The New York Knicks are enjoying the best shooting season of OG Anunoby's career, and Dirk Nowitizski thinks he played a major role in the improvement.
Dirk Nowitzki is one of the best shooting big men of all time, and he helped usher in the era of stretch fours and fives. However, since the Luka Doncic trade, he has been mostly alienated from the Dallas Mavericks. When he's not in the studio for Amazon Prime Video, he's offered his services as a shooting mentor.
The New York Knicks weren't able to poach Jason Kidd this offseason to replace Tom Thibodeau, but they did manage to convince Nowitzki to take some time to work with them.
OG Anunoby is known for his defense more than anything else, but he is shooting a career-best 40.8% from deep on 6.1 attempts per game. In the Knicks' NBA Cup win over the San Antonio Spurs, he shot five of ten from three.
Nowitzki was on the broadcast, and he insists that he deserves some credit for Anunoby's improved offensive game.
"He just wanted to know every little detail about feet, about positioning of the hands, of breathing, where the eyes go," explained the legend. "He asked me all sorts of questions. One main thing that I told him about is the finger position on the ball. And when I shot the ball, I liked to spread my fingers as wide as I could."
Nowitzki went on to give a shooting breakdown that youth coaches everywhere should show their teams.
"I wanted the pointer and the middle finger to be the last two to touch the ball," he added. "That way, you almost built like train tracks. And the ball should always go straight. You should never miss left or right. So if you shoot with one finger, the ball can go left or right. If you put the ball like this over the train tracks, good shooters should only miss short and long and not left and right. So those are some of the little stuff I talked to him about. Hopefully, it helped him, and he's been shooting it well."
Amazon and NBC's broadcasts have been a far cry from ESPN's Stephen A. Smith-led ramblings and TNT's Inside the NBA's general goofiness. By incorporating serious players like Nowitzki and Udonis Haslem, recently broadcast games feel like they are celebrating and expanding the NBA. It's worth noting that Steve Nash and Blake Griffin let Dirk give his lesson without interruption, which should be a breath of fresh air for most fans.
While Nowitzki was probably a lot more in-depth with Anunoby during their training sessions, his ability to explain it to fans isn't ignored.