Culver, others have room to grow at the foul line
Derek Culver has gone to the free throw line 94 times over the last 12 games.
That is when sophomore forward Oscar Tshiebwe elected to leave the team mid-season and transfer to Kentucky. The amount of trips has certainly been a positive for the junior big man.
But he’s only connected on 52 of those attempts meaning that he is shooting 55-percent from the line during that time. Take out the Florida game where he hit 14-17 and the total is 49-percent.
That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been effective as Culver is drawing fouls at a high clip in the paint, but he has largely been unable to make teams pay for it. In fact, he enters the final four games of the regular season at second in the league in attempts at the line at 6.5 behind only Oklahoma’s Austin Reaves at 6.6 per contest. Reaves, however, leads the league in free throw shooting percentage at 87.3.
Culver has developed into one of the dominant big men in the entire Big 12 Conference averaging 16 points and 10.6 rebounds over those dozen games and a double-double for the entire year. But it’s fair to wonder how much more effective he could be if he was able to convert at the foul line.
“I can take some positives but there really wasn’t too many positives in my eyes personally. I left a lot of freebies on the line today. It’s something I’ll have to think about on the way home,” he said.
It’s not like Culver was trying to miss the shots, but it’s something he is conscious of as a short coming in his game. The hitch is something that he developed and isn’t something he planned on doing.
But Culver certainly is not the only one.
Senior forward Gabe Osabuohien has struggled in his opportunities as well making only 6-19 during that span or 31-percent. He clearly hasn’t gotten to the line as much as Culver, but it has been an issue late in contests when head coach Bob Huggins has elected to swap the two big men offense for defense.
“I talk to Gabe all the time. Because Gabe’s follow through usually isn’t bad. He has a good follow through just sometimes his hand shakes, I call it breaking through the wall. That’s what my coach told me at an early age, you have to break through the wall follow through and point your fingers toward the rim,” senior guard Taz Sherman said.
Making free throws is a critical aspect in close basketball games and finding a way to put the ball in the basket is going to be essential as the Mountaineers hit the stretch run of the season. Especially in the case of Culver, who has been parked at the line quite a bit of late although that might not be the case had he been making them.
“Probably I think if he were better at the line he wouldn’t get fouled as much. He’s a guy who really absorbs contact, he’s a big strong guy,” Huggins said.
But there is still work to be done, especially because Culver has already shown in the Florida game that he can become more consistent in that department.
“I thought we had it fixed a little bit but it’s like anything else. You get away from it and you don’t do it, when you come back to it, you’re not as good as you were when you left. He hasn’t put the time in that he was putting in when he was shooting the ball well," Huggins said.
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