Hold your follow-through is a cue that hides the real problem

Shooting coaches keep correcting the last thing that happens in a jump shot, which is the part that matters least.

The wrist is where everybody looks. It is visible, it is photogenic, it is the frame that ends up on the highlight, and so it is what gets coached. Hold it. Freeze it. Gooseneck. A generation of players has been taught to admire its own hand.

The follow through is an outcome, not an input. By the time the wrist snaps, the shot has already been decided by the feet, the alignment of the hips, and whether the ball got to the set point on the way up rather than after the peak. Correcting the wrist is like correcting a golfer's finish position. You can force the pose and leave the swing untouched.

Where it does actual harm is in what it teaches a player to attend to. Attention is finite. A shooter thinking about his hand at release is not thinking about the space between his feet on a catch, which is the variable that changes most between a drill and a game. In the gym he steps into everything comfortably. In a game he is arriving off a curl, one foot late, and the entire base is different. He misses, and someone tells him to hold his follow through.

I would coach the catch and almost nothing else for the first year. Where the feet land relative to the rim. Whether the inside foot gets down first coming off a screen. How early the hands are ready. Ugly, unfilmable work that changes percentages far more than any wrist ever has.

There is a defence of the cue that I accept in one narrow case. For very young players, holding the finish slows the whole action down and stops them shot putting the ball from a hip. As a temporary scaffold it is useful. It should be gone by fifteen and it is not.

Watch a pregame warm up sometime and count how many professionals hold a pose after a make and how many after a miss. Almost nobody holds it after a miss. Whatever the cue is training, it is not training the shot.

It is training the celebration.