SO many NBA players whip their arm to block the shot as hard as they can instead of leaving the hand there to enable a steal after the block. It doesn’t seem like this increases the chance that they will block the shot since the hand is as high as it would be anyway. Anyone have any insight on this?
If you keep your hands stationary your chances of blocking a shot decrease by a lot.
Keeping your hands in one place allows the offensive player to adjust to avoid them. Swiping with your arm/hand not only is harder to avoid for the person on offense, but it increases the area your arm covers which also allows you to have less precision with your block attempt while still being able to contact the ball.
In order to effectively block shots without swiping or whipping your arms/hands you would need to predict further into the future about where the ball will be, you need to get to that point before the offensive player, and you have to hope that the offensive player won’t avoid you once you are there.