Thinking Basketball is one of my favorite resources for basketball analysis. He recently made a video debunking myths about the modern game [1]. While yes, there’s far more analytics and knowledge in the game, it hasn’t lead to monotony or poor quality. It’s instead resulted in a Cambrian explosion of tactics, counter tactics, and really diverse team strategies. But the commentary and analysis in mainstream basketball hasn’t caught up, so your average viewer is watching a chess match but not even understanding the basic moves. Which leads to frustration and confusion.
> your average viewer is watching a chess match but not even understanding the basic moves
Your average viewer isn't tuning in to watch a chess match. You'll notice that professional chess doesn't have the same viewership as basketball.
Regardless of the mathematical strategies, it sucks to watch a bunch of three pointers getting missed. The NBA team average is 36% on 38 attempts per game. Thus, in an average game, there are 76 three-point attempts and 49 misses.
The worst is when they take and miss a three-pointer early in the shot clock, maybe even from the logo. Shoot, clunk, possession over, yawn.
> Green talked about a recent Warriors game against the Los Angeles Lakers and how it was "refreshing" to go against a thinker like LeBron James, who is notorious for finding weaknesses and exploiting them.
> "Every possession is some type of chess move," Green said. "You don't get that today in the NBA, often. ... You don't just get that on a regular basis. It's just who can run faster, who can hit more 3s. It's no substance. I think it's very boring."
So I agree that more complexity is not better and there’s a real risk of alienating fans with complicated schemes. But chess has made real inroads by providing good commentators and analysis. You can’t make teams play dumber but you can teach fans to be smarter.
As for missing, the video I linked debunks that. 3 pointers are replacing long 2 pointers which also had a low percentage. And in turn, the game has become less crowded and more spread out, leading to a higher percentage on dunks and layups. The pace has also dramatically increased, leading to more swings in scoring, which is pretty exciting.
Draymond Green is the Joe Rogan of the NBA. He's just optimizing for engagement and controversy.
If it were truly as you say, those players would get pulled. Logo 3s are rare. And when someone heats up and hits multiple consecutive, it's anything but boring.
"The regular season is too long" and "the first quarter doesn't matter" (make that anything before the last 5 minutes, really) are practically ancient complaints at this point. Decades long.
"Too many threes" is a more novel complaint but one that should self-correct in a couple of ways:
* the passing/screens/movement that leads to a good look at a three is often pretty fun
* taking bad threes has a lot less mathematical advantage and as defenses get better at shutting down the schemes for the good ones, the best teams will adjust what other looks they try to generate
I would also be fine with moving the line back, or getting rid of the corner three entirely. The fixed-distance shot is an easier skill than being able to hit jumpers from various distances so as long as its easy-enough then you're never gonna see players who don't otherwise have much offensive game train themselves to be 3pt specialists.
1. <- I think this is a good thing to focus on, and even lightly touched on in the video. The idea should be that you don't _need_ to be sophisticated to enjoy the sport. The NFL does well in this regard because it's pretty easy to understand that moving the ball forward is good, losing the ball is bad.
Where basketball misses there is that the "get the ball in the hoop" portion of that is _really_ boring now. I'd wager that people don't want to be concerned with some 3rd man setting a screen on the other side of the court allowing some 2nd man to set up behind a pick from a 4th man to get passed the ball from the 1st man to shoot a three... and then clank it off the rim. Then, rinse and repeat on both ends. The end result is that the "get the ball in the hoop" part just feels like a back-and-forth 3-point shootaround, even though the actual sequence is far more complex.
I love the modern game. I just think the pendulum has swung a tiny bit too far toward 3s in the past 3-4 years, that's all. Just a nudge in the other direction.
My ideal would be to try changing 2s and 3s to 3s and 4s. But that will never happen.
I think it would be enough to simply move the 3 point line back a couple feet AND have it follow its natural arc out of bounds, thus eliminating the shorter and easier corner 3 shot.
I don't watch basketball, so I am speculating, but isn't this a case where defence hasn't yet adapted to the new attacking strategies? Wouldn't you expect that in a few years teams will be better at defending against 3s, reducing their expected value and therefore swinging the pendulum back towards more 2s?
The Nash equilibrium should be that the expected values of 2s and 3s are equal. If you're off, you would expect a trend toward that equilibrium, possibly with some overcorrection.
