ROSEMONT, Ill. - The shots, even Kevin Coble admits, aren’t textbook form. If most players took them, they’d be relegated to the end of the bench or demoted to manager status.

They are wild, running floaters and off-balance jumpers and some shots that, well, look better in a game or H-O-R-S-E or on an And1 Mixtape than in college basketball, let alone on a team that plays such a disciplined style of offense as Northwestern.

Yet there Coble is, unorthodox as his game may be, leading the Wildcats the entire way.
“Very unorthodox, to most,” Coble said. “Given some of the shots that go up, it’s a matter of what works and what doesn’t.

“…I would think most people think they are ill-advised shots but it is something that has worked over the years and teammates have just sort of accepted it and trusted it.”

So has Kevin Coble. Although he’ll be the first to admit he isn’t sure how some of them go in. He’ll try to replicate them in practice, like the pump-fake, shoot in the middle of a double clutch bank shot he made last season against Michigan State.

Or like against Purdue a season ago when he drove left on the baseline, leapt off his right foot and faded left.

Even Coble thought it might be an airball. Instead - swish.

That one surprised the Boilermakers’ Robbie Hummel so much he even went to Coble and said “I have no idea how you made that.”

Not many people are sure.

When Coble first arrived at Northwestern, it didn’t take long for Wildcats coach Bill Carmody to recognize the player he signed might be different than the rest of his guys. He’d be the ultimate ‘no, no, no, bad shot’ guy, followed up by an ‘OK, yes, good shot’ when it inevitably went in.

“I’m saying ‘Whoa, pal,’” Carmody said when he first saw Kevin Coble shoot in practice. “I probably said ‘That’s not going to go.’ Then I found out, well, it is going to go.”

As his teammates have learned by limiting him to “traditional” shots in games of H-O-R-S-E and Coble learned as he still wonders how he makes his right-handed floater driving down the left side of the lane, he knows to no longer question it. Just accept it.

So has the rest of the Big Ten.

The 6-foot-8 forward from Scottsdale, Ariz., was a second-team All-Big Ten player last year, averaging 15.5 points and 4.8 rebounds a season ago. Then there’s his field goal percentage, which supports his sometimes-crazy shot theory.

He made 47.2 percent of his shots last year, including 39.5 percent of his three-pointers.

With numbers like that, he’ll be allowed to keep shooting however he deems fit.

“A bad shot for you and me isn’t a bad shot for him,” Bill Carmody said. “He’s unorthodox. He’s quirky.

“Shot come from different angles, he practices them. And shooting them is almost like a self-regulating kind of thing.”

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein.