The deciding points in the Thunder-Rockets game last night were scored in a relatively innocuous fashion. There were no tricky screens, backdoor lobs or buzzer-beating jumpers. Instead, it was just a patient, benign possession involving multiple actions from the one of the games two, 30-point scorers.

Down one with 38.5 seconds left, Kevin Martin found himself with the ball on the right wing. After an initial pick and roll was thwarted, Martin got the ball back on the left wing and tried again. The second time around he drew a foul on Thunder big man Kendrick Perkins that got to the line for the game-deciding free throws. Here is a look at the play:

What made this play wasn’t so much what Perkins did poorly, but what Martin did well; he acted. In the following series of photographs you will exactly how he sold this call.

In the first picture will show Martin before Perkins makes contact with his body.

In the next one, Martin reacting as if someone just threw a football at his face, despite contact from Perkins that could be viewed as something far south of “jarring”.

This maneuver isn’t something Martin pulled out from the very bottom of his bag of tricks either. For years, despite not being an overly physical, Martin has consistently been among the league leaders in free throw attempts. It is part of what has made him such an insanely efficient scorer.

He (and a few others) has mastered the art of violently throwing his head back to accentuate any contact he receives with or without the ball. This allows him to pile up foul calls and those, in turn, get him to one of the easiest places in the game to score from; the free throw line. In game officiated by human beings that are trying to correctly make calls on plays that are happening at warp speed, it’s a huge advantage to consistently be able to make contact look worse than it really is. It may not be a step-back jumper or a nifty runner, in today’s NBA, it’s a skill.

You can call it flopping. You can complain about its place in the game. What you can’t do, is argue it’s effectiveness. The Rockets win proved that last night.