Gordon Hayward talks about his post-NBA career, including the introduction of form basketball shooting aid

Gordon Hayward retired from the NBA this summer after a 14-year career in which he averaged more than 15 points per game and made the All-Star team with the Utah Jazz in 2016-17. The former Butler University star led the Bulldogs to the NCAA Championship Game and was selected No. 9 overall in the 2010 NBA Draft by the Jazz before later playing for the Celtics, Hornets and Thunder.

Although he was an above-average shooter – Hayward made 1,111 career three-pointers for a .370 percentage and his playoff free throw percentage of .950 is No. 1 in NBA history – he was always looking for new ways to improve, which led him to success with an entrepreneur named Charlie Wallace. The 34-year-old Hayward and his former Butler teammate Emerson Kampen acquired most of Wallace’s company, redesigned some things and renamed it the form they launched this month.

Form makes a basketball shooting aid. The product is a flat-sided cube whose shape helps promote proper shooting form and muscle memory development. Form’s Pro Ambassadors are nine-time NBA All-Star Paul George and WNBA player Lexie Hull, who is currently a starter for the Indiana Fever.

How he got into shape. . .

The creator of Form was a guy named Charlie Wallace who created what was called Qube. I’m someone who is somewhat of a perfectionist and I was searching the internet for something to help me place my hand on a basketball and where to position it. And I came across Charlie’s YouTube, saw this device, saw him shooting it, and thought, “I might as well try that.” So I ordered one. On his records he found that Gordon Hayward had bought one, so he wrote him a message and asked if it was the real Gordon Hayward – it was.

I received the product. Then he sent me his number. We talked about it and chatted. Then we – my partner and I, Emerson Kampen – decided we wanted to move forward and rename and relaunch the company. We designed a few different things on it and changed a few things a little bit, and here it is now.

On the target demo for the product. . .

It was something that I really enjoyed using in the last few years of my career and I felt like this was a product that could really help a lot of young children in particular. It’s really a tool that’s more geared toward younger, fairer kids [wondering]How do you learn to shoot? How do you shoot a basketball? You would start with a tool like this. I have young children myself and felt like it was something that could really help them.

About what originally interested him. . .

For one thing, I saw Charlie, an unassuming middle-aged man who fires jump shots from almost half the court. And it was like, “What is he doing?” Shoot straight every time. The ball rolls back to him.

Now, at this point I was obviously still a good shooter, and it’s not that I wanted to change my shot at all, but I definitely felt like I used my left thumb a little bit and made it even more perfect wanted. I think that’s what initially sold me on it, and then when I got it, that’s just how it was [saw] how easy it was. I used it more for recording around the house than anything else. I didn’t really score a goal. I used it to warm up before a goal, especially during my off-season workouts, but mostly it was something I could lie on the couch and score over and over again. It simply locks your form.

You can’t be on the basketball court all the time. But you sit around and watch TV and just turn this thing up and down on the couch. When you think about basketball, your shot and your game, like I said, you can’t even do that on the court. And that was another thing: I know that a lot of people don’t have constant access to justice, and you can use that anywhere and everywhere.

About whether he always wanted to be an entrepreneur. . .

I honestly never thought about it. I wanted to be a basketball player and I was fortunate enough to be able to play in the NBA and have a long career in the NBA. And every year I thought about how I could get better as a basketball player, and something like this fell into my lap. The older I got, the more you have to start thinking that at some point this will come to an end. In the NBA there are always a lot of meetings on this topic and they try to help the players because careers are usually much shorter than you think. And that’s why you have to have something to do afterwards.

This is something that fell into my lap, but it’s something that we quickly became passionate about because it allows me to still be around the game and help young kids learn to shoot, but it is also the flip side of it. It’s the business side and that’s fun. Obviously the business is competitive. It gives you the opportunity to participate in competitions.

About his other business interests after basketball. . .

In general, I wanted to make sure my portfolio was very diverse. I also just released a film – I was the producer of a film. So that’s another thing, and it definitely helped me. When the preseason games start I miss it a little, but this has helped me fill that gap. People always say that athletes get bored when they retire and so on, but this helped me get straight into it.

For the first film from his production company Whiskey Creek Productions. . .

We made the film [Notice to Quit] on September 21, later this year. I was still playing, of course, so I wasn’t particularly involved in the day-to-day operations, but as a producer I was sent messages every day. I was able to go to Skywalker Sound and do some editing there, and I think I’d like to do more work on that in the future.

On different shooting techniques. . .

I used Noah when it first came out. My shot was actually pretty flat, and we used that for a while to work on the arc of my shot. Noah is good because you want to get a consistent shot more than anything, and it helps you easily see that your bow isn’t as high as you think. And that’s how I used it. We used the gun when I was in high school – the gun is just the thing when you have the nets that go right around the goal and when you shoot at them the balls fall down and then there they are back to one.

How young people can learn to shoot. . .

Another thing I found really amazing about Form: There has never been a tool to teach you how to shoot, and there really isn’t. Many tools these days are data-driven and will show you all the data about your shot, the arc, the rotation of the basketball, the depth and how far you shoot. It counts your misses and your shots, and all that stuff is really good, but it doesn’t help you learn to shoot. It doesn’t tell you anything about your form.

In other sports like golf and baseball, there are so many tools that anyone can fully immerse themselves in it and learn to master the basic part of what they are trying to do. [Basketball tools] They show you your data but can’t help you fix the problem. You would have to do that yourself. If you don’t shoot it properly, it will spin because it’s a cube. It won’t rotate around that single axis. So if you do it right, you’ll see immediate feedback. You can see that immediately. It spins beautifully, and if it doesn’t, it gets wobbly.