I love thinking basketball but think he completely missed the point here. An apt quote is when he's talking about how much strategy the game has and says "its like high speed chess." The problem is that people dont want to watch high speed chess. The NBAs job is to be as entertaining as possible, not just as strategic as possible. Like it or not iso plays are entertaining even if theyre "bad basketball" in terms of winning. He says the only thing thats changed is that people take less mid range shots and more 3s as if thats a good thing but the league has replaced entertaining sets where you have to actually beat your defender with shooting contests(even if you have to run around a lot or step back to get the shot off) and the product has suffered because of it.
I think defense is a lot more interesting now and the media has done a horrible job capitalizing on that but end of the day people care more about offense.
I am about as crazy of an nba fan as they come - or at least I used to be. I was averaging 80-90 games per year before, now I watch maybe 20 max, mostly in the playoffs. Surely there are people that prefer today's nba, I am not one of them. I think chucking 3's is the least interesting part of the game and it is so overwhelming in today's game that I lost interest in watching
This article presents a readable overview of today’s NBA trends, but IMO is too absolute in its judgment. Basketball is not a solved sport. There is still innovation, for example with OKC’s historically good defense that relies on playing 5 smaller but faster players. There are still good all-around players. There are still people that hit a lot of mid range shots. We have trends going the other way, sure, but they have their own set of tradeoffs and are neither a total solution nor totally embraced in the NBA. Teams will continue to evolve based on the talents of people at their disposal and their own innovative ideas.
In my opinion, the real problem with the NBA is that we no longer get the marquee matchups in the Finals that we used to during the 90s and 00s, mainly because the season is too long. An 82-game grind isn’t sustainable - it practically guarantees that stars like Giannis, Luka, or Jokic (or their key teammates) will get injured to the playoffs or not at all.
The fact that we’ve never seen Embiid vs. Giannis in the ECF, and that we’ll likely never get Giannis vs. Jokic, the two best players during the 2020s, in the NBA Finals says everything you need to know and it's a bummer.
Aside from 2021, I can’t remember another truly competitive finals where both teams had a real shot at winning. Maybe Boston wasn’t expected to fall so hard against Golden State, but matchups like DEN vs. MIA, BOS vs. DAL, or LAL vs. MIA felt lopsided—one team stacked with talent, the other never really standing a chance.
At this point, injuries, not players or teams, are deciding who moves forward.
> At this point, injuries, not players or teams, are deciding who moves forward.
Football is kinda like this at this point too. Some fraction of the top QBs are going to go down each year, and it feels like a limp to the finish.
That being said, somehow Wilt Chamberlain once played a season in which he only missed 8 and a half minutes total in the entire season, including OT. Amazing. Times have changed but that will never happen again now.
The real problem is the amount of ads and game breaks. Everyone knows basketball is about the fourth quarter so the league has backloaded ads. Now it routinely takes 20-30 minutes to get through the last 6 minutes of a game. Completely breaks the flow of the best part of the show. Second problem is that with the play in 2/3 of the teams make the post season so there is little incentive to try for a top seed anymore.
It's weird because almost all of the levels below the NBA are better games than the NBA. Nobody really goes out of their way to follow AAA baseball teams, but college basketball and even some high schools are great games.
The pet theory is that the NBA is a RNG for gambling now the game isn't really the game. TV is near death, so gambling is the only source of revenue that can possibly replace the big TV deal.
I think a big reason we don't have competitive finals is generally not having a harder salary cap and allowing max for contracts. If a player really is that good they should take up 50% of the cap and to balance it out have terrible other players.
Anything else allows stacking value above cost and leading to team imbalances.
The real problem is the players don’t give a sh*t about the fans any more. You need no better example of that than the All star game tomorrow. In the 90’s it was an amazing, competitive game between the best players in the league. Now…the players can’t even be bothered to jog up and down the court. Load management: players claim their bodies are delicate and can’t play too many games. Why would I want to buy tickets to a game or watch on TV if there’s a good chance the stars aren’t even playing. Guys the 90’s played every game. Players now sign a 5 year contract and the next day ask for a trade. Look at Kevin Durant - great player, but has forced his way out of 3 teams and it’s about to be a 4th. Too much guaranteed money means too little incentive.
If the players don’t care about us, why should we care about them?
"Only 3s and layups" is the current easiest strategy to build a proficient offense, but it's certainly not the only way.
You don't even have to look far for an example. The Denver Nuggets won a championship a year and a half ago while nearly attempting the fewest 3s in the league.
