The gap between catch and shoot is a footwork gap

Most players who shoot well standing still and badly off the dribble do not have a shooting problem at all.

Watch a shooter miss badly off the bounce and then bury three in a row spotting up, and the easy conclusion is that his stroke breaks down under movement. Usually the stroke is fine. The feet arrived wrong.

A jump shot is a sequence that starts at the floor. Force goes into the ground, travels up through the hips, and the hands do very little except aim and release something that has already been decided. Off a catch, a good shooter has organised that sequence before the ball arrives. He is turned, his feet are set, his weight is back on the inside foot, and the pass simply lands in a machine that is already running.

Off the dribble, that preparation has to happen in a single step while moving sideways. Now the base is uneven, the shoulders are rotated relative to the hips, and the upper body compensates for a lower body that is pointing somewhere else. The result is a shot that misses left and right rather than short and long, which is the signature of an alignment problem rather than a strength or touch problem.

That distinction is the useful bit. Long and short misses are about legs, distance judgement and fatigue. Left and right misses are almost always about the base. Any coach who charts miss direction for a week will learn more than a month of shooting drills would teach.

Which is why I am sceptical of the standard fix, which is to shoot five hundred pull-ups a day. Repetition of a broken sequence produces a very consistent broken sequence. The productive work is slower and looks less like basketball: footwork patterns without a ball, then with a ball and no shot, then a shot at half speed, building a plant that arrives square whichever way the player is travelling.

The other half is the dribble itself. A hard, low final bounce buys time to get the feet down. A soft high one does not, and a player who cannot control the last dribble will never be a reliable pull-up shooter no matter how pretty his release looks in an empty gym.

Fix the last dribble. The shot was never broken.