Survivor bias arises when you study what you think is a full population, while in fact you're looking at a selected sample that did survive the very thing you're studying.
A classical example in finance happens when you want to study, say, the performance of tech companies over the last 10 years. If you just pick current tech companies and look at their past performance, you will be biased towards companies that did make it. You have to include companies that don't exist anymore but would have been included were you to perform the study say 5 years ago.
"Survivorship" is the collider being conditioned on.
That said, it still seems reasonable that if you're going to be paid millions of dollars a year to throw a ball in a hole, it wouldn't be crazy to be expected to practice and get good enough not to miss if literally no one is trying to block you (e.g. free throws). I guess that if you're good enough at the other skills, it still helps your team win enough to sign you even if you don't get good at that, but it still feels like fairly low hanging fruit...
I know that sounds facetious, but like, there’s a reason no one jumps on a free throw. It’s easier if you don’t. But you have to jump to get your shot over a defender.
If you are sufficiently tall, you could just… jump less, so that your release height is the same.
I actually think the bigger reason is simply that there are more important skills for tall players to work on. If your main job is rebounding , it is better to work on rebounding than shooting.
Of course, the changes to how NBA teams play over the last decade or so have changed this, which is presumably why you now see more players who are both tall _and_ good shooters.
Especially in the modern NBA, where players are pushed very hard to get out from the post and shoot. Being unable to shoot puts a limit on a players career, even at 7+ feet. There’s a reason why in the off-season every big in the league posts insta videos of themselves draining 3s in an empty gym.
The level of competition in the NBA is fierce, as is the incentive to learn to shoot. If many bigs don’t, the only reasonable explanation is that it’s physically more challenging.
They only need to be better than a few dozen or hundreds of others at the required skills. The average 7 footer in the NBA is a way better shooter than the average player in the general population and probably better than any average college player. But shooting skill is inversely proportional to height in the NBA for the exact reason the GP stated.
To be something like 6'3'' or shorter in the NBA means you need to be an insane outlier in other skills, better than literally millions of others at your height and hundreds of thousands with your general athleticism.