> In the past, the team built its roster around a big name like Shaq. Most of the offense were from the center. This has now changed...
Is the author not aware of Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, (Wembanyama... soon)? The winners of the last 6 MVP awards? If there were enough talented bigs to go around, every team in the league would be building around them because it works really, really well.
wow really? Did soccer also go through a statistical revolution? I don't watch soccer at all and am pretty surprised to hear this. Did all the teams converge on a winning solution?
It seems like a very brief and abrupt article. I can understand the part about strategy of three pointers. But how does all the technology and analytics actually change the game, besides "improving form"? Has it allowed better calculation shots with the best odds for a given player? Has it discovered other team's weaknesses to exploit? Etc
Analytics leads to teams converging on the same strategy, at least on offense. The data makes it clear that you should almost never being taking mid rangers or running iso sets. So now those plays are gone from the game.
When analyzing non-computing problems through a computer science lens, the human element merely muddies the path to a concrete answer. It’s best to avoid that ambiguity and complexity.
I think that's unfortunate: the article still has that title, and knowing it wants to lead to such an absolute conclusion can tell a prospective reader if they are interested to be led down that path or not.
This reads as someone who looks at data but doesn’t actually play basketball, coach basketball or generally know basketball. Numbers can only tell you so much, and 2025 Celtics and the rise of Steph have led to more 3s but the sport of basketball is not as predictable as the author suggests. For example, look at the college game, which doesn’t reflect this trend as much as the NBA does.
It's basically just seems like a riff off of a Bloomberg article published yesterday, titled "The NBA Has Fallen Into an Efficiency Trap", without any of the details in the article, besides the 3-pointer trend chart, which is basically a carbon copy. I'm not even sure this article is suggestive of someone simply looking at the data. Given the close timing, they probably just read the Bloomberg article, or a different blog inspired by the Bloomberg article, as opposed to just coming to this conclusion as a NBA aficionado.
College players are much more inconsistent because they're younger and less experienced. There are not many 20 year olds you can depend on to consistently make 3s. There are also a lot more teams which spreads the talent pool around. In my opinion, it amounts to a more exciting product to watch, even if it's less polished.
Yes, I agree. Love the college game. I think people don’t realize how talented NBA players really are, which sounds crazy to type - but I believe its true.
There probably are as many 20 year old college kids who can hit threes as there are pros who can hit them, but they are spread over many more teams.
Unless you have a correctable mechanical problem with your shot, the ability to hit a three point basket is more of a natural ability than a learned skill. Those guys just have incredibly good hand-eye coordination.
I play and watch a lot of basketball and this article seems to be written by someone who doesn't do either.
The idea that players are more specialized is wrong. In the 90s there were plenty of defense-only players like Denis Rodman and Ben Wallace; they might not start in today's NBA, let alone make all-star teams, because they are too one-dimensional.
Disagree. Also watch and play a lot. And also think the article is poorly written, amateur analysis FWIW.
That said, Wallace was 2000s, not 90s, and they were specialists whose exception proved the rule. Basketball then was much more positional, so you did have specialists in that you expected your PF to rebound, your SG to shoot, etc. Considering the modern game is much more positionless, it is surprising that in relation that foundation, there is much so much more focus on specialized skills (3pt shooting, wing defense, paint protection, offensive rebounding).
Also agree that Thinking Basketball is a terrific podcast.
This blog post was likely inspired by an article published by Bloomberg yesterday, about how basketball had fallen into an efficiency trap, centered around avoiding mid-range shots in favor of threes and high percentage close range shots.
> Recently, teams have realized three-pointers have higher point value despite their lower scoring percentage.
This was such an eye-opener for me. A high-stakes sport like basketball/the NBA went on for decades without realising the simple math that three pointers are more valuable than two-pointers if you just do the basic math. How many areas in our lives are yet to be optimised with really basic math?
Disclaimer: I have only extremely limited exposure to this topic (I worked in sports analytics, attached to a team, quite awhile ago), so take it all as heavy speculation:
1) It seems like there’s a natural resistance to change driven by loss aversion; you see a similar pattern in the NFL with decisions like punting vs. going for it on fourth down. Even if the expected value is positive, the failures are given far more weight than the successes.
2) In general, there's a lot of skepticism toward analytics until they reach a tipping point where they’re impossible to ignore, at which point they take over completely and introduce shifts like the ones shown here.
