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
"The NBA" did not do most of these things. Rather teams who used economic reasoning did.
E.g., the rules did not change to incentivize teams to shoot more 3s (or, at least, you have not mentioned a rule that changed to incentivize shooting more 3s); in fact, the changes to defense and foul-calling incentivized more drives to the hoop. But teams realized that 3 points are still more than 2 points, so they should take open 3s instead of contested 2s. And they realized that FTs are worth more (in expected value terms) than contested 2s also, so when guarded shooters starting hunting free throws.
This is not a rules change, it is a behavioral change produced by improvements in the informational environment in a competitive context. I.e., a "market". You are complaining about market efficiency, you prefer the inefficiencies of your youth. Call it a "stubborn attachment"!
This "it used to be better" narrative is not new, and has been pretty thoroughly debunked by analysis of the way the NBA used to actually be. Here's one 20-minute YouTube video that breaks a lot of it down with both visual and statistical evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4but75EjY
Or you can buy the books by Kirk Goldsberry, a cartographer -- yes, map-maker... the NBA court is a terrain, and if you don't understand why a cartographer might be very influential within the NBA then you don't understand any modern sport, not just the NBA -- who has worked for some of the leading analytical organizations in NBA and currently teaches at the University of Texas at Austin (the real one, not Tyler's faux university in Austin).
Thank you! I thought I was going crazy reading that the increase in 3-pt shots was due to rule changes as opposed to an increased focus on efficiency.
I would like people explain to me how watching a player shoot an 18-foot jump shot is more entertaining than watching someone shoot a 24-foot jump shot, but I haven't heard a convincing argument yet.
My take is that the "NBA sucks now" narrative is just a popular thing to think and not something that people came to organically.
The game is more available now. People used to see the best matchup each week, now they see all the bad ones too. Some efficiency-seeking truly is ugly to watch, esp foul-seeking.
But I agree with you: this is a casual take, and overall the game has never been better. Never been more diverse in its styles of play, never been more progressive in its management, never been more strategic, never been more athletic, etc. There's more pace, more space, more movement, more skill, more of everything people claim to like.
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.
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.
It is absurd, but no rule changed to produce this outcome. Shooters have always hunted contact to draw fouls, and defenders have never been allowed to undercut them in the air even if the attacking player initiates contact.
With you on the three-point fouls and I think Scott is wrong. The shooters are not jumping forward in almost any case where the foul is called for the landing zone. They don't land two or three feet inside the arc. I don't know what games he is watching.
100% the off-arm push-off should be outlawed. Period. Just like the defender putting two hands on the dribbler, a de jure offensive foul. Also the charge/block rule is officiated in a manner far to favorable to dribblers, who just fling themselves at defenders in the lane or when turning the corner while being guarded. I
Not with you on the traveling and gather step, which I've gotten used to but cheapen the team aspects of the game. My general take is that dribbling is too much favored over passing and cutting. Iso play is not that entertaining to me, and getting bailed out by the officials ought not to be the primary strategy for offensive play. One thing I like about Steph Curry is that he is very clean on his drives to the rim, little carrying and trying to avoid contact while tossing in amazing layups high off the glass.
I now pay close attention every time they show replays on 3-point fouls, and I find many cases where the player starts outside the line and lands inside the line, 2 or three feet from where they started. I encourage people to pay more close attention to these cases.
In regards to the tanking problem I'll repost in full a thread by Kevin Bryan that discusses this using mechanism design. His proposed solution is not as simple as yours but it does have the advantage of encouraging teams (late in the season) to win in order to improve their draft position. Link to original tweet here:https://x.com/Afinetheorem/status/1922471157569057117
On the NBA and economic theory: dynamic mechanism design tells us how to redo the draft. A good rule of thumb (due to Reny?) is that stochastic mechanisms like draft lotteries usually aren't best. How to prevent tanking while still having worst team get top pick? Simple!
Theory is beautiful. Myerson Revelation: look only at mechanisms that get teams to reveal quality "type" (we/ dynamic caveats!). Better teams will get some information rents else they tank. Let's find mechanism with no tanking that maximizes prob worst team gets top pick.
Let V be value of winning it all, W<<V value of getting top pick, p(n,w,l) prob of winning it all after n games. True quality is random walk over season from baseline unknown to mech designer. Costs 0 to give up in a game, c to try. If both try win prob based on true quality.
Immediate that variance in p grows over season, so incentive to tank grows also. Also then immediate that early wins and losses more informative about true quality since in game 1 worst team still has "chance" to win it all.
