Drew Neitzel Needs To Shoot More

The Michigan State Spartans will be taking on San Jose State tonight in East Lansing, and senior point guard Drew Neitzel is hoping he can use tonight to break out of the "slump" he's been in this season.

Even though Neitzel's shooting percentage is up this season from 42.6% to 43%, and his three-point shooting is up from 41.2% to 44.1%, Drew's seen his scoring drop from 18 points a game last season to 14 this season. So in Drew's eyes, there's only one way to fix the problem. Stick around after practice everyday and take an extra 600-700 jump shots.

"Every shooter goes through some kind of a slump and I've just gotten back to what I've done my whole life and that's just spend hours in the gym shooting," Netizel said. "There wasn't a whole lot wrong with my shot.

"Sometimes they just don't go in but I'm starting to turn the corner now."

Neitzel found that he had been leaning a bit during his shot, but he's straightened his form out now, and the shots seem to be falling more often. Still, according to Tom Izzo it may not be Neitzel's form as much as it is Drew just isn't taking enough shots.

"For some reason, even in practice once in a while, he feels like he has to prove a point that he can pass," Izzo said. "I tell him, 'You can do that when you're 80, passing the ball over to your grandkids. Right now I need you to shoot it in the basket.' "

Izzo is right too, Drew does need to shoot more. Over at Spartans Weblog, they took a look at Drew's career numbers at Michigan State, and they found that the more he shoots, the better he shoots.

This points to something about Neitzel's game I've theorized since high school: the more he shoots, the better he gets. In high school, he'd miss four or five shots in a row at times. But he always had the green light and eventually he'd knock down several big shots in a row. While he's certainly a great shooter, I'm not sure he's the same kind of a shooter as someone like J.J. Reddick or Shawn Respert, who has picture-perfect, textbook form on every shot. Neitzel is more of a touch shooter. The more shots he takes, the more he zeroes in on the rim.

But I also wanted to test the theory a little more rigorously. So I took Neitzel's career game logs from ESPN.com (which only include regular season games) and broke them down by number of FG attempts. Here are the results:

FGA  #ofGames  eFG%
0-4      28    35.1
5-9      33    48.9
10-14    20    55.3
15+      13    59.1

As you can see by the numbers, Neitzel's shooting percentage does increase as he takes more shots. All of which means Drew probably doesn't need to spend as much time in the gym after practice as much as he needs to start being a little more selfish while on the court.