Over time as the population has increased and as players have begun specializing in their favorite sport earlier in life, the top athletes really do have an edge. In MLB one can easily see pitchers' average velocity increase, batting averages are much, much lower as a result. In NFL QBs now have completion percentages that are much, much higher than in previous eras and placekickers are just so much better than they used to be. In the NBA I'd suggest the spotlight is on the 3 point shot, indeed if its the end of the game and you're up by two would you give Steph Curry an open look from half court? I wouldn't. NBA players got really really good at hitting 3's in a game that was originally designed to reward teams for taking shots closer to the basket. With the NBA I would love to see a CBA league experiment with having 3 points for shots in the paint, 2 points from the floor and make anything beyond the current 3 point line a 1 point shot.
I would argue the shooting is too good in the nba. The quality of play is too high. College still has loads of errors which makes the game more in doubt
Don’t agree with all of your comments. Shooting free throws entails a risk of missing; in the most close games there is intense pressure.
The traveling and palming drives me CRAZY.
Players are so much more athletic today, I sometimes think the NBA should make the court bigger and/or the basket higher.
I’ve been watching NBA ball since the mid 1960’s and notwithstanding today’s better athletes, I remember fondly the matchups of the Sixers and Celtics and Celtics vc Lakers.
Good post…not sure about getting rid of free throws, especially late in games. Totally agree the amount of 3-point attempts is getting absurd. Yes, the field goal percentage has stayed pretty constant over past 40 years but it makes the game so boring to watch. Ok, Steph Curry was incredible from beyond the arc but I don’t need to see 6’10” centers and power-forwards launching it from downtown. Basketball just had way better rhythm and tempo in the 80’s.. and centers that could post up like Olajuwon…or maybe I’m just getting old and out of touch.
When the 3 point play was instituted my view which i expressed to my fellow friends who were fans to the game and to which they agreed was it would ruin the sport. All sports today have negative aspects to them in part from fantasy sports leagues to online gambling. Offense across basketball and football became the emphasis in my view in part due to fantasy leagues and rule changes to accommodate more action by offenses of the these sports. As to basketball one just has to watch perhaps the last 5-6 minutes of a game and not much else; well at least in my view. Too bad.
Incidentally I just came across this 16 year old The Onion video titled "NHL Woos Fans By Increasing Scoring With Bigger Nets, 3-Point Line".
"How will that effect the game? It won't change a thing. It'll be exactly the same.
Except, instead of the players passing the puck with the stick, they'll be throwing the puck in with their hands. It's just going to make scoring a lot easier."
Agree with most of what you said except for the “landing zone” foul. Usually it happens when the defender is flying in on a close out and ends up underneath the shooter, not when the shooter jumps forward. Since there is a high risk of injury on those plays I think it’s a good rule, although I do agree that it is a mistake to call it when the shooter jumps forward and lands on the defender.
Much bigger problem is the “off arm” push off, which has been much discussed over the last several years. Short interview clip of Steve Kerr talking about it recently went around nba twitter: https://x.com/NateDuncanNBA/status/2039800623462236228?s=20.
To give a (relatively) young person’s perspective on the traveling issue, I started watching in 2005 when I was about 8 years old, and pretty much no one my age has any problem with the gather step and “palming” rules, probably because none of us have known anything else, although we have all had “back in my day” types of coaches who hated the new rules (but still let us “carry” the ball if it meant we won more games). Mostly we are bemused by the old heads who shout “travel!” every play. The strongest argument in favor of the new rules is that league’s most entertaining player (imo) of the last 10 years, Kyrie Irving, would not have been able to do a lot of what he did without the gather step or palming, and when I watch old clips I don’t find it any more impressive that the players are more restricted in what they can do. All that to say I don’t think the league should revert back to the old traveling rules.
I'd encourage you to closely watch replays of these fouls. The majority of times the player starts behind the line and lands inside the three point line, often 2 or 3 feet from where he started. It's absurd.
Prior to the introduction of the 3-point line, NBA ratings were so bad that CBS aired the finals on tape delay. Only after the 3-point line was introduced and scoring significantly increased, did the Showtime Lakers and Bird’s Celtics bring the NBA to the forefront of American professional sports.
In the early 2000s, when zone defense and hand-checking were permitted, ratings were low, despite the dominance of the Lakers, the league’s preeminent franchise. Fans complained about how ugly the game had become. When, as mentioned in this piece, the league made it easier to score by banning hand-checking and emphasizing freedom of movement, ratings *increased* significantly.
On the thesis of the article, the Phoenix Suns’ seven-seconds-or-less offense, enabled by the new rules and which favored quick and easy scoring, should have been the least-enjoyable form of basketball, but fans found it to be among the most.