Moneyball, for example, has plenty of anecdotes about front office staff and coaches dismissing analytics in favor of “gut instincts”—and that was in 2002! In baseball, a sport which adopted advanced analytics far faster than others (obviously in no small part due to teams like that As roster).
Even today, plenty of NBA personalities push back against analytics—Reggie Miller, for example, has been pretty vocal about his distaste for them. He's obviously increasingly alone in that opinion, but it can be really hard to break old habits.
Baseball lent itself to advanced analytics even before player tracking became a thing, since the sport consists of a series of discrete one-on-one matchups with limited possible outcomes.
I'm guessing that it's more complicated than that. Possibly when the specifications for a basketball court were laid out, the 3-point line was intentionally drawn where it would be a risky shot. And the coaching/playing culture developed with that mindset.
But since then people have gotten at least a little bit taller. We developed more ways in which to train and grow our physical strength. Training got more intense, improving results. And more subtle changes along those lines, which are micro-changes that accrue over time, and often hard to notice.
It can take a while for someone, anyone, to realize that all the various changes have made what was intended to be a risky maneuver into a viable play. It seems obvious in retrospect, but until someone points it out, it's one of those avenues of thought requires you to shake off what you've known your whole life before you can accept it.
Could also be that none of that was relevant, but it's worth considering and keeping in mind.
"But since then people have gotten at least a little bit taller. We developed more ways in which to train and grow our physical strength."
The person who shifted this mindset is one of the smallest players in the the NBA though, would be considered small by the standards of any era of the game. And in fact, the game has shifted to smaller players in general in recent years. It's more of a skill/agility thing.
I do believe technology has played a part though. Being able to 3d scan a player's motion and find mechanics adjustments has proven to be quite powerful.
Ok, so we learn a function mapping position on the court to point value. Clearly a step function was too simple. Might want to fix the values during the games though to make it a bit easier on the fans.
One possibility is that there are more players who can make 3-point shots at a high enough percentage to make this true. Also, it depends on how good the defense is vs. 2-point shots; if that gets tighter, then the 3-point shot becomes more valuable.
Which also suggests how things may continue to evolve; the best defense vs. 3-point shots probably compromises your defense vs. 2-point shots, and eventually some team will "realize" that they can do better with _fewer_ 3-point shots.
Further complication comes from rebounds; the player taking the 3-point shot is less likely to be able to get the rebound if he misses, relative to a player trying to dunk it. So, the math is not trivial, and it depends on what the other team is expecting/guarding against, which might make it a non-linear system (i.e. constantly evolving over time).
There was a time when chess theory said that there was one perfect, optimal opening, and anything else was a mistake. It was sort of true, until everyone took it as a given, and then doing another opening meant your opponent wasn't as likely to be prepared for it.
A tall player who can't make threes, is more limited in the modern NBA and more limiting for roster construction. As a result, a lot more practice would be allocated to shooting from range. Look at someone like Brook Lopez (7-foot centre) who attempted 31 threes total in his first 8 seasons. Then started attempting 250-500 threes/season after that (peaked at 512 attempts).
Developing players who are elite prospects are also now less likely to be pigeon-holed during development into: you're tall as a 12 year old, so just focus on drills for centres. So yes, there would absolutely be growth in the number of capable shooters.
On your point about realisation, teams already optimise to favour threes and high-percentage twos. They try to stretch defence to each extreme, but you need to excel and threaten at both things at any given point because teams will adjust constantly during the game.
While most of what you say correlates, there are other gotchas: moving around a 3pt line leaves a lot more space for defenders to cover, and the real innovation is introducing multiple staggered blocks to open up a 3pt shooter (as a development of pick-and-pop). And moving around an even farther imaginary line at like 40ft from basket and making ~35% of those shots.
So it really is impossible to cover a more than 33% shooter all around the court, and that equates to a better than 50% 2pt shooter.
No, because hand-checking was allowed back then. Smaller guards like Mark Price for example, would go off in some games but stronger, bigger defenders would ultimate shut them down because they could feel and follow their movements with their hands. Now, if you so much as think too much of a player, they call a foul - supposedly to help the offense and make the game more entertaining. The result? A watered-down product where any team can win on any given night, but no one cares because defense is nonexistent during the regular season.
The only basketball that really matters happens in the playoffs; the rest is irrelevant and says nothing about the true power rankings.
Coaches and owners are not rewarded for innovation. Fans strongly discourage taking bets that could fail.
And then there’s preparing for the strategy change. Training, practice, and coaching time is extremely limited. How much do you re-allocate to this new approach? You don’t just tell players to take more 3s, it’s more complicated than that.
So in traditional innovators dilemma fashion, it’s much easier to follow when you see that the new way works. It’s easier to convince everyone (fans, coaches, players, owners) to get on board when you can point to Steph Curry doing it right.
"Really basic math"? Do you think NBA coaches reached this conclusion like this:
1. A player can throw X 2-points in a game.
2. Or he can throw Y 3-points in a game.
3. 3Y > 2X, so we should just throw 3-points all the time.
It's absolutely not what happened. And the reason teams didn't discovery the current strategy decades earlier was absolutely not that they couldn't do basic math.
In the 2008-2009 season, the year before Curry’s debut, the 3p percentage was 36% vs 2p percentage of 48%. If you took 100 shots of each you’d have 108 points vs 96 so yeah I consider that quite simple.
And call me naive maybe but not arrogant, I’ve never been called that in my life so it’s quite surprising to be called arrogant in HN where I know the average person is smarter than me.
4th down attempts in American football come to mind. Twenty years ago they were rare; mathematically they should be common.[1] Coaches have shifted with the math but not quite as dramatically as it suggests.
It’s a bit of a dodge. In the 80s and 90s, there were a handful of players making 40% of threes and most shooters were closer to 30% so the math didn’t used to be the same.
Stolen bases in baseball is similar to this. In 2023, MLB made two rule changes with stealing being at all time lows (and them thinking fans love stolen bases): 1) Limiting the number of pickoff attempts by pitchers, and 2) Slight enlarging of the bases. Take a look at the jump[0].
It's been interesting to follow some changes teams have made the past two seasons where teams are figuring out how to better time steals when a pitch is thrown, and which players to go after. For example, pitchers with slow releases and bad catchers.
Base running aggressiveness that some teams have been doing as well. The value of going 1st to 3rd on a single is massive and getting speed, and judgement and wanting your players to do that will be more and more valued.
I actually searched "base running aggressiveness" to see what articles had to say, and two months ago Statcast put in a new stat called "Net Bases Gained"[1]. Crazy.
This mimics the changes in NBA talked about here, where value in players changes over times when new ways of playing show their value. It's kind of like the 4 minute mile though, where until someone went out and was able to run under 4 minutes / make all those 3s / run that aggressive on the base paths / go for it on more 4th downs, teams are scared to be the first.
I don't really understand the comparison. The game changes with the rules. The meta shifts with the analytics.
But stealing bases has long been a science. It was something I admired about college level development of players in the 2000's - stealing bases went from fundamental to advanced and well beyond "just let the fastest guys do their thing." UVA's coach had a saying like "every player on this team will be capable of stealing bases"
I think the comparison in general to baseball is pretty apt. Baseball has always been ahead of the curve in terms of analytics in sports. In the last 10 years it really went to extremes that made it unwatchable. The OP didn't mention the pitch clock, but that has made numerous improvements as well. The shift rules too. The game is a lot closer now to its history than it was just a few years ago.
The NBA could use its own blast from the past. There's too much isolation and 3s. When the 3s are falling, it's fun, and when they're not, it's terrible. Much like baseball and its homerun or nothing strategy.
I think the NBA has other problems too, though. The regular season doesn't mean much so their superstars take lots of time off throughout the year. Either shorten the regular season or eliminate some playoff teams.
MLB teams abandoned fundamentals because of the moneyball analyst guidance. Just like in business, following the MBA short-term analysis stuff often has negative impacts. You need to tweak the rules to break the statistical advantage.
When the NHL over-expanded in the 90s a similar thing happened -- there wasn't enough talent so they'd just skate in these obnoxious circles, which is super boring to watch.
The comparison IMO is that how baseball is played changed over time as teams optimized, and some of those changes are undesirable from the perspective of an entertainment product. So MLB changed the rules to increase plays at the margin that are on average considered "more exciting."
Every league does this of course, NBA did it just last year with the stealth rule changes around fouls.
Ah, this is the current grouse about the league, that it is all pace and space and somehow the art is lost. Sports go through eras. I will simply assume the author was not alive to watch Pat Reilly’s Knicks play their version of juego bonito, but while the over reliance on threes can make individual games hard to watch, the league has more talent that I can remember and there are so many fun players. It is bold to declare basketball is now deterministic in Year Two of Wemby and with all the other people capable of doing things we thought unique a generation ago. Plus there are some great minds as coaches right now. I think Spolestra, Daigneault and Mazzula will have something to say about how the game is played.
