Will the NBA pinpoint its problem?

Too many long shots and long flights

Ever get the feeling people aren’t ready to NBA yet?

Fans don’t want the pressure of pretending these games mean much. Or that they are played exceedingly well, or that NBA performers aren’t conditioned to pace themselves to be at best in April, May and June, not November.

So they, uh, they pace themselves. Or players don’t close out. Or they shoot long jumpers instead of passing or cutting. Or they don’t get back. Or they get back too much and don’t close out on the trailer. A lot of these have to do with three-pointers, it turns out.

That’s the NBA’s on-court problem, too many three-pointers. The stock market ain’t the economy and weather ain’t climate and nailing 38 percent of a certain-length jump shot might be “efficient,” but it ain’t always fun to watch.

Scores are up because players know how to shoot three-pointers, which was not the case for the three-point stripe’s first decade in the NBA. Scores also increased because the NBA prints money in the form of calling every bit of contact, necessitating whistle after whistle because hey, he touched him.

But whistles will predictably diminish, refs will lean less on September’s preseason talking points and more on whatever November memo the NBA sends out, telling its refs to settle the fuck down and do their jobs a little less. The league sent out a similar memo midway through 2023-24 and the NBA enjoyed a spirited brand of ball unseen since its teams discovered the easiest way toward 120 points per 100 possessions was playing like James Harden.

However, the league cannot send a memo insisting its teams attempt fewer three-point shots, the NBA’s administrative office doesn’t have as strong a hold on Garrison Mathews as it does Zach Zarba. Mathews is in essence paid by the three-pointer and Zarba, though it looks like it, isn’t compensated for each foul he calls.

What the league also cannot do is get clever, in response to 42 percent of its NBA shots coming from way, way downtown.

No trickle-down stuff, curtailing one advantage in the hope another stops being advantageous. We do not need decreased defender-to-dribbler contact above the (mid) elbow-crease leading to fewer stationary-to-paint dribble-drives and an expected three-point attempt ratio of who-gives-a-bleep to bleep.

As if anything will stop players from taking a jump shot (the easiest thing) for three points (the most points). Each NBA team’s approach appears uniform because its participants found the quickest distance between two points is three points.

Which is why we can’t have a four-point shot.

Please, no-four point shots. The ball doesn’t need to head further out. Adding another point will not solve the motivation driving the search for gold within meandering distances further and further away from the cup. If a team’s sweet shooter hits 30 percent on four-pointers, the sweet shooter did the team a big favor. We don’t want to live inside a game where missing seven of ten is “very good,” that’s baseball, go watch baseball.

Ending the corner three? Coaches already did. That thing was sussed out years ago, NBA defenders are taught to run over grandmothers (not their own!) to cover corner threes, the NBA does not suffer from an overwhelming rash of corner threes. Rather, threes.

So limit threes. Teams get 33 per game.

If they want to unleash most of those 33 early for the knockout? Go for bust! Want to save ‘em for later? Good call, maybe not, depends, who knows, intrigue! Two minutes into the fourth and we only have four three-pointers remaining, Goga, we didn’t need to take that one there.

The three-pointer is a special shot, worth one and a half times its low-rank, nondescript, subaltern. Two-points, sheesh, they give that out for layups.

A special shot requires regulation. Tyson’s Punch-Out wouldn’t be nearly as fun if Little Mac owned unlimited uppercut stars. But that’s the Celtics, leaning on the START button to hurry up and get out of Detroit:

NBA ennui isn’t simply three-point pervasiveness, I get that.

I’ve felt this feeling before, five years ago, free agent dangles dominating the 2019 NBA draft and its Summer League. The NBA never ended.

By the time 2019-20 came around, nobody was ready to NBA. It was too much NBA.

People were over it, and earned the right to be over it. People were over it, without really wanting to be over it. That’s how burnout works.

We never realize it when we do it, but I am showing my middle-aged ass when I crunch my nose and snarl over crummy low-scoring NBA games from 1998-99, comparing them to how nicely kids have it in the modern era.

