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.
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.
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.
That said, trends are cyclical. Look at the role of the running back in the NFL. There will always be outlier players like Shaq who will buck the trends and exploit matchups.
If “most teams can build rosters that get to the playoffs” is true it’s only because the NBA playoffs are so big. I’d assume it’s false based on any interpretation of “can build” you pick.
Realistically only a handful of teams compete for a championship in any given span of years.
Not really, it's still 16/30 (I don't like playoff formats btw, so American).
They mention Boston Celtics, but they are only a single time champion, and we can see plenty other teams with good chances to beat them.
And I'd argue we are moving further away from specialization: now centers are required to shoot 3 pointers at a high clip and high percentage, they have high number of assists (it's not just Jokic, look at Iannis, Sabonis...).
And centers need to defend smaller, faster players when switching, just like smaller players need to defend centers.
Obviously people shot fewer 3s back then, but as far as I remember, Bruce Bowen was really the first 3-and-D player back in the 90s.
Gone are the days of an all-around player. There is no longer a need for a player who does everything. Look at players like Kobe Bryant and Lebron James (early career); they not only scored but guarded defense, caught rebounds and played the role of playmakers.
Not sure how true that is. People sometimes call the modern style "heliocentric" - one star who makes the offense work, surrounded by a bunch of role players. These star players often do basically everything, albeit most are better at some things than others. But that's always been true, stars in the old days were not always perfectly balanced.
And stars these days have a ton of variability. Look at the best players in the league - Jokic, Shai, Giannis, Luka, Embiid (when healthy..) - those guys all play very different styles of basketball, and that's awesome!
But I do agree with the overall point of the article. I find it annoying when I'm watching a game and so many possessions there's just not much happening. A couple passes around the perimeter, someone jacks up a moderately contested 3, rinse and repeat. Not the most exciting basketball. That doesn't happen every play, and there's still plenty of exciting plays and players, but it happens a lot more than it used to.
Usage rates also show there is still plenty of heliocentrism so Copernicus remains happy
For example, if you have a team that posts up in the middle, actually moves the ball around and not just around the perimeter, and utilizes the shot clock well, this is going to wear down a team by forcing them to play rough defense, reducing the effectiveness of the three point shot over the course of the game.
Part of the reason of the decline e of interesting basketball is the insane relaxation of rules. Offensive players can travel, carry, flop, ect. all the while knowing that defensive players are handicapped in the contact they can initiate.
A big conversation I see now days is what’s “wrong” with the modern nba, with too many 3’s being the most common refrain. That’s silly. I will tell you what’s actually wrong about the nba. They’re playing the most amazing basketball the worlds ever seen, but the entertainment ecosystem around them hasn’t changed at all. Literally they just talk about the stupidest stuff, like who’s the GOAT, instead of actually educating their audiences about the incredible level of play that exists now days.
You could argue that people aren’t interested in seeing that, but I don’t think we will ever know until it’s been tried. Instead, sports pundits are just being negative about the sport and filling the airwaves with low effort, toxic cliches while providing zero information about the brilliance we’re seeing. As to why I think people would actually care to know, I think it’s because once you’re exposed to this stuff it sticks and then you can’t unsee it. You start to notice the patterns and enjoy the game again.
So anyways sorry for the rant but it drives me nuts. Basketball is so cool right now once you start to get what you’re actually seeing and players can be so smart too. It’s amazing.
100% agree on this. NBA coverage, especially on ESPN is garbage. Not to mention how expensive it is to (legally) watch the NBA. If they actually had better coverage explaining different facets of the game, and analyzing it, maybe people would appreciate what they're seeing more.
I do not like the bullying aspect of it though. Offensive players are ramming straight into defenders, shoving the them mid-jump to get a rebound etc.
Agree on offensive players drawing fouls.
If there's any problem with basketball right now it's that Adam Silver is trying too many radical things and leaving history behind in uncomfortable ways. I mean, he's talking about going to 10 minute quarters! That will invalidate basically every record ever. I could go on and on, but the NBA game itself is not broken.
Superstars not only impact the makeup of their teams roster, they impact the composition of rosters across the league. When Shaq was in his prime teams used to carry extra big men to have more fouls to give.
The most recent iteration of the league was teams going for small ball with three point shooting wings to compete with the Warriors. Right now you see serious contenders in the western conference going for size to make it past Jokic. The next iteration will be the Wemby stoppers.
Before Wilt and Dr J you had Oscar Robertson, Pistol Pete Maravich, Jerry West, Rick Barry, George Milan, etc. The league has always revolved around stars.
> but guarded defense, caught rebounds and played the role of playmakers.
nobody who has watched basketball would say "guarded defense" or "caught rebounds". I saw "throw 3 pointers" elsewhere in this thread, which is similar, though I'm not sure if that's said by the article author.
Imagine if someone commented on the state of tech today and said that programmers "type code programs".
While I partially agree with the article's stance, you can't optimize for this[^1] or this[^2] because they’re unpredictable—historically great outliers that defy averages and planning.
[^1] Luka Doncic WCF G5 against the Twolves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H3bGEXk3GA
[^2]: Giannis Antetokoumpo scoring 50p in G6 of the 2021 NBA Finals (featuring 17/19 FTs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHPLeWsAQw4
[1]the worst were the conference finals 2018 game 7s: Cavs (9/35); Celtics (7/39). Rockets (9/44); Warriors (9/33).
Is that stats based or anecdotal?
Link to random person on reddit, but it seems like shooting percentage overall drops due to getting rid of bad teams in the playoffs. And 3pt and fg are affected equally. By about 1% - ie not that much.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/12luk37/oc_how_does_pl...
