How has Auburn gotten so much better from the free-throw line this season?
The Tigers have gone from the nation's No. 269 team from the stripe to a top-50 team this season. And there are several reasons for that.
SF Chad Baker-Mazara (Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)
Texas A&M led Auburn by two points with less than nine minutes to play when the ball reset to Tre Donaldson on the right wing.
Johni Broome worked his way up to the top of the key, looking to attack the Texas A&M defense off the dribble. After taking a bounce pass from Donaldson, Broome took the ball in his favored left hand and drove the lane. At the rim, Broome absorbed the contact from a helping Tyrece Radford and tried a layup.
The ball bounced off the backboard and off the side of the rim. A collective “aww” could be heard through the crowd, disappointed that Broome wasn’t able to get an and-one look to fall.
But Broome was still going to the line for two free throws. The last time Auburn was in a competitive game in the second half — a road loss to Appalachian State — Broome went 1-6 from the charity stripe. In his first season with the Tigers, Broome shot just 56% on free throws.
Broome stepped up to the line and put up his first free throw. Nothing but net.
(clap clap) “A-U!”
The second one was identical. Tie game.
(clap clap) “A-U!”
Two possessions later, after Broome scored a layup on a high pick-and-roll with Donaldson, the Auburn big man was wrestled down to the floor by Radford while trying to attack the basket again.
Broome was headed back to the line. This time, it was a 1-and-1 bonus situation. He drilled the all-important first one and got the second one to fall. In the blink of an eye, Broome had maximized three straight trips down the floor to give Auburn a multi-possession lead, thanks in large part to a 4-4 stretch from the line.
“It was a close game, a gritty game,” Broome would later say. “You know, up two and making it four is a big difference than making it just three or even two — making it a two-possession game. That just goes to the GAs and our managers who are helping me rebound while shooting free throws.”
Later in the game, Auburn got more perfect free-throw trips from Broome, Donaldson and K.D. Johnson. The Tigers went 16-19 from the line in the second half and finished shooting 80.8% for the entire game.
This has become a recurring trend for the Tigers in their nine-game winning streak. As a team, Auburn is now shooting 75.5% from the free-throw line for the season. That ranks inside the top 50 among all 362 Division I teams, and it’s on pace to be the best free-throw mark for the Tigers since their SEC championship campaign in 2017-18.
“All the credit goes to the players,” Bruce Pearl said after Auburn’s win over LSU, when the Tigers went 27-31 (87.1%) on free throws. “All of it. All of it. … Those guys have spent tireless hours in the gym.”
For most of Pearl’s tenure at Auburn, the Tigers have been average-at-best at free-throw shooting. The first SEC championship campaign (77.4%) was an outlier, but last season’s mark (69.6%, which was 269th nationally) was one in the opposite direction.
But this season’s team is different. Auburn has shot 70% or better from the line in all nine of its wins during this current streak. The Tigers haven’t had a stretch of games like that since non-conference play in that 2017-18 season.
So how have the Tigers turned into one of the better free throw-shooting teams in college basketball so quickly?