Is this the end of Hack-a-Shaq?

On Tuesday, the NBA announced an attempt to cut down on the away-from-the-play foul known specifically as “Hack-a-Shaq.” While it will not be a complete ban, three adjustments were made:

The rule for away-from-the-play fouls made in the final two minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime resulting in free throws will now be expanded to the last two minutes of all quarters. The fouled team will be awarded one free throw and retains possession of the ball.
Defensive fouls on inbounds plays will be treated the same as any away-from-the-play foul.
The fouling strategy of jumping on an opposing player’s back will presumptively be called a flagrant foul immediately. Such plays were previously subject to flagrant calls but were not automatic.

Some kind of change was bound to happen. As I wrote in a previous article about the Hack-a-Shaq, free throw rates for poor free throw shooters like DeAndre Jordan, Dwight Howard, and Andre Drummond skyrocketed once their teams were in the bonus situation. At that foul state, any team foul leads to two free throws and Jordan’s free throw rate, specifically, went from 54.6 percent when not in the bonus to 347 percent. That is a bit excessive. The average increase in free throw rate for players when going out of the bonus situation to in it is about 25 percent, from 22 to 47.

What was also interesting from Tuesday was commissioner Adam Silver adding that the NBA will reduce the number of intentional fouls by roughly 45 percent. That’s quite a reduction just by ruling out intentional fouls in the last two minutes of each quarter, though by that point in the quarter it only takes one team foul to put a team in the bonus/penalty situation as opposed to four team fouls during the first 10 minutes. The adjustment makes Hack-a-Shaq not impossible to deploy, but at the least it will be more difficult.

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Here’s what else to know based on bonus/penalty data I compiled from NBA.com last season that could have an impact on Hack-a-Shaq going forward:

Out of about 119,000 total minutes, teams spent 28,311 or about 24 percent of them scoring in the bonus (for example, the Spurs spent 899 of their 3,941 total minutes scoring in the bonus). That’s about the same percentage as the two seasons prior, and it matches up with last season’s average percentage of possessions in the bonus, which was 26. You can find team-by-team possession-based stats when in and out of the bonus here.

As for minutes, below is a breakdown by quarter, as well as total times teams got in the bonus. I also included bonus time outside the two-minute mark in each quarter. That is important when looking at available Hack-a-Shaq time going forward:

bonus /

To summarize:

The window to intentional foul will still be open but reduced by a decent margin. 14,919 of those 28,311 minutes in the bonus, or about 53 percent, were spent outside of the two-minute mark. The portion is smaller in the first quarter, slightly larger in the rest of the three quarters, and very small in overtimes when teams need only three team fouls to get into the bonus but have only five minutes to do so instead of 12.

At some point or another in a quarter, teams got in the bonus 83 percent of the time with similar differences by quarter like in total bonus minutes. When looking at the number of instances when teams got in the bonus with over two minutes remaining, which requires the four team fouls, the number of instances dropped to 50 percent and just 32 percent for first quarters.

Also worth noting, but not shown in the table above was that outside of the two-minute mark there were 368 fouls in first to third quarters and 315 in the fourth quarter alone characterized in play-by-play data as intentional, away-from-play, or personal takes. That’s compared to 256 with less than two minutes left in the first to third quarter, Hack-a-Shaq time that is now banned.

At the least, first quarters should be hack free. As they should be. At that point, there’s still plenty of time left in the game to make up a deficit and use fouls on higher leverage plays.

When looking at substitution patterns, the third quarter might be okay as well. Starters usually rest during the tail-end of first and third quarters, when the bonus situation takes place, and check back into a game in the middle of the second and fourth quarters.

Below were five Hack-a-Shaq candidates last season and their maps of when they were on and off the floor, via Vorped.com. Darker meant more often on the floor and lighter shades meant less often. Dots represented the beginning or end of each quarter.

Vorped /

With the exception of Whiteside and his unusual substitutions for Amar’e Stoudemire, it looks like while second and fourth quarters are still question marks for Hack-a-Shaq going forward, these starting centers should be off the floor by the time the bonus situation normally starts in the third quarter.

However, second and especially fourth quarters could remain a problem. After all, the new rules include only eight of 48 minutes where Hack-a-Shaq is off limits. K.J. McDaniels’ five fouls to start the second half of a Pistons-Rockets game is still a possibility. There will still be teams sacrificing at least two minutes of defending legit possessions with no fouls to give in hopes of either a string of missed free throws prior or creating more available possessions to climb back from a deficit, or both.

As for less than two minutes in a quarter, the loose ball foul and bumping players on screens remain more casual, possibly more dangerous ways to foul poor free throw shooters. There are surely other ways to get below-average free throw shooters at the line, whether those and the free throw attempts themselves actually net a positive result for the defense or not.

(As for the bonus/penalty data in this post, I’m in the process of getting data back to 1998 and publishing that later in the off-season. Sit tight.)

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