It was about eight years ago—wow, time truly does fly, even for a young guy like me—when some of my best friends and I decided to delve into a new fantasy basketball league. This league was custom-built to make things highly interesting for the years to come. We opted for a points league since some friends were new to fantasy basketball and weren’t ready to dive immediately into categories action, since that requires much more diligence in terms of performance statistics from each player. One must not only know which players can consistently deliver 20 & 10 performances or score 30 points per game but also be aware of a player’s shooting efficiency from the field and the free throw line, their steals per game, or if you can count on their three blocks per game, and so on.

To add more depth to the points league, we decided to place additional value on players who were efficient in their field goal and free throw percentages while penalizing those who were not. This approach allowed us, especially me, to gain a deep understanding of how even top-performing, high-stat players could be detrimental to your team, particularly for seasoned fantasy managers who play in similar league settings or category leagues that may not weigh these efficiency metrics heavily. The goal is to make fantasy managers more aware of this efficiency perspective, as understanding how severely the percentage categories can negatively impact our teams’ stats is essential.

Field goal percentage and free throw percentage have another component that makes the percentage itself misleading: volume. Even seasoned fantasy players may not be aware of the majority of NBA players’ shot attempts per game. It’s the weighted percentage that is crucial to understanding the percentage killers.

In this article, I wanted to use my experience tracking these players over the years and utilize Basketball Monster’s 2023-24 top player rater—specifically the top 188 players—to determine last season’s ten worst performers (among fantasy-relevant players) in free throw percentage. In other words, this is a list of players who had the most negative impact in FT% on a per-game basis.

You will see some big names on this list; names that you won’t believe are such huge drags on your free throw efforts. The FT% Killers are not guys who shoot at a painfully bad percentage, like Steven Adams or prime Andre Drummond, but often times guys who are below average/mediocre but shoot a lot. The volume is hard to counteract.

Paolo Banchero is a great example. Last season he shot .725 from the line on 7.0 attempts per game. That’s not good, but it’s not such a low percentage that it looks like an obvious anchor.

Going through last season’s rankings, A top-200 9-cat player averaged only 3.0 attempts per game and shot .783 from the charity stripe. The top-150 shot .793 on 3.5 attempts. When you zoom out, Banchero is shooting much worse than the average on double the volume of the average player, and suddenly the enormity of the task ahead becomes clearer.

That means that to pull Banchero’s free throw percentage back to neutral impact by negating it entirely, you need to compile players who shoot about .851 from the line and combine for seven attempts a game. The closest such combo? Franz Wagner (.850, 4.4), Tim Hardaway Jr. (.852, 2.1) and Georges Niang (.850, 0.7). That means you’re looking at three roster spots, including two guys who shouldn’t be rostered in standard leagues, just to pull Banchero back to average among the top-200, not even the top-150 (ignoring the rest of your hypothetical fantasy roster and that adding Niang to the mix changes the average ever so slightly, just for the sake of an example).

The other route? Drafting someone like Jalen Brunson, who shot .847 on 6.5 attempts per game (Devin Booker, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and DeMar DeRozan are names who could put a Banchero squad above average, while we’re making this detour). Of course, if you draft Brunson first, you may not want to add Banchero knowing the damage he would do to the FT% value that Brunson provides unless the category is not a priority for you — again, despite the head start that Brunson provides. And that’s the balance that you have to embrace if punting FT% is not something you want to do.

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