Optimal mechanism: get points for each loss. In game 1, a loss is worth 1 Draft Point. As season continues, loss is worth less, becoming negative late. Draft position based on Draft Points. Everyone wants to win late in season. Early season used to handicap truly bad teams.
Would make for some very exciting late season games (in NBA and other sports). Your dreadful team will need to go full out the last week or they will lose the top pick, not gain it! A Dallas Mavericks 2025 strategy would have been brutal for them.
Cool thing is that w/ a bit of econ theory you can actually *prove* the optimality of this rule. Mechanism design beautiful b/c we have theoretical "principles" that make "what is the best way to do X among any way including those I didn't even think of" a tractable problem!
(btw, there are similar ideas to award 'draft points' only after a team is eliminated. PWHL does this. Not bad - gives incentive to try hard, weights teams who were bad early by giving them 'more games' to accrue points - but mechanism above is better on incentives and fairness.)
PS - If you want to improve your econ intuition, "fairness of worst team gets best pick" depends on avg. performance, "try hard in every game" depends on marginal incentives, with transferable utility you can solve both problems more cleanly than w/ randomization.
If you insist on this sort of thing, I'd just rank each team by the quality of its 10 best players. Individual players have no incentive to tank, rather teams tank by resting players. So just assign a number for each player based on their statistics, and add up for each team. Then do draft order in terms of total talent on each team, not win loss record. It's not perfect, but it's reasonable.
That seems more complicated, no? I found the above solution quite elegant. You incentives lower ranked teams (bottom 10) to compete for a better draft position by winning more games late in the season, how do you ensure worse teams get better draft spots? You give them a handicap by giving draft points for losses early in the season, this ensure that good teams won't improve their draft position (much) at the end of the season by continuing to win.
NBA regular season is unwatchable. But NBA playoff basketball is still the best thing going in professional sports. It’s a season unto itself and the games get officiated completely different. The physicality of play increases exponentially.
The regular season in the NBA is about 50 games implicitly. And then the back 32 is just a joke of rec league ball played by NBA players.
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.
I never understood why a player has to shoot a free throw after a technical foul. Just award the point automatically.
As long as we're changing the rules, here's a nutty idea that probably has a fatal flaw I haven't thought of: Get rid of the game clock and just count down 50 shot clock resets per quarter. That would eliminate the end of game fouling strategies and I think it's more elegant than the "Elam ending" proposal.
The issue with the draft is that the teams and players conspired to suppress rookie salaries. If you eliminated the rookie pay scale, the rookie contracts would have far less value. If you keep the pay scale but let the rookies sign wherever they want (no draft), the small market teams would be at a big disadvantage in attracting the best rookies. If you flatten the lottery odds a lot, you might as well get rid of the lottery and just award the draft slots on a rotating schedule. In my opinion the lottery was a mistake from the beginning. People think lotteries are fair because everyone has the same chance to win before the drawing. But after the drawing, one person gets all the money for no good reason, which is completely unfair.
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."
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.
The big mistake the NBA made was trying to screw college basketball, which created ready-made interest in players moving to the pros after competing for four years. With the D-League and the G-League and allowing drafting of younger players, a lot of NBA players just show up on the screen from God knows where and unless you are a superfan you have no idea who they are or what their story is. And their story is a lot more boring than the story they would have had as a college player. The Euro thing may be a factor, but frankly Jokic is super-entertaining and watchable, Dirk Nowitzki was super-popular and beloved, and even Luka Doncic, who seems to have lots of hate potential given his whining to the refs and iffy conditioning and defensive effort, is a fan fave.
The "face of the league" who turned off the most people is American LeBron James, whose passive-aggressive diva-ism was enough to make a lot of people overlook his old-school dedication to his craft.
I think you're not comparing apples to apples when considering guys entering the league early vs. late. I'll grant that a 22-year-old who played four years in college has more of a story than an 18-year-old who was one-and-done or played in the G-league, but by the time the 18-year-old is 22, he will have generated more fan interest and storylines by playing 3-4 years in the NBA.
On Jokic, your point is precisely mine: he is the best and most entertaining offensive big man since Wilt Chamberlain, possibly ever, and he is hardly a household name. If you walk down the street and ask someone to name all the former NBA players they can, how long until he names Dirk? If he stays healthy, Wembanyama has the potential to be the best player of all time, and seemingly the main discourse surrounding the NBA right now is its decline.
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 .
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
"The NBA" did not do most of these things. Rather teams who used economic reasoning did.
