Korver top free-thrower

? Kyle Korver feels as if he should absolutely, positively make every free throw. When he misses one, Korver contorts his face in agony as if a sinister force had made the basket or the ball less than perfectly round.

Then again, the 76ers’ resident sharpshooter hasn’t unleashed that painful look much this season. Korver has missed just 14 of 191 free-throw attempts, and his 92.7 percent success rate has him at the top of the NBA standings.

Three times this season, Korver has converted 20 or more consecutive free throws. The 6-foot-7 forward extended his career-high streak – also the NBA season high this season – to 47 in a row Saturday night in Miami before missing with 11.7 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter of the Sixers’ win over the Heat.

And that’s OK.

“I don’t really like having streaks that long, actually, because then you start to get a little extra nervous at the line,” Korver said Sunday after the Sixers practiced at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. “You don’t want to be thinking about that, but people ask you about it all the time. I’ll start another one.

“I just want to end up at the percentile that I’m at. As long as I stay there, I’ll be OK.”

Korver shot 89.1 percent from the line in his four collegiate seasons at Creighton. He admitted that his 84.5 percent mark in his first three NBA seasons with the Sixers was “disappointing” and that shooting better than 90 percent now “isn’t a big deal at all.”

“I don’t like talking about it a whole lot,” he said. “Free throws are easy. You’re supposed to make them. I look at a free throw as two free points, or a free point, or whatever it is. I’m always disappointed if I miss them. So I expect to have streaks. I think everyone expects to have free-throw streaks.”

Maybe so, but only five players in the NBA – Korver, Charlotte’s Matt Carroll, Seattle’s Ray Allen, Milwaukee’s Earl Boykins, and Dirk Nowitzki of Dallas – are shooting 90 percent or better from the line. The average free-throw percentage in the league is 75.2 percent, meaning roughly one miss out of every four attempts.

So if it’s easy, why do players have so much trouble doing it?

“Free-throw shooting is all mental,” Korver said. “The guys that shoot high percentages are good shooters, but they also go up there with the mentality of ‘These are free points. I’m supposed to make these.’

“A lot of guys go up there and they hear a lot of people talk to them about it, like coaches are trying to tinker with their free-throw shooting a little bit, at least in college. I knew a couple of guys who were good free-throw shooters and someone messes with their shots a little bit and it just wrecks them.”

During his streak, Korver went 16 games and 38 days without missing a free throw, although he didn’t attempt a single foul shot in seven of those contests.

He is trying to become the Sixers’ first free-throw percentage champion since Larry Costello did it in 1964-65. He also is shooting for Mike Gminski’s team record of 93.8 percent set in 1987-88, although Gminski didn’t have enough made free throws to qualify for the NBA crown.

Sixers coach Maurice Cheeks couldn’t remember his longest streak of successful free throws. “I know I wasn’t anywhere close to that,” Cheeks said. “But 47 straight is very impressive. His foul shooting, period, is very impressive.”