E sports actually gave me a lot of insight into regular sports which decreased my interest. The real power is with the league, not the players. And they steer the sport to promote business engagement. If the sport is hyper optimized and boring they will change the rules. If teams from smaller markets keep winning they will do what they need to, to help other teams win.
Playing sports is a fun activity to get exercise, it’s not worth getting emotionally invested in teams or leagues.
Readit News
[1]: https://youtu.be/fp4but75EjY?si=YdOqZZ5-sH6lQHd9
Your average viewer isn't tuning in to watch a chess match. You'll notice that professional chess doesn't have the same viewership as basketball.
Regardless of the mathematical strategies, it sucks to watch a bunch of three pointers getting missed. The NBA team average is 36% on 38 attempts per game. Thus, in an average game, there are 76 three-point attempts and 49 misses.
The worst is when they take and miss a three-pointer early in the shot clock, maybe even from the logo. Shoot, clunk, possession over, yawn.
Draymond Green just said that the modern game is rarely a chess match. https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/43860581/no-substance
> Green talked about a recent Warriors game against the Los Angeles Lakers and how it was "refreshing" to go against a thinker like LeBron James, who is notorious for finding weaknesses and exploiting them.
> "Every possession is some type of chess move," Green said. "You don't get that today in the NBA, often. ... You don't just get that on a regular basis. It's just who can run faster, who can hit more 3s. It's no substance. I think it's very boring."
As for missing, the video I linked debunks that. 3 pointers are replacing long 2 pointers which also had a low percentage. And in turn, the game has become less crowded and more spread out, leading to a higher percentage on dunks and layups. The pace has also dramatically increased, leading to more swings in scoring, which is pretty exciting.
If it were truly as you say, those players would get pulled. Logo 3s are rare. And when someone heats up and hits multiple consecutive, it's anything but boring.
1) That people who don't enjoy what they see are just unsophisticated.
2) That today's basketball is better because players have more skill and plays are more complex. I don't think that's the point at all.
I've personally found it hard to sit through games this season - it feels like there isn't much at stake.
What happens in the first quarter is a mere blip. And even in the fourth, it seems like just which shots happen to go in by chance.
I feel like the Thinking Basketball approach might be exactly what's unenjoyable - devaluing individual moments for the sake of theory.
"Too many threes" is a more novel complaint but one that should self-correct in a couple of ways:
* the passing/screens/movement that leads to a good look at a three is often pretty fun
* taking bad threes has a lot less mathematical advantage and as defenses get better at shutting down the schemes for the good ones, the best teams will adjust what other looks they try to generate
I would also be fine with moving the line back, or getting rid of the corner three entirely. The fixed-distance shot is an easier skill than being able to hit jumpers from various distances so as long as its easy-enough then you're never gonna see players who don't otherwise have much offensive game train themselves to be 3pt specialists.
Where basketball misses there is that the "get the ball in the hoop" portion of that is _really_ boring now. I'd wager that people don't want to be concerned with some 3rd man setting a screen on the other side of the court allowing some 2nd man to set up behind a pick from a 4th man to get passed the ball from the 1st man to shoot a three... and then clank it off the rim. Then, rinse and repeat on both ends. The end result is that the "get the ball in the hoop" part just feels like a back-and-forth 3-point shootaround, even though the actual sequence is far more complex.
My ideal would be to try changing 2s and 3s to 3s and 4s. But that will never happen.
The Nash equilibrium should be that the expected values of 2s and 3s are equal. If you're off, you would expect a trend toward that equilibrium, possibly with some overcorrection.
Yes, it will. However it will take depressed viewership to realize.
I think defense is a lot more interesting now and the media has done a horrible job capitalizing on that but end of the day people care more about offense.
The fact that we’ve never seen Embiid vs. Giannis in the ECF, and that we’ll likely never get Giannis vs. Jokic, the two best players during the 2020s, in the NBA Finals says everything you need to know and it's a bummer.
Aside from 2021, I can’t remember another truly competitive finals where both teams had a real shot at winning. Maybe Boston wasn’t expected to fall so hard against Golden State, but matchups like DEN vs. MIA, BOS vs. DAL, or LAL vs. MIA felt lopsided—one team stacked with talent, the other never really standing a chance.
