Motivation Quote by Rick Barry

Rick Barry isn’t nitpicking; he’s drawing a bright line between craft and cargo-cult imitation. When he calls modern players’ techniques “fundamentally flawed,” the sting comes from its bluntness: he’s not arguing about style points, he’s indicting basics. “They shoot the ball flat” and “they all stand upright” are deliberately concrete tells, the kind you’d hear from an old-school gym rat who believes the body is either in the right positions or it isn’t. That specificity is the rhetorical weapon. It shifts the conversation from opinion (“I don’t like today’s game”) to mechanics (“this won’t hold up under pressure”).

The subtext is a generational grievance sharpened by Barry’s own legacy as a technician and contrarian. He’s one of the great scorers and also the guy forever linked to the underhand free throw - a method statistically sound, culturally mocked. So when he talks about “ridiculous” technique, he’s also talking about basketball’s pecking order of cool: players would rather miss with swagger than make with something that looks uncool. His criticism isn’t just that shots are flat; it’s that development culture rewards repetition over correction, highlight-making over foundation.

Context matters: in an era of positionless basketball and three-point volume, “standing upright” reads as a jab at the casualness of modern skill work. Barry is insisting that fundamentals aren’t quaint. They’re a competitive edge everyone thinks they’ve outgrown.