Steph Curry and the 3-point revolution were not associated with another ratings boom, but the NBA became the preeminent league on social media and franchise valuations exploded, increasing 3-5x.
At almost every stage of the league’s recent history, fan interest and team valuations have increased with the implementation of rules to make it easier, *not* harder and more satisfying, to score.
PS Purposefully placing one’s foot in a jump-shooter’s landing zone is extremely dangerous and seems obviously worthy of a flagrant foul.
I've seen defenders standing two feet away from a jump shooter get called for a foul because the jump shooter leapt forward onto their foot. That's crazy. Where is the defender supposed to stand?
If we judge NBA policies by market valuations, I think the evidence supports offense-favorable rules, but of course it's difficult to evaluate the counterfactual.
An underrated reason for the perceived decline in the NBA in America is that the top four players in the league are not American-born (and none have particularly attractive star personalities). The history of the league is driven by stars: Wilt/Russell -> Kareem -> Bird/Magic -> Jordan -> Shaq -> Kobe -> Lebron -> Lebron/Steph. Not only is there no American-born player in the top 4, of the Americans (Kawhi, Cunningham, Tatum, Edwards, Mitchell) in the top 10, I would only consider Anthony Edwards a truly marketable star personality.
2016 is widely considered the best postseason of recent history, and that is well after all the offesnive rule-changes had been implemented, and after the analytics-driven 3-point revolution was well on its way. The post-pandemic era is supposed to be when analytics and offense "ruined" the NBA, but note that it didn't coincide with any major rule changes, but it *was* the first time in the history of the league that the best player (Giannis/Jokic) had not been American.
When I was a kid, taking a 25 foot set shot would have gotten you thrown out of the game.
At the Rucker, it would have gotten you ridiculed or beaten up.
Perhaps the best, and certainly the most underrated NBA (offensive) player was Bernard King, who famously played without knees. You will never see his like again.
On the positive side, we'll never see any Bill Laimbeers either.
I'm surprised that you give a bit of a free ride to the college game. I think it is much worse than the NBA with the freaking "portal", all the bribes and all the point shaving.
I was merely discussing the college game itself, not all the surrounding corruption. To be clear, I prefer pro basketball. But college has some advantages, such as more enthusiasm.
I don't think even lottery odds for all ten teams that don't make the playoffs or play-in tournament will prevent tanking. It will change the inflection points though.
The current system is a weighted lottery for only the top 4 picks. Your odds of winning the lottery and getting a top 4 pick are higher the worse your record is. That is one benefit of tanking. But the other benefit is that the team can put a floor on how low its pick will fall if it has poor lottery luck. The team with the worst record is guaranteed no worse than the #5 pick, second worst record no lower than #6, and so on.
But if you give all 10 teams the same odds, the floor incentive to tanking is still there. I suppose you could do a lottery for the first 10 picks instead of the top 4 as it is now, but that will open up the possibility that the really bad teams won't be able to draft high enough to get franchise altering talent. This would be a big deal to many small market teams that have little hope of signing a superstar in free agency.
Perhaps more importantly, teams will try to tank out of the playoffs or play-in. Why scrap and try to get the 8th seed just to get destroyed by OKC in the first round when I can lose a few more games and get a decent shot at a high draft pick?
"I suppose you could do a lottery for the first 10 picks instead of the top 4 as it is now"
That's what I had in mind. And all the bottom ten teams are bad, there's no point in distinguishing between them. Utah and Dallas are better than Milwaukee in terms of talent, but have much worse records. Records mean nothing at the bottom.
I don't worry much about teams intentionally trying to miss the playoffs.
Maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but didn't the NBA institute the play-in tournament to disincentivize teams trying to tank out of the 7 and 8 seeds because that was an issue for the league? The optics aren't great when teams prioritize draft position over making the playoffs.
I think one of the fundamental problems is that the NBA season is too long and has too many games. NFL teams also tank and no one really cares because it's a couple of games out of 17. If the season were 60-something games where the teams play 2-3 times per week, no back-to-backs, I think it would diminish tanking (or at least shorten the time of it) since teams would be in the playoff race longer. And the quality of play would probably be better, fewer injuries, etc. But this will never happen because of the revenue hit everyone would take (although the improved quality of play may capture back some/most of it over time).
Eliminating pick protections in trades outside of just lottery protecting the pick would also help, but this would also negatively impact the trade market.
PS - John Hollinger wrote a really good piece for the Athletic today about how historically bad the tanking has been for the bottom 10 teams post-trade deadline .