At this point, injuries, not players or teams, are deciding who moves forward.
Football is kinda like this at this point too. Some fraction of the top QBs are going to go down each year, and it feels like a limp to the finish.
That being said, somehow Wilt Chamberlain once played a season in which he only missed 8 and a half minutes total in the entire season, including OT. Amazing. Times have changed but that will never happen again now.
The pet theory is that the NBA is a RNG for gambling now the game isn't really the game. TV is near death, so gambling is the only source of revenue that can possibly replace the big TV deal.
Anything else allows stacking value above cost and leading to team imbalances.
You don't even have to look far for an example. The Denver Nuggets won a championship a year and a half ago while nearly attempting the fewest 3s in the league.
> In the past, the team built its roster around a big name like Shaq. Most of the offense were from the center. This has now changed...
Is the author not aware of Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, (Wembanyama... soon)? The winners of the last 6 MVP awards? If there were enough talented bigs to go around, every team in the league would be building around them because it works really, really well.
But still data-lization is taking the fun out of basketball, that's for sure.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-14/forget-do...
there is absolutely no sport today that is as predictable as nba. check this next thursday 2/20, boston is playing philly
- boston will score between 108 and 125 points
- they will attempt between 48 and 58 3's
- they will make betwee 19 and 25 of them
I can make another 5 of these, they will be true as it is always all the same these days
While you’re at it, do it for “another 5” and let me know how you get on.
College players are much more inconsistent because they're younger and less experienced. There are not many 20 year olds you can depend on to consistently make 3s. There are also a lot more teams which spreads the talent pool around. In my opinion, it amounts to a more exciting product to watch, even if it's less polished.
Unless you have a correctable mechanical problem with your shot, the ability to hit a three point basket is more of a natural ability than a learned skill. Those guys just have incredibly good hand-eye coordination.
The idea that players are more specialized is wrong. In the 90s there were plenty of defense-only players like Denis Rodman and Ben Wallace; they might not start in today's NBA, let alone make all-star teams, because they are too one-dimensional.
A good counter to these arguments is made on the Thinking Basketball podcast. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4but75EjY
That said, Wallace was 2000s, not 90s, and they were specialists whose exception proved the rule. Basketball then was much more positional, so you did have specialists in that you expected your PF to rebound, your SG to shoot, etc. Considering the modern game is much more positionless, it is surprising that in relation that foundation, there is much so much more focus on specialized skills (3pt shooting, wing defense, paint protection, offensive rebounding).
Also agree that Thinking Basketball is a terrific podcast.
Dead Comment
This was such an eye-opener for me. A high-stakes sport like basketball/the NBA went on for decades without realising the simple math that three pointers are more valuable than two-pointers if you just do the basic math. How many areas in our lives are yet to be optimised with really basic math?
1) It seems like there’s a natural resistance to change driven by loss aversion; you see a similar pattern in the NFL with decisions like punting vs. going for it on fourth down. Even if the expected value is positive, the failures are given far more weight than the successes.
2) In general, there's a lot of skepticism toward analytics until they reach a tipping point where they’re impossible to ignore, at which point they take over completely and introduce shifts like the ones shown here.
Moneyball, for example, has plenty of anecdotes about front office staff and coaches dismissing analytics in favor of “gut instincts”—and that was in 2002! In baseball, a sport which adopted advanced analytics far faster than others (obviously in no small part due to teams like that As roster).
Even today, plenty of NBA personalities push back against analytics—Reggie Miller, for example, has been pretty vocal about his distaste for them. He's obviously increasingly alone in that opinion, but it can be really hard to break old habits.
But since then people have gotten at least a little bit taller. We developed more ways in which to train and grow our physical strength. Training got more intense, improving results. And more subtle changes along those lines, which are micro-changes that accrue over time, and often hard to notice.
It can take a while for someone, anyone, to realize that all the various changes have made what was intended to be a risky maneuver into a viable play. It seems obvious in retrospect, but until someone points it out, it's one of those avenues of thought requires you to shake off what you've known your whole life before you can accept it.
Could also be that none of that was relevant, but it's worth considering and keeping in mind.
The person who shifted this mindset is one of the smallest players in the the NBA though, would be considered small by the standards of any era of the game. And in fact, the game has shifted to smaller players in general in recent years. It's more of a skill/agility thing.
