Effect of different height and distance oppositions on basketball shooting precision

Basketball shooting is the most important technical element because it is where games are won or lost. The presence of an opponent represents an increase in difficulty, when compared to a shot with no opposition. During the game, the players have a defender trying to contest the shot and avoid them scoring. Thus, understanding the opponent's effect on the shot could help optimize practices to work with opposition, closer to what happens during a game. As this aspect can improve the quality of the game, and the literature on the topic is scarce, the study of the opponent and his influence on shooting is an added value to optimizing performances. Basketball coaches and players need to know the shooting constraints that can best improve shooting accuracy and practice them to mechanize the shooting movement, with opponents and movement variables. The goal of this study was to analyse the effect of opposition on basketball shooting accuracy. A sample with 23 athletes, 5 male and 18 female (21.1 ± 4.2 years; 171.5 ± 8.9 cm), with at least 4 years of federated basketball practice (12.4 ± 5.7 years), volunteered to perform 10 shots in 7 conditions. The shots were carried out with and without an opponent at different distances (1 m and 1.5 m from the shooter) and heights (1.10·shooters height, 1.15·shooters height, and 1.20·shooters height), proportional to the height of the shooting athlete. To compare precision, a system with 5 values was used. Shooting without an opponent was the one condition in which the precision shooting results were lower (60.4% of accuracy). This might result from a relaxation by the shooter, which refers to an incorrect movement, and from the fact that this condition was the first for all athletes. Although there were no statistically significant differences between the six types of opposition, the shot accuracy decreased when the opponent was closer to the shooter, which is similar to what happens during a game. However, the higher condition and lower distance of opposition was the one opposition condition with lower values of precision, showing a tendency of the opponent to influence the accuracy of shooting, probably due to the reduced vision of the basket. Unopposed shots had lower effectiveness when compared to opposed shots. Also, the closer the opponent, the lower the shooting accuracy. In this way, introducing an opponent into shooting practice can help improve athletes' performance.