One of my proposed rule changes would be to make fouls more like soccer, where the person fouled puts the ball in play from the point of the foul with no defenders allowed within, say, 6 feet of him (and the shot clock resets). Completely eliminates the incentive to foul intentionally. Maybe add on top of that yellow and red cards, rather than a 6 foul limit that includes ticky-tack minor fouls.
Free throws and other delays give the players a chance to rest. Without them, they wouldn't be able to go as many minutes, which would lower the quality of play.
Agree on traveling, kicked balls, landing on feet, etc.
I always hate to point out when my favorite writers make a mistake but in this case, Scott is mistaken about the scoring. I've been following the NBA starting when the Lakers moved out to Los Angeles. I even attended one of the Laker-Celtic final's game in 1962 (my dad's best friend was the son of NBA Commissioner Maurice Podoloff who was instrumental in putting the 24 second clock into use. Scoring per team was higher than today for most of the 1960s. It was not until 1996 that it dipped below 100 and did not go above that mark until 2009. For this period, the 3-point basket was in play. What has happened is teams have moved to quicker lineups with much faster play from dribbling to passing (one reason possibly for more Achilles injuries). Tactics have changed and as well from the old defensive days of the Pistons, Bulls (despite the presence of MJ, they were an exceptional defensive team).
Allowing the Euro-step move is a little ridiculous but I doubt it has much influence on the scoring level.
"It was not until 1996 that it dipped below 100 and did not go above that mark until 2009. For this period, the 3-point basket was in play."
This in no way contradicts anything I said. You said I should "look up the data", but when I do so it confirms that 102-96 was a typical score in the late 1990s, just as I said.
As for the Euro step, that's not the main cause of traveling. There's also lots more shuffling of feet, carrying the ball, etc.
Add on to your list: on drives, the offensive player can't jump into the defensive player and it's a defensive foul. No grabbing by the defensive players. No push offs by the offensive players.
Over time as the population has increased and as players have begun specializing in their favorite sport earlier in life, the top athletes really do have an edge. In MLB one can easily see pitchers' average velocity increase, batting averages are much, much lower as a result. In NFL QBs now have completion percentages that are much, much higher than in previous eras and placekickers are just so much better than they used to be. In the NBA I'd suggest the spotlight is on the 3 point shot, indeed if its the end of the game and you're up by two would you give Steph Curry an open look from half court? I wouldn't. NBA players got really really good at hitting 3's in a game that was originally designed to reward teams for taking shots closer to the basket. With the NBA I would love to see a CBA league experiment with having 3 points for shots in the paint, 2 points from the floor and make anything beyond the current 3 point line a 1 point shot.
Yes, athletes are getting better in all the sports.
Traveling and palming are ubiquitous. My junior high coach would have been appalled.
I would argue the shooting is too good in the nba. The quality of play is too high. College still has loads of errors which makes the game more in doubt
Agree with all of this but on Saturday those Jokic shots over Wemby in OT are as good as anything I saw in the eighties and nineties.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1scm1d5/highlight_nikola_joki%C4%87_is_unstoppable_floating_a/
If they meet in the second round it will be epic.
Don’t agree with all of your comments. Shooting free throws entails a risk of missing; in the most close games there is intense pressure.
The traveling and palming drives me CRAZY.
Players are so much more athletic today, I sometimes think the NBA should make the court bigger and/or the basket higher.
I’ve been watching NBA ball since the mid 1960’s and notwithstanding today’s better athletes, I remember fondly the matchups of the Sixers and Celtics and Celtics vc Lakers.
Still a great sport, though.
Good post…not sure about getting rid of free throws, especially late in games. Totally agree the amount of 3-point attempts is getting absurd. Yes, the field goal percentage has stayed pretty constant over past 40 years but it makes the game so boring to watch. Ok, Steph Curry was incredible from beyond the arc but I don’t need to see 6’10” centers and power-forwards launching it from downtown. Basketball just had way better rhythm and tempo in the 80’s.. and centers that could post up like Olajuwon…or maybe I’m just getting old and out of touch.
When the 3 point play was instituted my view which i expressed to my fellow friends who were fans to the game and to which they agreed was it would ruin the sport. All sports today have negative aspects to them in part from fantasy sports leagues to online gambling. Offense across basketball and football became the emphasis in my view in part due to fantasy leagues and rule changes to accommodate more action by offenses of the these sports. As to basketball one just has to watch perhaps the last 5-6 minutes of a game and not much else; well at least in my view. Too bad.
Incidentally I just came across this 16 year old The Onion video titled "NHL Woos Fans By Increasing Scoring With Bigger Nets, 3-Point Line".
