The problem of shooting a basketball is a great way of demonstrating projectile motion. In demonstrating projectile motion we will neglect air resistance.
When considering any physics problem, you must first consider the forces acting on your object. Newton's first law of physics states that any object in motion will remain that way unless acting upon. When considering the motion of our basketball we will neglect air resistance.
The first thing we have to do when considering the flight of our basketball is to define our coordinate system. We can let the distance from the shooters feet to the hoop be the positive X direction. We can simplify our Y distance by letting Y initial to be the height from which the basketball is released and going in the positive direction. Since there is no force acting along the X axis we can ignore it and only worry about gravity acting along the Y axis.
