We need to start counting assists that lead to made free throws.

I was looking yesterday at the play-by-play of game between Greece and Great Britain for the 2023 WC qualifiers and I noticed the following:

Dorsey passed to Antetokounmpo and he drew a shooting foul. The moment he scored the second free throw, Dorsey was credited with an assist. I am not sure when FIBA started counting these types of assists, but I like it! The NBA scorekeepers, despite being sometimes too liberal in crediting assists, they do not credit such assists. This could be understandable for comparisons reasons with earlier seasons that these were not counted, but still I do not think it makes sense not to count those assists.

So I took a look at these assists for this past NBA season and you can find the data here. As you will see Darius Garland played 70 (reg season and play in) games this season and he had 83 foul assists. This would have moved his assists per game at 9.7 instead of his current 8.5. Obviously this would be the case for other players as well but these “lost assists” are part of “creating for teammates”. Now I have heard some arguments that if the fouled player only scores 1 FT then the assist does not have the same “value” as a made FG. While this is (partially) true, we still count as 1 assist passes that lead to 2 and 3 point made shots. In fact the difference in points created between foul assists and FG2 assists is only 0.33pts per assist, which is much less than the 1 point difference in FG2 and FG3. Maybe we should start counting fractional assists (but this will never happen :)), but point generated from assists is a better indicator of creation although other things need to be considered there (e.g., sure a player created a wide open three point shot but making that shot is not a gimme like a layup).