During each game in Cameron Indoor Stadium, the graduate student sections have an important task — distracting the opposing team’s free-throw shooters. Stationed behind each basket, graduate students are perfectly positioned to tilt the game in Duke’s favor with an arsenal of distractions.
Over the past four years, I’ve attended nearly every Duke men’s basketball home game. During these games, I or a proxy (thanks Alex and Oscar) have recorded each free-throw attempt, the accompanying distraction and the result of the shot. I previously published an analysis from the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons but now present additional data from the two most recent seasons. Any distractions used fewer than five times in the past four years were not included. In total, 616 free-throw attempts were included.
A few disclaimers before jumping into the data; this isn’t intended to be a methodologically rigorous analysis. There are many confounding factors affecting whether a given player makes a shot aside from student distractions, and these aren’t accounted for here. Free-throw shooters have different baseline averages, and some distractions are used more often than others, leading to discrepant sample sizes potentially driving false trends in the data. Furthermore, the quality of each distraction may differ depending on the number of students present and the energy they put into it.
Here’s a quick reminder adapted from my last story about the various distractions:
The jump: We’ll start with a self-explanatory one. Students hunch down and stay quiet until the free-throw shooter begins his motion, at which point they leap into the air and yell to provide both a visual and auditory discombobulation.
The false start: Affectionately named after a football referee’s mechanic when a member of the offense moves early, this distraction is when students form fists with both hands and rapidly rotate them around each other, alternating between above-the-head and chin heights.
The fish: In this distraction, students first place their palms together at chest level. Then, they move their hands upward in a serpentine fashion, curving to the left and to the right until their arms have fully reached above their head, similar to a football referee’s signal for a safety.
The countdown: Students create an artificial shot clock for the free-throw shooter, calling out a countdown starting at 10 and going to zero. This distraction is also accompanied by a hand gesture where students hold up a number of fingers corresponding to the number of seconds remaining on the clock.
The hand wave: This one starts with students extending their arms to the left or to the right. As the shooter begins his motion, they then rapidly swing their arms in the other direction and yell.
The stomp and punch: Students stomp on alternating feet and swing the accompanying arm high into the air.
The flailing arms: As its name suggests, this is not the most organized distraction. Students begin with both arms slightly above their head, palms out. Then, in a karate chop-like motion, they alternate moving their hands upward and outward.
The clap: Students raise their arms high above their head and clap at increasing frequency as the player prepares to shoot.
Without further ado, here’s the proportion of missed free throws over the past four years, sorted by the distractions outlined above.
A few takeaways from the data:
- The hand wave and the fish remain the two most effective distractions, resulting in a miss around one-third of the time. In addition to being the most effective, they are also the most popular, with the hand wave and fish being used 181 and 99 times, respectively.
- The clap causes the shooter to miss only 4% of the time, making it by far the least effective distraction. However, it is also the least common distraction, having been used only 24 times in the past four years.
- Only three distractions result in an above-average miss rate. We’ve already discussed the hand wave and the fish, leaving the countdown as the third-most effective distraction. The countdown has been used only 26 times, making it the second-rarest distraction.
- The false start and jump are tied for the third-most common distraction, yet they result in a below-average miss rate.
I hope that this information can continue to guide the selection of free-throw distractions in the coming seasons. Generally, it seems that the most effective distractions are also the most frequent, but there are some exceptions to this pattern that may be useful areas to address in future years.
Finally, creating new distractions that are similar to those shown to be most effective may be another exciting direction in the coming years. As someone who has been a Duke student for eight years, I’ve gained an appreciation for how Cameron Crazies can truly affect the game. I’ll be excited to follow along from afar and invite anyone else with an interest in free-throw distraction science to take up the mantle and continue this data-keeping next year and beyond.
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