E.g., the rules did not change to incentivize teams to shoot more 3s (or, at least, you have not mentioned a rule that changed to incentivize shooting more 3s); in fact, the changes to defense and foul-calling incentivized more drives to the hoop. But teams realized that 3 points are still more than 2 points, so they should take open 3s instead of contested 2s. And they realized that FTs are worth more (in expected value terms) than contested 2s also, so when guarded shooters starting hunting free throws.
This is not a rules change, it is a behavioral change produced by improvements in the informational environment in a competitive context. I.e., a "market". You are complaining about market efficiency, you prefer the inefficiencies of your youth. Call it a "stubborn attachment"!
This "it used to be better" narrative is not new, and has been pretty thoroughly debunked by analysis of the way the NBA used to actually be. Here's one 20-minute YouTube video that breaks a lot of it down with both visual and statistical evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4but75EjY
Or you can buy the books by Kirk Goldsberry, a cartographer -- yes, map-maker... the NBA court is a terrain, and if you don't understand why a cartographer might be very influential within the NBA then you don't understand any modern sport, not just the NBA -- who has worked for some of the leading analytical organizations in NBA and currently teaches at the University of Texas at Austin (the real one, not Tyler's faux university in Austin).
https://www.kirkgoldsberry.com/
Thank you! I thought I was going crazy reading that the increase in 3-pt shots was due to rule changes as opposed to an increased focus on efficiency.
I would like people explain to me how watching a player shoot an 18-foot jump shot is more entertaining than watching someone shoot a 24-foot jump shot, but I haven't heard a convincing argument yet.
My take is that the "NBA sucks now" narrative is just a popular thing to think and not something that people came to organically.
The game is more available now. People used to see the best matchup each week, now they see all the bad ones too. Some efficiency-seeking truly is ugly to watch, esp foul-seeking.
But I agree with you: this is a casual take, and overall the game has never been better. Never been more diverse in its styles of play, never been more progressive in its management, never been more strategic, never been more athletic, etc. There's more pace, more space, more movement, more skill, more of everything people claim to like.
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.
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.
It is absurd, but no rule changed to produce this outcome. Shooters have always hunted contact to draw fouls, and defenders have never been allowed to undercut them in the air even if the attacking player initiates contact.
With you on the three-point fouls and I think Scott is wrong. The shooters are not jumping forward in almost any case where the foul is called for the landing zone. They don't land two or three feet inside the arc. I don't know what games he is watching.
100% the off-arm push-off should be outlawed. Period. Just like the defender putting two hands on the dribbler, a de jure offensive foul. Also the charge/block rule is officiated in a manner far to favorable to dribblers, who just fling themselves at defenders in the lane or when turning the corner while being guarded. I
Not with you on the traveling and gather step, which I've gotten used to but cheapen the team aspects of the game. My general take is that dribbling is too much favored over passing and cutting. Iso play is not that entertaining to me, and getting bailed out by the officials ought not to be the primary strategy for offensive play. One thing I like about Steph Curry is that he is very clean on his drives to the rim, little carrying and trying to avoid contact while tossing in amazing layups high off the glass.
I now pay close attention every time they show replays on 3-point fouls, and I find many cases where the player starts outside the line and lands inside the line, 2 or three feet from where they started. I encourage people to pay more close attention to these cases.
In regards to the tanking problem I'll repost in full a thread by Kevin Bryan that discusses this using mechanism design. His proposed solution is not as simple as yours but it does have the advantage of encouraging teams (late in the season) to win in order to improve their draft position. Link to original tweet here:https://x.com/Afinetheorem/status/1922471157569057117
On the NBA and economic theory: dynamic mechanism design tells us how to redo the draft. A good rule of thumb (due to Reny?) is that stochastic mechanisms like draft lotteries usually aren't best. How to prevent tanking while still having worst team get top pick? Simple!
Theory is beautiful. Myerson Revelation: look only at mechanisms that get teams to reveal quality "type" (we/ dynamic caveats!). Better teams will get some information rents else they tank. Let's find mechanism with no tanking that maximizes prob worst team gets top pick.
Let V be value of winning it all, W<<V value of getting top pick, p(n,w,l) prob of winning it all after n games. True quality is random walk over season from baseline unknown to mech designer. Costs 0 to give up in a game, c to try. If both try win prob based on true quality.
Immediate that variance in p grows over season, so incentive to tank grows also. Also then immediate that early wins and losses more informative about true quality since in game 1 worst team still has "chance" to win it all.