I do believe technology has played a part though. Being able to 3d scan a player's motion and find mechanics adjustments has proven to be quite powerful.
Which also suggests how things may continue to evolve; the best defense vs. 3-point shots probably compromises your defense vs. 2-point shots, and eventually some team will "realize" that they can do better with _fewer_ 3-point shots.
Further complication comes from rebounds; the player taking the 3-point shot is less likely to be able to get the rebound if he misses, relative to a player trying to dunk it. So, the math is not trivial, and it depends on what the other team is expecting/guarding against, which might make it a non-linear system (i.e. constantly evolving over time).
There was a time when chess theory said that there was one perfect, optimal opening, and anything else was a mistake. It was sort of true, until everyone took it as a given, and then doing another opening meant your opponent wasn't as likely to be prepared for it.
Developing players who are elite prospects are also now less likely to be pigeon-holed during development into: you're tall as a 12 year old, so just focus on drills for centres. So yes, there would absolutely be growth in the number of capable shooters.
On your point about realisation, teams already optimise to favour threes and high-percentage twos. They try to stretch defence to each extreme, but you need to excel and threaten at both things at any given point because teams will adjust constantly during the game.
So it really is impossible to cover a more than 33% shooter all around the court, and that equates to a better than 50% 2pt shooter.
The only basketball that really matters happens in the playoffs; the rest is irrelevant and says nothing about the true power rankings.
Coaches and owners are not rewarded for innovation. Fans strongly discourage taking bets that could fail.
And then there’s preparing for the strategy change. Training, practice, and coaching time is extremely limited. How much do you re-allocate to this new approach? You don’t just tell players to take more 3s, it’s more complicated than that.
So in traditional innovators dilemma fashion, it’s much easier to follow when you see that the new way works. It’s easier to convince everyone (fans, coaches, players, owners) to get on board when you can point to Steph Curry doing it right.
"Really basic math"? Do you think NBA coaches reached this conclusion like this:
1. A player can throw X 2-points in a game.
2. Or he can throw Y 3-points in a game.
3. 3Y > 2X, so we should just throw 3-points all the time.
It's absolutely not what happened. And the reason teams didn't discovery the current strategy decades earlier was absolutely not that they couldn't do basic math.
And call me naive maybe but not arrogant, I’ve never been called that in my life so it’s quite surprising to be called arrogant in HN where I know the average person is smarter than me.
A 3 point shot with 36% chance to go in (league average) = 1.08 points per attempt.
A mid-range 2 point shot with 45% chance to go in = .9 points per attempt.
The math is very basic.
[1] https://malteranalytics.github.io/nfl-4th-down/
Deleted Comment
It's been interesting to follow some changes teams have made the past two seasons where teams are figuring out how to better time steals when a pitch is thrown, and which players to go after. For example, pitchers with slow releases and bad catchers.
Base running aggressiveness that some teams have been doing as well. The value of going 1st to 3rd on a single is massive and getting speed, and judgement and wanting your players to do that will be more and more valued.
I actually searched "base running aggressiveness" to see what articles had to say, and two months ago Statcast put in a new stat called "Net Bases Gained"[1]. Crazy.
This mimics the changes in NBA talked about here, where value in players changes over times when new ways of playing show their value. It's kind of like the 4 minute mile though, where until someone went out and was able to run under 4 minutes / make all those 3s / run that aggressive on the base paths / go for it on more 4th downs, teams are scared to be the first.
[0] https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/SB_leagues.shtml [1] https://www.mlb.com/news/breaking-down-statcast-s-new-baseru...
But stealing bases has long been a science. It was something I admired about college level development of players in the 2000's - stealing bases went from fundamental to advanced and well beyond "just let the fastest guys do their thing." UVA's coach had a saying like "every player on this team will be capable of stealing bases"
The NBA could use its own blast from the past. There's too much isolation and 3s. When the 3s are falling, it's fun, and when they're not, it's terrible. Much like baseball and its homerun or nothing strategy.
I think the NBA has other problems too, though. The regular season doesn't mean much so their superstars take lots of time off throughout the year. Either shorten the regular season or eliminate some playoff teams.
When the NHL over-expanded in the 90s a similar thing happened -- there wasn't enough talent so they'd just skate in these obnoxious circles, which is super boring to watch.
Every league does this of course, NBA did it just last year with the stealth rule changes around fouls.
Playing sports is a fun activity to get exercise, it’s not worth getting emotionally invested in teams or leagues.