But, the game slows down, and everyone plays defense more aggressively, which might account for the change described here.
No, it was Daryll Morey's Houston Rockets around the James Harden era, who started advanced analytics player selection and shot selection. They started with enormous video analytics and Morey runs the yearly Analytics Sports Conference.
Moreyball was way more advanced than Moneyball. You go by the three and die by the three. He still didn't win a championship though.
This is the first time I've ever heard this.
> they not only scored but guarded defense, caught rebounds and played the role of playmakers.
This is also the first time I've ever heard the phrases "guarded defense" and "caught rebounds".
I much prefer the street ball route: make it a contact sport and stop the flopping.
The adaption varies by sport - without going into the weeds, basketball is less random than other invasion sports so there has been typically been a higher premia on player talent so you see high levels of strategic adaption to individual players...by contrast, you don't see this in soccer to the same degree, apart from the top one or two players - but it happens all the same. For some reason, the assumption is that without quantification none of this stuff would be obvious...but if you look at the history of almost every invasion sport there have been strategic adaptions over years/decades/centuries because this stuff is obvious to people playing it.
To be clear, this doesn't happen in non-invasion sports. There is no strategic adaption so you see interesting things like the ability to compare statistical records over long periods (to a certain degree, over very long periods the rules often change and there can be adaption due to generally increasing physical capacity of athletes).
In other words, there is always someone who wants to spoil the fun. The beauty of invasion games is that there is no global minima (and there is a profound lack of joy in non-invasion sports when someone has a higher level than the competition, and just annihilates everyone every match).
Maybe the solution is with a different type of 3D model, namely the Wilson 3D printed basketball. It has more drag than the regulation basketball, making long shots more difficult. This could restore the balance between long field goals and shots near the basket.
Clearly that justifies it.
The same problem is happening in baseball pitching and football kicking.
The strategy, drama, and player celebrity are all part of what makes a popular spectator sport. Lots of casual viewers found the recent Superbowl to be boring because of the early runaway score, despite lots of great athleticism on display.
And of course it's a tautology that "true fans" will always find something to enjoy.
But why stop there? What about the foul line, key width, court size/half court line?
I feel like the rim height is sacred, but what about backboard size/shape?
Some of these dimensions are different in the international game.
(Not that people bank off the backboard, but hit the rim, backboard, in, type accidents)
Yet Wemby is the most hyped young player since LeBron because of his incredible versatility.
Seems like that would have a huge impact on end of game strategy.
It would change the “in the paint” strategy—maybe defense would foul earlier to avoid the 2+1? Hoping instead to split the 2, 1-1 with a miss. Of course, the centers and forwards, who typically aren’t great free throw shooters, are gonna get the ball less. Where does the play go? 3pt land, where it’s way more risky to foul.
I still like the idea.
There’s still a free-throw left to earn the old fashioned way.
Mostly the thinking is this encourages post-play since bigs are usually worse free-throw shooters. Also, it should shorten game length which is another recent audience concern.
Maybe an NBA team will come up with something like that.
However, I believe Kasparov famously tried to employ this tactic against Deep Blue but by that time it wasn't particularly viable.
Another proposal would be to widen the court so the 3 point line would be a complete half circle.
> Players are no longer do-it-alls; they are now given specialized roles.
> they not only scored but guarded defense, caught rebounds and played the role of playmakers.
Anyone who even watches games would instinctively use different language. Nobody in basketball speaks this way.
As far as the veracity, I'd really need to see some data.
First, nothing in cutting edge, 3-and-D basketball says to stop playing defense. Defense is the D in 3-and-D.
As just one counter-example to the author's claims, big players - centers and power forwards - have become more generalized. Instead of just playing near the basket on offense and defense, many now handle the ball, pass, and also shoot from outside - the old-style guys who lack those skills have taken big pay cuts. The primary ball-handler for the author's local Golden State Warriors is Draymond Green, their center. The best player in the world is a center renowned especially for their passing, Nikola Jokic.
Wing players (small forwards and shooting guards) do it all. The local Golden State Warriors also have Steph Curry, the best shooter ever and an excellent ball-handler and passer. And they recently acquired Jimmy Butler, an all-star all-around player; here is the coach:
"Jimmy, he's a real deal," Kerr said. "I mean, just a complete basketball player, methodical, under control all the time, plays at his own pace, never turns it over, sees the game and then can get to the line frequently. Great closer, not in the traditional sense where he's going to be Kevin Durant and make four straight midrange jumpers, but it's more of a complete game. Get to the line, make the right pass, get somebody else an open look, get a defensive stop, get a rebound. He's a fantastic player."
https://abc7news.com/post/warriors-draymond-green-calls-new-...
What's changed in the NBA is that 3-point shooting has become more valued, partly supported by analytics, partly because Steph Curry redefined what is possible for 3-point shooting for both playing and for being a star: Before Curry, every kid wanted to be Michael Jordan or others who made miraculous drives to the basket through crowds; after Curry, kids were heaving up shots from ridiculous distances, just like their hero.
You won't be surprised to learn that many people say, 'it's not like the old days', and are debating changing the rules to make everyone play like they did 20 years ago.
Supporting my theory of the author, here is their bio (https://nabraj.com/)
> Hi, I'm NT (Nabaraj T), a full-stack engineer in Northern California. ... ten years of professional experience
> Besides software development, my interests are in embedded circuits and astronomy. I have started my startup to research space technologies. When not tangled with 1s and 0s, I usually watch football, cheering on Chelsea.
Would be really interesting to read about team records when they field a bunch of specialized players vs generalized players (due to injuries or foul trouble). That would be far more convincing.
Is that why I don't enjoy watching it at all anymore?
