Hook shot

• 1. Introduction

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  The hook shot is one of basketball's most elegant and vexing weapons. Picture an offensive player turned sideways to the basket, one arm sweeping upward in a long arc, the ball floating high and soft before falling through the net. The defender, no matter how tall, arrives too late. That is the hook shot: a play so beautifully angled that blocking it is almost a physical impossibility.

  But where did it come from? Who first dared to throw a basketball with one hand in that sweeping, sky-reaching motion? And why, in an era when players sprint and leap and dunk with ever-greater power, does this old-fashioned technique still carry the kind of reverence that makes coaches and analysts say it may be the single hardest shot to stop in the sport?

  The answers wind from a Lithuanian gymnasium in 1937 through the Chicago arenas of the mid-1940s, to Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Houston, carried by some of the most outsized talents the game has ever produced.

• 2. The First Hook

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  Pranas Talzūnas threw the first documented hook shot in an official game during Eurobasket 1937. He was a member of the Lithuanian basketball team, the eventual champions of that tournament. The record of that moment is modest, a single line in the sport's history, but the shot he threw set something in motion that would travel across continents and decades.

  Around the same time, a former Harlem Globetrotter named Goose Tatum was earning a separate kind of credit. Tatum is often cited as the inventor of the hook shot, a claim that speaks to how widely he deployed it and how memorably he performed it. He even shot the hook without looking at the basket, a detail that illustrates just how fully the motion had become second nature to him.

  That combination of European competition and American showmanship helped carry the hook shot into the mainstream of the sport. FIBA games in particular saw it become a favored weapon for centers, prized specifically because it was so difficult to defend before the slam dunk rose to prominence.

• 3. George Mikan and the College Roots

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  George Mikan developed a devastating hook shot while playing for DePaul University in the mid-1940s. Mikan would go on to become a Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer and one of the NBA's foundational stars, and that shot, refined on a college court, traveled with him.

  Fifteen years after Mikan's time at DePaul, Jerry Lucas was doing much the same thing at Ohio State. Two players, separated by a decade and a half, arriving at the same solution: a one-handed sweeping arc that the defense simply could not reach.

  Mikan's hook spread the shot through the NBA and gave it a new kind of legitimacy. What Talzūnas and Tatum had introduced, Mikan formalized as a weapon a dominant professional player could build a career around. His example planted the idea in the minds of the players who came after him, one of whom would carry the hook shot to its most famous form.

• 4. The Skyhook

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  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's version of the hook shot arrived at distances from the basket that other players never attempted, and the higher arc it required gave it a new name. The term skyhook was coined by Eddie Doucette, the radio announcer for the Milwaukee Bucks, during Abdul-Jabbar's time with that team. Doucette said that the hook was so high it seemed to be coming out of the sky.

  Abdul-Jabbar is the NBA's second-place all-time leading scorer, and the skyhook is inseparable from that record. The shot was almost never blocked. Among the very few players capable of stopping it were those of extreme height, specifically Wilt Chamberlain and Manute Bol, whose reach made the impossible merely improbable.

  During the 1987 NBA Finals, Magic Johnson deployed a shot he called his "baby hook," naming it in deference to his Laker teammate Abdul-Jabbar. That phrase, offered by Johnson himself, captures the relationship between the two players and the degree to which Abdul-Jabbar had made the shot his own. For Johnson to name his version after the master was an act of acknowledgment that the skyhook belonged, in the deepest sense, to one man.

• 5. The Jump Hook Era

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  As low-post basketball grew more physical, players needed a version of the hook they could release faster and from a more stable base. The jump hook answered that need. Instead of stepping into the shot and pushing off one foot, the player jumps off both feet, which provides better balance and a quicker release, even if the ball does not travel quite as high.

  Shaquille O'Neal and Dwight Howard, two of the most dominant centers of their generations, made the jump hook a central part of their arsenals. Billy "The Hill" McGill, the former number one pick in the 1962 NBA draft, had already built a reputation around the jump hook in both his college and professional careers, long before the term became widely used.

  Hakeem Olajuwon framed the case for the jump hook in direct terms: he called it a "necessary shot that every center should have" because it is very difficult to block. Coming from Olajuwon, one of the greatest post players in the history of the game, that endorsement carries weight. The jump hook did not replace the skyhook. It extended the logic of the original shot into a new era, putting a version of that sweeping, nearly unblockable arc within reach of players who would never match Abdul-Jabbar's distance or Tatum's effortless no-look confidence.