Chris Webber was close to a 30% improvement from his worst year in college (50%) to his best year in the pro's (79%).
Karl Malone's worst year was 48% and his best year was 79%.
Most people with the really low percentages are players with awful form who have no hope of really improving their shot, that isn't Gordon.
So I checked Karl's numbers.
College:
1st year: 62% on 8.7 attempts in 32 min/game
2nd year: 68% on 7.4 attempts in 31.6min
3rd year: 54% on 5.3 attempts in 29 min
NBA: 74% over his career
Rookie: 48% on 5 trys in 30.6 min
Soph: 60% on 6.6 attempts in 34.8min
So we're having a player who has 2 down years but before that he wasn't a horrible free throw shooter.
So I don't know too much about Karl.
-Did he have an injury his senior season?
-Did he reconstruct his shooting form?
Some remarks: It's very rare that rooks play that many minutes and fatigue may be a factor in his rookie season slump until he getts his conditioning right the following years.
Chris Webber had some huge changes in free throw shooting as a gradual improvement process early in his career but has shown huge fluctuation even after he had reached good numbers.
Which leaves to wonder:
-Did Webber had mental problems that prevented him from performing from the free throw line
-Was he simply lazy and some summers he didn't spend enough time on free throw shooting
Webber also never was such a huge offensive player when you see his numbers. Below avg accuracy and yet took a lot of attempts. There just wasn't enough analytics to trash talk him like Josh Smith is getting nowadays.
And I could start now to find players who never improved their free throw shooting. I'm just not banking on him to do it because the numbers indicate that's a dumb expectation. And if he can't do it he'll get stopped around the rim with hard fouls that are flagrant-1 hard but get called regular because the player is going for the ball. And that will increase the chance of him getting hurt or missing time. Plain and simple.
