're not making much of difference.

"The balloons, the signs, all that stuff that goes on behind the basket never bothered me much," says former NBA guard Steve Kerr, an 86.4 percent career shooter from the foul line. "The only thing I was ever distracted by was the situation."

Kerr has company. Lots of it. Last season, the 25 teams with split stats listed on NBA.com shot an average of 75.7 percent from the foul line at home and 75.3 percent away, a whopping difference of 0.4 percent. Ten squads even shot better on the road.

Guess what? All those noisemakers aren't going to make a guy miss.

All of which suggests that those oh-so-clever BRICK signs aren't exactly getting the job done.

"Just sitting there yelling, waving your arms, that doesn't work," says Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas. "It has to be something you haven't seen before."

Such as?

"When I was at Arizona, the Oregon Duck had this big smile," Arenas recalls. "He stands in the back, kicking the goal over and over. We must have missed six free throws straight because we were laughing at him."

As it turns out, Thunderstix and wiggling balloons have little effect because the brain simply blocks out random motion, like white noise on a television screen. According to this Slate.com article, fans behind the baseline would be better off moving side-to-side in unison.

Why? Confronted with a field of background motion, observers tend to believe that they are moving while the background remains still -- think of sitting on a stopped subway train while an adjacent train passes. David Whitney, a visual scientist at the University of California-Davis, has demonstrated that a field of background motion can influence hand motions, such as the flick of the wrist on a free throw.

Kerr concurs.

"The most effective one I've seen might have been at Duke, or maybe Kansas," he says. "As soon as the guy was about to shoot, the fans would all move from the right side to the left. It would create this visual of everything moving."

Put those same fans in Duck costumes? Now we're getting somewhere.

If you could get sychronized, just moving back and forth as one sea of humanity could be really distracting. Might even make someone sick. That would be awesome.