After watching the Blazers employ a bit of the hack-a-Howard strategy (and having nightmares about game seven of the 2000 Western Conference Finals), I decided to generate a graph of the career free throw shooting percentages of every NBA player. Then I got carried away and added 2-pt and 3-pt field goals. These data technically include BAA stats, as they go back to 1946, though the 3-pt data only go back to the 1979-80 season, which is when the 3-pt line was added.

As it turns out, Howard isn’t even in the worst of the worst category for free throws – that exclusive club has only two members: Shaquille O'Neal and Wilt Chamberlain. You can see those two orange data points at just over 50% and 11k attempts.

After looking at the scatter plot, I realized the players who took very few shots during their careers were making the graph a bit messy. Rather than remove them using an arbitrary minimum cutoff, I decided to use a polar plot to reduce the visible noise they created. This is an unconventional transformation from Cartesian to polar coordinates, because instead of plotting 0 to 180 degrees, the polar plot runs (clockwise) from 0 to 100%. I think this alternate plotting method better visualizes the natural bins for players who shoot a lot:

~30-40% for 3-pt FG

~35-55% for 2-pt FG

~65-85% for free throws

Data source: http://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2014_totals.html