Does the ball lie? Testing the Rasheed Wallace hypothesis

Former NBA all-star forward Rasheed Wallace popularized the catchphrase “Ball Don’t Lie.” Rasheed would often shout this after an opponent missed a free throw. It was used by Rasheed to illustrate the mental impact on a free throw shooter from knowing the foul was questionable and its impact on likelihood of converting the ensuing free throw. The tendency to miss free throws associated with questionable foul calls—or the propensity for the ball to miss—would be followed by Rasheed’s “Ball Don’t Lie!” exclamation. This paper aims to test whether the ball was less likely to go through the hoop during free throws following questionable foul calls. We use a proxy to identify the questionableness of a foul call, one that Rasheed Wallace was very familiar with—whenever the original shooting foul was immediately followed by a technical foul. This proxy is meant to capture player and coach reactions to a shooting foul call. If the call was bad, or questionable, we expect more outrage from the team the foul was called on, which tends to draw technical fouls. Our findings do not support Rasheed’s prediction; the propensity to make a shooting foul free throw does not appear to change after a technical. In fact, using a subset of our data period under which the NBA changed technical foul rules to target complaining about foul calls, we find a small increase in free throw percentage after a technical foul call.