James Harden forces his way out of Houston, spurring on arguments from every angle of the player empowerment spectrum. The Utah Jazz become the best team in the league despite not having a top-15 player on the roster. How can that be?! Can a title contender really be a title contender without a superstar? Giannis Antetokounmpo puts up relatively the same statistics as previous MVP-winning seasons but because he and his Milwaukee Bucks have combusted in the postseason multiple years running, he can no longer be considered for such a prestigious regular-season award.
You’ve heard it all before—the league and all of us sure do like, or put up with, its easy narratives—and you’ve certainly heard some iteration on this one: Three pointers are ruining the NBA! Cries to the basketball heavens about the dearth of stylistic diversity, the lack of gainful employment for non-shooters, the absence of any sort of defense to stem the long-range onslaught, and an overhaul of the rules and/or scoring system are now as commonplace as every dropped jaw in awe of the exploits of Steph Curry and Damian Lillard. We’re in the midst of the three-point revolution, and here come the reactionaries.
Kevin Arnovitz of ESPN reported earlier this week that NBA insiders are increasingly concerned about the state of the league, believing that “all these threes are reaching a critical mass.” This article is behind the ESPN+ paywall, a recent and frustrating tweak to the website that has locked up almost all of its basketball writing, so I can’t quite shoot the messenger. But reading quotes and summaries elsewhere around the web, it’s rather clear that not much new is being said here. The guys who don’t play basketball are not happy with the way the sport is trending, even if the recent influx of more analytics-based scouting and development they’ve championed has helped usher in that very style of play. The three-point line has been around since 1979 but only in the past few years has it become a harbinger of doom, a sign of the basketball end times and the beginning of a boring, predictable brand of sport solely predicated on threes and free throws.
Some people envision the coming apocalypse but others, like me, see something a lot less ominous: a league finally grappling with and adjusting to the advantages that a three-point line offers and the stylistic changes and player types that stem from that realization. It took about thirty years for everyone, bar Reggie Miller and a handful of others, to appreciate that threes are worth more than twos and how that only gets magnified with each attempt and make. The Houston Rockets fired the first shot, Curry blew up our preconceived notions about how far out a consistently makeable shot could be, and now most of the rest of the league has followed suit. Funnily enough, Daryl Morey, a godfather of this revolution, might have some regrets, echoing a mad scientist horrified by his own creation. He also works for the Philadelphia 76ers, not quite an old-school throwback of a team but an anachronistic one led by a mostly traditional, dominant big man and a guy who never shoots jumpers.
The biggest elephant in the room, at least as far as this season’s concerned, is that way too many people still want to act like this season is normal. I did not put an asterisk on the bubble playoffs of last autumn, and I do think that this year’s playoffs will be a somewhat “return to normal” given the uptick in vaccine distribution; the playoffs themselves induce a level of competition and desire not seen in the regular season, and that’s doubly so during a pandemic. But I’m gradually beginning to think this regular season isn’t something we should glean much from. Attaching an asterisk to it would be a bit much and too disrespectful to the many teams and players playing terrific ball amid all this.
Still, the convergence of all these threes with this season provides plenty of non-apocalyptic reasons for why offenses and shooting have been this way. The defense is excruciatingly bad and, while some of that is surely due to the difficulties in adjusting to more threes being attempted, everything about the past year in the NBA is a good indicator as to why. Some teams started this season without having played basketball in nine months. Others got an offseason that’s more accurately measured in terms of weeks than months. Many players expected the season to start in January or February, not late December, and are still rounding into shape. Coronavirus outbreaks and pauses within teams have wrecked any semblance of continuity and repetition. Coaches and players have frequently harped on limited practice time hurting defensive schemes, rotations, and gameplans pretty much more than any other aspect of the game. Add in all the typical rigors of an NBA calendar—oh wait, this one is much more jam packed, too—and it feels like these people are searching for a solution for a problem that might only exist due to the exacerbations of the pandemic. Everything about this season would suggest that shooting can thrive amongst all the chaos, absurdities, and distractions. And it has.
The other persnickety point related to three pointers forever altering the game we know and love is that a not insignificant amount of people find this kind of basketball monotonous and unexciting. The above paragraph works well enough to account for this season’s dull play, even if the last month or so leading into the All-Star Break seemed to produce better basketball. Regardless, this is an issue no matter the yearlong near societal breakdown going on around us. Look, I get it. I didn’t particularly enjoy watching those Rockets teams launch three after three into oblivion and, as a fan, there are few things more frustrating than a good defensive possession being ruined by a ridiculous three in the waning seconds of the shot clock. Some people watch basketball for the dunks, for the defense, for the passes, for the shooting, and whatever else. With the league so clearly tilting in the direction of long-distance shooting, it’s natural that fans and viewers with different views and obsessions are going to feel disappointed or left behind.
Then, it’s fascinating how this concern for the future of basketball somewhat unites two typically opposed groups: front-office types and former pros. Front-office people are beginning to tire of it in the name of “balance” while the pros are annoyed because it’s not the basketball they played. As I watched the Dallas Mavericks and San Antonio Spurs Wednesday night, Greg Anthony, a career 34.9 percent shooter from deep, remarked that the top 100 in three pointers made in league history would look a whole lot different in a decade. He’s entirely accurately, and I think it gets at some of the concerns with this transformation. Are we losing our sense of history? We all have our favorite players that we say would look better or even dominate in a different era. If most statistics and records are going to be overwhelmed due to the changes in play—and not necessarily due to the level of the athletes—it’s not crazy to see why it upsets some. *whispers* This is also reactionary.
The calls to halt this revolution are incredibly premature and, yes, reactionary. It might be ironic to suggest that those who want to change the rules are actually anti-progress, but they are! The league has changed in ways where, at times, it might as well not be basketball anymore. There’s certainly a slogan for some team out there zagging by loading up on bigs, physical defenders, and packing the paint (“Make Basketball Great Again”). For many, this little revolution has simply gone too far.
And to that I say, let it ride! We know what the transition from deep twos to threes has wrought on the NBA, but I don’t think we’ve yet seen any longstanding adaption period. It’s still too early, and the fervor to change the structure of the game or the court denies what should really be happening: front offices, coaches, and players around the league figuring out how to guard in this new NBA. When the only solution is to change basketball’s parameters—like getting rid of the corner three (WTF)—the implication is that defense is forever doomed in the face of three-point bombs. Maybe that is eventually proven true, and guys like Curry, Lillard, Trae Young, and company are really breaking the sport. It’s nevertheless too hasty of an assertion at this point, especially since every franchise in the league is still acclimatizing.
The league is undergoing a dramatic three-point revolution. There’s no denying that. If a player plays any position that isn’t center, they must have a hint of a jumpshot. And it’s pretty helpful if the center does, too. The defense is lagging well behind the innovations on offense but, for every Curry, Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić, and Zion Williamson that shatters what we think is possible on a court, there is going to be some legitimate attempt made to counteract them. To think that the league and its players are only capable of modernizing on one side of the ball is a gross underestimation of what these guys can do. After all, in a league primarily focused on championships, it’s still the best players and not the best shooters that hold up the trophy. Letting the rules be changed, the point system be modified, or even the court itself be reworked is not allowing the revolution to continue apace. What’s the worst that could happen? In five or ten years, we look back and wonder why everyone let basketball get too close to arcade-y on the entertainment scale? And the best that could happen? We’ll have to wait and found out. If the powers that be let us that is.