I am kind of new to the site so if this has been covered recently please let me know, but opp. free throw % has been bothering me for a while now i.e. since the Golden State loss when they could not miss from the charity stripe through the Boston home game when they hit their first 21 free throws.  Currently, the Blazers are last in the league in free throw percentage allowed, with opponents shooting .821 from the line (amazingly only 1 team even shoots a higher  percentage than that). What really bothers me about this stat is that at first glance it should be the most irrelevant stat in basketball, because every team plays poor free throw shooting teams and good ones, it should even out.

For starters the league average free throw shooting is about  .768 so that puts the Blazers 53 points above the average.  So basically for every twenty free throws taken the Blazer's opponent makes one additional free throw, so it's not a huge difference in most cases, but in a close game where the opponent shoots 30 free throws it can change the game.

You might think that the disparity is just some strange anomaly and the Blazers have just been unlucky.  But the Blazers have been leading this stat for a long time now at least as long as I have been checking which has been several months.   You could also argue that someone is bound to lead this stat and it will even out in the long run.  I kept thinking this for a while but looking at the numbers this doesnt seem the case.  Every team in the league except for the Blazers has an opponents free throw percentage ranging from ,738-.800.  So the Blazers lead the league by 22 percentage points!  Not only that but every team is within 32 points of the average .768 execept for the Blazers this means the data is not very spread out and with a slight calculation you can check that the standard deviation (wikipedia it if you aren't familiar with statistics stuff, I don't claim to be anything but a novice in statistics so you arent alone) is 17.52, now the Blazers being more than one standard deviation away from the closest team is pretty amazing, which makes me believe that this is NOT an aberration and something very strange is going on.  My question is why do the Blazers allow a higher percentage?

My first thought was that the Blazers play at the slowest pace in the league and because of this players might be more rested and because of this can knock down their free throws more easily.  This argument does seem to make sense and in fact the Knicks who play at one of the fastest paces in the league actually defend the free throw line the best with opponents shooting .738.  However, I can point out that teams like the Mavs and Warriors who play at a fast pace give up a high percentage from the line and teams like the Hornets and Wizards who  play at a slower pace give up a low percentage.

Keep in mind that we shoot about as many free throws as we give up and it's close to the league average (we are 19th on free throws taken its not far away from the average but it needs to get better).  We've played bad shooting teams like Orlando and Miami and good ones like Toronto, so I don't think that's it either.

My only conclusion that I can come to is that the Blazers are fouling higher percentage shooters more often than low percentage shooters and do this to a greater extent than anyone else in the league.  Traditionally the high percentage shooters are wing players and guards not big men.  So what this tells me is that we aren't defending these players very well and they are getting to the line.  Conversely, it also means that we aren't fouling low percentage shooters too often so big men aren't getting to the line.  So if you agree with my conclusions then basically Joel and Greg are doing a great job defensively in one on one situations but our guards are getting killed out there and/or are big men aren't rotating quickly enough to protect the rim without fouling. 

Right now we are 24th (or somewhere in that range depending on what metric you like) on the defensive end; if we want to be a playoff team or an elite team that needs to improve.  IMO and what this free throw nonsense supports is that our guards are killing us on the defensive end, and our big men are not making rotations very well and until we get better there we are going to struggle to make the playoffs.

btw I used basketball reference for my stats