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Keeping Everything Inside the Lines of the Rim
- Marvin Harvey
- Jul 25
- 3 min read
By Marvin Harvey, The Original Shot Doctor
🎯 The Power of Straight-Line Shooting
The basketball rim is exactly three feet wide. When you're training, use that visual boundary as your foundation. Every motion in your shot—your feet, hips, arms, hands, and especially your fingers—should stay inside the invisible lines of the rim.
Why? Because if your body is quiet and everything is aligned in a straight line, you immediately eliminate two of the most common ways players miss: left and right.
By programming your shooting mechanics within those “rim lines,” the only outcomes become:
Front rim
Back rim
Swish
And that’s exactly what we want.
💥 Driving the Fingers Through the Ball
Back in 2004, I was working with Marie Ferdinand at the RDV Sportsplex in Orlando. She was recovering from a dislocated elbow that kept her out for much of the WNBA season, and we were reprogramming her shot.
While demonstrating the form, she stopped me and said:
“See, my hands don’t go through the ball as smooth as yours. I can’t get that finish like you—or like Michael or Kobe. I don’t have that.”
Her issue wasn’t effort—it was finger control. She was using too much finger contact on the ball, gripping it with her fingers rather than letting it roll off her finger pads. That limited her follow-through and killed her backspin.
Once she adjusted her grip and understood how to drive her finger pads through the ball, she found not only more control, but more distance—with less effort. That’s when her shot started to transform.
What Michael Jordan Taught at Kansas
I told Marie a story I’d read about Michael Jordan teaching at a camp at the University of Kansas when Roy Williams was Head Coach.
Jordan told the campers:
“Try to imagine your fingers going through the ball when you release it.”
Simple. Profound. And incredibly teachable.
That statement confirmed what I had been teaching in another way for years: “Take the bottom off the ball.” That’s how you create pure backspin.
When the ball rests on your finger pads, there’s a slight gap between the palm and the ball. As you release, the pads go underneath and through that space, generating clean, controlled backspin. It’s not about slapping the ball or flicking it—it’s about driving through it with precision.
The Sequence: From Cupped to Clean
Here’s how the motion works:
As the shooting hand’s finger pads push upward and outward, the non-shooting hand begins to release and open.
The guide hand straightens—pointing upward—as it moves out of the way.
Meanwhile, the shooting hand keeps going. The finger pads slide under the ball, “taking the bottom off,” and driving the seams into a tight backspin.
This motion controls:
🎯 Spin
📏 Distance
📐 Arc height
When the shooting arm finishes high, and the finger pads have passed through the ball, the backspin carries the shot. If the spin is perfect, the shot feels almost effortless, because the lower body supplies the power, and the hands become a guide.
✍️ Final Thought: Effortless Precision
When your fingers go through the ball, shooting becomes a motion of grace, not force. You feel like you’re doing less—but getting more.
By staying inside the lines of the rim and mastering the control of your finger pads, you're not just shooting a basketball—you’re engineering every inch of the shot. This is where mastery begins.
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