Like MJ like Kobe

In the heat of the NBA finals, lets look at this picture from game one last night. Kobe going against Ray Allen, showing one of the most perfect moves in basketball offense, the Fade Away shot.

The most important feature of this move is that the shooter gets farther away from the basket and the defense as he executes the shoot. Making it really hard to defend and making it one of the hardest techniques. But there is something very special about the fade away shot you see in this picture and that is it isn't a normal one where the right handed player moves clock wise and turns on the right foot, placing the left foot a bit behind and shooting. In this picture, Kobe is executing a counter clock-wise, left foot as a pivot fade away shot which is in fact the trade mark of the master himself, Michael Jordan. The picture below shows MJ executing the move and its interesting to see how the defense has formed against this move. The helping defender on the left indicates that Kobe (Jordan below) was on the low post, and the helping defender coming down to double team (Pierce above and Sir Charles below), making the player turn on the left foot, place the right foot behind the body and just elevate in the air and go backwards, twist the body and make the shot. I've really only seen Jordan and Kobe show this move as it should be done.

If youre interested to find out more about this spectacular basketball move, check out this link and in this video, the master himself tells us how it should be done. (Although he talks about the right foot pivot fade-away, but somehow Kobe learned the trick himself)