Introducing Shooting Specialist Dave Love: For the Love of The Game

NPH is excited to welcome shooting specialist, Dave Love as our newest contributor to the site, who will aid players by providing knowledge, tips, “do’s and donts” and overall guidance when it comes to the art of shooting.

Dave Love is a Canadian born shooting coach. Coach Love started The Love of the Game Shooting Clinics in Calgary in 2001 and has been running them across the country ever since. In addition, Dave has been the shooting coach at the University of Calgary for 9 years, and has worked with players ranging from 10 year old grass roots players to NBA players like Tristan Thompson, Tyler Zeller, Louis Amundson and for the Phoenix Suns and Cleveland Cavaliers.  Coach Love has also been a guest coach with Canada Basketball Senior Mens National Team. 

I loved shooting the basketball. And if you had seen me play in high school, you would agree, I didn’t do anything else well.

But the love for that aspect of the game has helped me to meet a lot of wonderful people and have very special experiences. It turns out as much as I loved shooting, I love TEACHING shooting even more, and I’m probably a better teacher than shooter.

My goal with NPH is to open dialogue about shooting mechanics, reinforce some ideas and give a slightly different perspective on some things. I’ll try to explain some of the things that I value, habits I try to build, and the work I do to build them. It isn’t rocket science, but it is simple physics.

But keep this idea in mind–I don’t teach each player exactly the same. The ideas may be common, the drills may be similar, but the players are different. They each have different bodies, different strengths and weaknesses, and different habits. There is no one RIGHT way to shoot the ball, and that has been proven by players like Ray Allen, Larry Bird, Reggie Miller, and Steve Nash. They all have very different shots, but were all great shooters.

Shooting a basketball is like playing blackjack. There are Rules to the game, which you can familiarize yourself with at Bestuscasinos.org/legal/new-york/. It’s important to not that there are also guidelines to playing it well, consult chattanooga lawyers for more information. In Blackjack, those guidelines are things like splitting aces and when to hit or stay depending on the dealers cards. In basketball, those guidelines are the fundamentals. But here is the funny thing… you can play a hand of blackjack perfectly and still lose, just like you can shoot a shot perfectly and still miss.

Conversely, you can also break all the guidelines and still be successful once in a while in each discipline. So why do we have them? Why are they important?

We are just trying to stack the odds in our favor. You aren’t going to make every single shot, just as you aren’t going to win every single hand.  But if you build those fundamentals you are increasing your odds on all future shots.

In the coming posts, that is what we will talk about… How to stack the odds.

Or in other words, how to “Maximize Your Potential” when it comes to shooting.