theres always going to be someone to nitpick at stuff like this when hes actually been leading the team in assists for years…

Infinity.

but i would imagine many players would at least intuitively flinch if someone threw a hand/arm in their face—thus altering the shot?

No real idea what the answer is. Seems like Shane Battier uses the hand-in-the-face quite often.

One benefit, perhaps, is that you can do it while your feet are still on the ground, since you don’t need to elevate as high. That could reduce your susceptibility to shot fakes.

Against someone like Kobe, who practices his shot so much I doubt he thinks at all about the execution when actually performing it, the effect is minimized. If you already know by muscle memory the full form of your shot (and the countermoves built in to it, if necessary), then you tend to remove outside interference and simply finish it, coming back to earth to see whether your shot went in or not.

To other players though, it can be pretty jarring. Battier, perhaps the most frequent user of this technique, causes some pretty embarrassing bricks by using it. Players used to having the rim act as a guide for their shot tend to be thrown off by it.

That going for the block is better, because if you are getting your hand in the shooter’s face after he’s located the target, it does not have much effect.

What’s peculiar is that this “face guarding” tactic gained popularity after ONE bad shooting night Kobe had against Battier, and that was the thing sheeple latched onto, thinking that was the reason, had to be the reason, for Kobe’s off night.