Optimal mechanism: get points for each loss. In game 1, a loss is worth 1 Draft Point. As season continues, loss is worth less, becoming negative late. Draft position based on Draft Points. Everyone wants to win late in season. Early season used to handicap truly bad teams.
Would make for some very exciting late season games (in NBA and other sports). Your dreadful team will need to go full out the last week or they will lose the top pick, not gain it! A Dallas Mavericks 2025 strategy would have been brutal for them.
Cool thing is that w/ a bit of econ theory you can actually *prove* the optimality of this rule. Mechanism design beautiful b/c we have theoretical "principles" that make "what is the best way to do X among any way including those I didn't even think of" a tractable problem!
(btw, there are similar ideas to award 'draft points' only after a team is eliminated. PWHL does this. Not bad - gives incentive to try hard, weights teams who were bad early by giving them 'more games' to accrue points - but mechanism above is better on incentives and fairness.)
PS - If you want to improve your econ intuition, "fairness of worst team gets best pick" depends on avg. performance, "try hard in every game" depends on marginal incentives, with transferable utility you can solve both problems more cleanly than w/ randomization.
If you insist on this sort of thing, I'd just rank each team by the quality of its 10 best players. Individual players have no incentive to tank, rather teams tank by resting players. So just assign a number for each player based on their statistics, and add up for each team. Then do draft order in terms of total talent on each team, not win loss record. It's not perfect, but it's reasonable.
That seems more complicated, no? I found the above solution quite elegant. You incentives lower ranked teams (bottom 10) to compete for a better draft position by winning more games late in the season, how do you ensure worse teams get better draft spots? You give them a handicap by giving draft points for losses early in the season, this ensure that good teams won't improve their draft position (much) at the end of the season by continuing to win.
NBA regular season is unwatchable. But NBA playoff basketball is still the best thing going in professional sports. It’s a season unto itself and the games get officiated completely different. The physicality of play increases exponentially.
The regular season in the NBA is about 50 games implicitly. And then the back 32 is just a joke of rec league ball played by NBA players.
I'd like to see the season reduced to about 58-60 games, home and away for each team. No back to backs. No play in tournament.
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.
I never understood why a player has to shoot a free throw after a technical foul. Just award the point automatically.
As long as we're changing the rules, here's a nutty idea that probably has a fatal flaw I haven't thought of: Get rid of the game clock and just count down 50 shot clock resets per quarter. That would eliminate the end of game fouling strategies and I think it's more elegant than the "Elam ending" proposal.
The issue with the draft is that the teams and players conspired to suppress rookie salaries. If you eliminated the rookie pay scale, the rookie contracts would have far less value. If you keep the pay scale but let the rookies sign wherever they want (no draft), the small market teams would be at a big disadvantage in attracting the best rookies. If you flatten the lottery odds a lot, you might as well get rid of the lottery and just award the draft slots on a rotating schedule. In my opinion the lottery was a mistake from the beginning. People think lotteries are fair because everyone has the same chance to win before the drawing. But after the drawing, one person gets all the money for no good reason, which is completely unfair.
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
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.
The big mistake the NBA made was trying to screw college basketball, which created ready-made interest in players moving to the pros after competing for four years. With the D-League and the G-League and allowing drafting of younger players, a lot of NBA players just show up on the screen from God knows where and unless you are a superfan you have no idea who they are or what their story is. And their story is a lot more boring than the story they would have had as a college player. The Euro thing may be a factor, but frankly Jokic is super-entertaining and watchable, Dirk Nowitzki was super-popular and beloved, and even Luka Doncic, who seems to have lots of hate potential given his whining to the refs and iffy conditioning and defensive effort, is a fan fave.
The "face of the league" who turned off the most people is American LeBron James, whose passive-aggressive diva-ism was enough to make a lot of people overlook his old-school dedication to his craft.
I think you're not comparing apples to apples when considering guys entering the league early vs. late. I'll grant that a 22-year-old who played four years in college has more of a story than an 18-year-old who was one-and-done or played in the G-league, but by the time the 18-year-old is 22, he will have generated more fan interest and storylines by playing 3-4 years in the NBA.
On Jokic, your point is precisely mine: he is the best and most entertaining offensive big man since Wilt Chamberlain, possibly ever, and he is hardly a household name. If you walk down the street and ask someone to name all the former NBA players they can, how long until he names Dirk? If he stays healthy, Wembanyama has the potential to be the best player of all time, and seemingly the main discourse surrounding the NBA right now is its decline.
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 .
Perhaps I'm biased being a Milwaukee fan. In the 2000s, they kept trying to get the 8th seed in the playoffs, only to be destroyed in the first round.