I have always thought they should. A lot of the time the first pass made is more important than the second pass made that leads to the bucket. Of course it would need to be continuous movement on the ball between the players witch leads to the basket. If there could be any rule changed it should be this one in my opinion.
Half-assists would be interesting in general as a mechanism. Then you could get half-assists for this situation (i.e., hockey assists), and for foul shots made off a shot you would have assisted on if he'd made it. I might start keeping track of them unofficially to see how much it changes the assist totals.
Maybe if you made them a separate stat: Expanded Assists or something like that, with assists nowadays being called something like Traditional Assists. Then, the record books remain safe, and the new, expanded statistical metrics can be argued over separately.
There is that too; basketball is a fast game and you'd need to basically watch the game twice to be sure you got all the hockey assists. On the other hand, half-assists from foul shots would be easy to account for, since you have time to mark them down.
Imagine the career assist #'s for some players if they counted these. For example, the late Yinka Dare might've had a total of 5 assists in his career! Or bums like Derek Anderson, Juan Dixon or Chris Dudley!
