Landry Shamet is no longer a Sixer, but I wanted to spend a minute talking about the offensive foul he was whistled for last night in the Toronto loss.

It was a huge play, a three-point/and-1 sequence that would have cut the Raptors lead to four or five points with less than four minutes to play.

Shamet, curling off a Joel Embiid hip/butt screen, was called for a leg kick here:

https://twitter.com/TheRenderNBA/status/1092991942890278912

It looks a lot worse in replay. That corner is tough to see from press row in live action.

See, the problem here is that Pascal Siakam is not in the play when Shamet begins his shooting motion. When Reggie Miller threw his legs into players, he did it as a way to purposefully draw fouls by initiating contact with defenders who were in front of him. In this case, Siakam is throwing himself at the play and basically runs into Shamet’s legs from the side.

I asked Brett Brown about it after the game, and while Brett rarely talks about the officiating, he offered this:

Landry spoke about it in the locker room. Sarah Todd and I got one set of quotes from him, then I think he spoke to other folks who had been talking to Joel Embiid and came over to his locker a few minutes later.

These are the quotes I got, after the jump:

I guess he thought I did something unnatural. But if you’re sprinting from the middle of the floor to the corner to turn 180 degrees and shoot a jumper, you’re gonna kick out a little bit. I’ve shot 50 of those shots this year. It’s how I shoot even if nobody is in the vicinity. I think we shouldn’t even have been in that situation. We dug ourselves a hole where we shouldn’t have had so much coming down on that call.

….

That’s how I shoot. I’ll stand by that. To be honest with you, he came.. I think he came from the elbow and I wasn’t even thinking about getting a foul shot. If anybody in the NBA would tell you they’re not trying to draw a foul on a jump shot, they’re lying, but I knew I was open and had a lot of separation and I just wanted to get a shot up. Knocked it in, and the call came about 10 seconds after the ball went in.

I asked Shamet if he remembered anything about the Reggie Miller days and the 2012 decision to enforce that rule more significantly. In hindsight, he was just a teenager back then, so it was probably a dumb question:

I feel that. But you know, if you’re gonna reward guys with unnatural movements jumping to the right or left to shoot a jump shot, then.. I don’t know. I couldn’t be an official. I’m not trying to bash any officials or anything, but if you go back and watch the film, I shot that shot however many times this year.

Correct.

I mean, do you really want everybody shooting like Marco Belinelli in an effort to avoid fouls? I think Shamet is totally correct when talking about the idea that the torque of your body and rotation on a hard drive into the corner is going to make your legs float a bit naturally. If Siakam started the sequence in front of him, fine, but he didn’t, he came from the side and ran into the guy’s legs instead.

When Shamet begins his shooting motion from the corner, Siakam is only at the extended elbow:

Here’s Joel’s take on the play, which was interrupted by a phone call:

Time’s yours.