“I cringe,” said Dennis Scott, the former Orlando Magic shooting legend.
Marion’s wrists flick around chin level, and the ball sails toward the horizon.
“The worst shot I’ve ever seen in my life,” said the shooting guru David Thorpe, dispensing with all diplomacy.
Type the phrase “ugly jump shot” into Google, and the first link is a YouTube video of Marion flinging and shot-putting 3-pointers. The form stays true, and truly hideous, on free throws and practice shots. Scroll down, and a computer-generated Marion is putting up the same unsightly shot in a video-game clip.
“I haven’t seen anything like it,” Charles Barkley says politely, “but it’s just effective.”
As the Dallas Mavericks battle the Miami Heat for the N.B.A. title, the hitches and hiccups in Marion’s supremely unconventional shot have become amplified. But the results have always been much more pleasant than the delivery.
In a dozen N.B.A. seasons, Marion has averaged 16.8 points a game, with a shooting percentage of .485, a .332 rate from 3-point range and an .812 rate at the free-throw line. At 33, he may not be the freakishly athletic Matrix of his Phoenix Suns days, but he remains a skilled scorer from a variety of spots on the court.
But that jump shot. Oh, that jump shot.
“He kind of shoots the ball from his forehead,” said Dan Sparks, who coached Marion for two years at Vincennes University, a junior college in Indiana. “Fundamentally, his jump shot is about as poor as you’re going to get. But he was always successful with it.”
This is one of the great confounding mysteries of modern basketball. Marion violates nearly every precept of proper jump shooting — balance, ball position, arm extension, follow-through. Coaches and purists turn away in horror. Yet the ball keeps finding the net — at least, more than it has a right to.
From 2002-3 to 2006-7, Marion averaged 104 3-pointers a season and nearly 20 points a game for the Suns. He ranks 19th in scoring among active players, with 15,151 points — just behind Chauncey Billups (known as Mr. Big Shot) and not far behind Jason Terry, the Mavericks’ designated shooter.
Marion’s résumé contains 6,186 made shots, or 6,186 moments where someone wondered, “How in the name of James Naismith did that go in?”
To which Marion replies, a bit defensively, “How many people have scored 15,000-plus points in their career?”
This is a touchy area for Marion, a four-time All-Star who has always been reticent to discuss his peculiar form. When the subject was raised this week, he answered with a disarming smile and staccato answers. He turned twitchy, the way Rodney Dangerfield did just before he grabbed his tie knot and declared, “I don’t get no respect.”
“It just goes in,” Marion said. “Hey, what difference does it make?”
To Thorpe, the executive director of Pro Training Center in Clearwater, Fla., it makes all the difference. Thorpe has built a career on fixing errant jumpers and creating jump shots where they did not exist. He has worked with more than 25 N.B.A. players, including the Heat’s Udonis Haslem and the Houston Rockets’ Kevin Martin.
After watching Marion’s pregame routine before Game 1 of the finals, Thorpe summed up his jump shot in two words: “Completely broken.”
The shot starts much lower than it should. Marion’s arms never extend more than halfway on his follow-through. In the moment before the ball is released, Marion’s hands are tucked to his chest, like a Tyrannosaurus rex. Thorpe compared it to a golfer who stops swinging when the club hits the ball.
“He only does 50 percent of the shot,” Thorpe said, adding, “He’s unbelievably talented, though, so he makes it enough to be serviceable as a shooter.”