"How will that effect the game? It won't change a thing. It'll be exactly the same.
Except, instead of the players passing the puck with the stick, they'll be throwing the puck in with their hands. It's just going to make scoring a lot easier."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7mekhFTrXM
Agree with most of what you said except for the “landing zone” foul. Usually it happens when the defender is flying in on a close out and ends up underneath the shooter, not when the shooter jumps forward. Since there is a high risk of injury on those plays I think it’s a good rule, although I do agree that it is a mistake to call it when the shooter jumps forward and lands on the defender.
Much bigger problem is the “off arm” push off, which has been much discussed over the last several years. Short interview clip of Steve Kerr talking about it recently went around nba twitter: https://x.com/NateDuncanNBA/status/2039800623462236228?s=20.
To give a (relatively) young person’s perspective on the traveling issue, I started watching in 2005 when I was about 8 years old, and pretty much no one my age has any problem with the gather step and “palming” rules, probably because none of us have known anything else, although we have all had “back in my day” types of coaches who hated the new rules (but still let us “carry” the ball if it meant we won more games). Mostly we are bemused by the old heads who shout “travel!” every play. The strongest argument in favor of the new rules is that league’s most entertaining player (imo) of the last 10 years, Kyrie Irving, would not have been able to do a lot of what he did without the gather step or palming, and when I watch old clips I don’t find it any more impressive that the players are more restricted in what they can do. All that to say I don’t think the league should revert back to the old traveling rules.
"not when the shooter jumps forward."
I'd encourage you to closely watch replays of these fouls. The majority of times the player starts behind the line and lands inside the three point line, often 2 or 3 feet from where he started. It's absurd.
The evidence doesn’t support this thesis.
Prior to the introduction of the 3-point line, NBA ratings were so bad that CBS aired the finals on tape delay. Only after the 3-point line was introduced and scoring significantly increased, did the Showtime Lakers and Bird’s Celtics bring the NBA to the forefront of American professional sports.
In the early 2000s, when zone defense and hand-checking were permitted, ratings were low, despite the dominance of the Lakers, the league’s preeminent franchise. Fans complained about how ugly the game had become. When, as mentioned in this piece, the league made it easier to score by banning hand-checking and emphasizing freedom of movement, ratings *increased* significantly.
On the thesis of the article, the Phoenix Suns’ seven-seconds-or-less offense, enabled by the new rules and which favored quick and easy scoring, should have been the least-enjoyable form of basketball, but fans found it to be among the most.
Steph Curry and the 3-point revolution were not associated with another ratings boom, but the NBA became the preeminent league on social media and franchise valuations exploded, increasing 3-5x.
At almost every stage of the league’s recent history, fan interest and team valuations have increased with the implementation of rules to make it easier, *not* harder and more satisfying, to score.
PS Purposefully placing one’s foot in a jump-shooter’s landing zone is extremely dangerous and seems obviously worthy of a flagrant foul.
https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/the-nbas-paradox-fewer-viewers-bigger-paydays/
I've seen defenders standing two feet away from a jump shooter get called for a foul because the jump shooter leapt forward onto their foot. That's crazy. Where is the defender supposed to stand?
https://scottsumner.substack.com/p/no-wait-and-see
If we judge NBA policies by market valuations, I think the evidence supports offense-favorable rules, but of course it's difficult to evaluate the counterfactual.
An underrated reason for the perceived decline in the NBA in America is that the top four players in the league are not American-born (and none have particularly attractive star personalities). The history of the league is driven by stars: Wilt/Russell -> Kareem -> Bird/Magic -> Jordan -> Shaq -> Kobe -> Lebron -> Lebron/Steph. Not only is there no American-born player in the top 4, of the Americans (Kawhi, Cunningham, Tatum, Edwards, Mitchell) in the top 10, I would only consider Anthony Edwards a truly marketable star personality.
2016 is widely considered the best postseason of recent history, and that is well after all the offesnive rule-changes had been implemented, and after the analytics-driven 3-point revolution was well on its way. The post-pandemic era is supposed to be when analytics and offense "ruined" the NBA, but note that it didn't coincide with any major rule changes, but it *was* the first time in the history of the league that the best player (Giannis/Jokic) had not been American.
When I was a kid, taking a 25 foot set shot would have gotten you thrown out of the game.
At the Rucker, it would have gotten you ridiculed or beaten up.
Perhaps the best, and certainly the most underrated NBA (offensive) player was Bernard King, who famously played without knees. You will never see his like again.
On the positive side, we'll never see any Bill Laimbeers either.
I'm surprised that you give a bit of a free ride to the college game. I think it is much worse than the NBA with the freaking "portal", all the bribes and all the point shaving.
I was merely discussing the college game itself, not all the surrounding corruption. To be clear, I prefer pro basketball. But college has some advantages, such as more enthusiasm.
I don't think even lottery odds for all ten teams that don't make the playoffs or play-in tournament will prevent tanking. It will change the inflection points though.
The current system is a weighted lottery for only the top 4 picks. Your odds of winning the lottery and getting a top 4 pick are higher the worse your record is. That is one benefit of tanking. But the other benefit is that the team can put a floor on how low its pick will fall if it has poor lottery luck. The team with the worst record is guaranteed no worse than the #5 pick, second worst record no lower than #6, and so on.
But if you give all 10 teams the same odds, the floor incentive to tanking is still there. I suppose you could do a lottery for the first 10 picks instead of the top 4 as it is now, but that will open up the possibility that the really bad teams won't be able to draft high enough to get franchise altering talent. This would be a big deal to many small market teams that have little hope of signing a superstar in free agency.
Perhaps more importantly, teams will try to tank out of the playoffs or play-in. Why scrap and try to get the 8th seed just to get destroyed by OKC in the first round when I can lose a few more games and get a decent shot at a high draft pick?
"I suppose you could do a lottery for the first 10 picks instead of the top 4 as it is now"
That's what I had in mind. And all the bottom ten teams are bad, there's no point in distinguishing between them. Utah and Dallas are better than Milwaukee in terms of talent, but have much worse records. Records mean nothing at the bottom.
I don't worry much about teams intentionally trying to miss the playoffs.
Maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but didn't the NBA institute the play-in tournament to disincentivize teams trying to tank out of the 7 and 8 seeds because that was an issue for the league? The optics aren't great when teams prioritize draft position over making the playoffs.
I think one of the fundamental problems is that the NBA season is too long and has too many games. NFL teams also tank and no one really cares because it's a couple of games out of 17. If the season were 60-something games where the teams play 2-3 times per week, no back-to-backs, I think it would diminish tanking (or at least shorten the time of it) since teams would be in the playoff race longer. And the quality of play would probably be better, fewer injuries, etc. But this will never happen because of the revenue hit everyone would take (although the improved quality of play may capture back some/most of it over time).
Eliminating pick protections in trades outside of just lottery protecting the pick would also help, but this would also negatively impact the trade market.
PS - John Hollinger wrote a really good piece for the Athletic today about how historically bad the tanking has been for the bottom 10 teams post-trade deadline .
One of my proposed rule changes would be to make fouls more like soccer, where the person fouled puts the ball in play from the point of the foul with no defenders allowed within, say, 6 feet of him (and the shot clock resets). Completely eliminates the incentive to foul intentionally. Maybe add on top of that yellow and red cards, rather than a 6 foul limit that includes ticky-tack minor fouls.
Free throws and other delays give the players a chance to rest. Without them, they wouldn't be able to go as many minutes, which would lower the quality of play.
Agree on traveling, kicked balls, landing on feet, etc.
John Havlicek didn't need no freakin' challenge breaks.
High bar indeed
I always hate to point out when my favorite writers make a mistake but in this case, Scott is mistaken about the scoring. I've been following the NBA starting when the Lakers moved out to Los Angeles. I even attended one of the Laker-Celtic final's game in 1962 (my dad's best friend was the son of NBA Commissioner Maurice Podoloff who was instrumental in putting the 24 second clock into use. Scoring per team was higher than today for most of the 1960s. It was not until 1996 that it dipped below 100 and did not go above that mark until 2009. For this period, the 3-point basket was in play. What has happened is teams have moved to quicker lineups with much faster play from dribbling to passing (one reason possibly for more Achilles injuries). Tactics have changed and as well from the old defensive days of the Pistons, Bulls (despite the presence of MJ, they were an exceptional defensive team).
Allowing the Euro-step move is a little ridiculous but I doubt it has much influence on the scoring level.
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_stats_per_game.html has every season average per team that you might want to look up.
"It was not until 1996 that it dipped below 100 and did not go above that mark until 2009. For this period, the 3-point basket was in play."
This in no way contradicts anything I said. You said I should "look up the data", but when I do so it confirms that 102-96 was a typical score in the late 1990s, just as I said.
As for the Euro step, that's not the main cause of traveling. There's also lots more shuffling of feet, carrying the ball, etc.
Add on to your list: on drives, the offensive player can't jump into the defensive player and it's a defensive foul. No grabbing by the defensive players. No push offs by the offensive players.
Have reviews done by off the floor officials.