Complaining before catching my listener nodding and yelling ha, gotcha, there’s no such thing as “1998-99,” and I make air-quotes with my arms and I kind of look like Nixon because my hair is mostly gone up there and I haven’t slept and I sound drunk even though I’m not, the lockout went until January 1999 and then they leave my front porch without even asking if I was registered to vote.

Registered? I’ve already voted. Twice!

Pointing out how wonderful present life can be consumed, compared to whatever remains of the pretense of its predecessor, is as destructive as touting past achievements as if they were superior simply because they came first.

Telling bored NBA fans that 118 points is “better” than 88 is still a form of cranky old man, I must watch out for it. Even while I’m clapping and grinning like a kid in front of the TV in the basement den 35 years ago, past bedtime on a school night and wishing the world and all its seconds would stop, save for this game I’m watching, the only thing on earth still allowed to spin. That’s my charge, selling readers on what makes me clap.

So I bring them a rarity from the past. A fourth quarter’s 20-point comeback, based around a chunk of three-pointers, but from 1999:

Twenty-point rallies like this were rare in 1999, but they are all over the place in 2024. It is great.

A reward for superior three-point marksmanship, conditioning, and an enlightened pace. The modern NBA is full of 20-point comeback wins or massive leads cut to manageable, engaging deficits. There’s never been anything like this.

Saturday evening was typical, nothing was safe, teams ran out to unsurmountable advantages before the other side ably surmounted them, I couldn’t switch away. Every NBA contest was stupid, sexy Flanders, all curves we didn’t see coming because nobody knew they existed.

Friday showed a lot of that, Thursday a little, it’s the law of the league at the moment, no lead may last. It upsets the wagerers but keeps me glued to League Pass outings I otherwise woulda watched half of. It’s akin to most NFL games starting with a 28-10 run before rounding into a 35-34 final.

Shooting variance has its silver linings, if not upside. The payoff for those who watch every night is the unending amount of obliterated advantages. The way announcers raise their voice when telling us this is only a three-possession game. No NBA game is worth turning off.

Unless you dislike over 40 percent of the game’s attempts launching from outside the three-point line. Then the NBA is absolutely worth turning off.

I enjoy what I watch because I don’t know how to not enjoy this. I am smarter than stupid but not by a lot and it is fun when all the three-pointers go “splash.” My favorite part is guessing if the 25-footer will go in while the ball spins in the air, based around my personal experience with footwork, follow-through, and posture.

Shooting variance and indifferent play are nothing new in the NBA, we pay more attention than ever and frankly we need to stop. We need to treat this 82-game campaign with half the respect and with half the intensity we do for the 162-game sport people play at an elite level at age 37, with thinned-out blood courtesy a tobacco chaw the size of Teddy Kennedy’s jowls:

It is hard to take the NBA lightly with only five to a side.

In other team events we can blame “the bullpen” or “the offensive line” but in the NBA we can really hone in on when “Connaughton” is really fucking up or when “Porter Jr.” needs to get his head out of his ass. We even specify which “Porter.”

We are less capable understanding when they are tired. This is hard in an 82-game season, each one with its own Game Face, barely half of them credible. Plus that in-season tournament we’re supposed to be excited over because they tell us we’re supposed to be excited over it. Also, NBA? Nobody cares about the All-Star Game, one silly evening in February. Worry about every other night between October and April.

The entire NBA schedule needs to be made of little, two or three or four-game miniseries, each with some function in postseason seeding.

Keep 82 games full of teetering tills and conferences as they are, no need for a postseason blitz of seedings 1-through-16. We don’t need extra jet fuel billowing from Miami-to-Sacramento and back only for one of many opening round NBA playoff series between two whatever teams.

The 2024-25 season features a few of these two-game visits — Boston doesn’t have to fly to Charlotte again — which is good, saving jet fuel from the sky. Although Adam Silver probably already made up for it privately jetting out to Silicon Valley in a way-too-warm cabin with Miriam Adelson and Common and three tiny bottles of water they each took two sips from. Ahead of that ‘Efficiency Through Artificial Intelligence’ conference they chaired, Jim Gaffigan was the host! AI means anything I can do to get away from the kids!

Silver’s NBA is annoyingly proactive in all the wrong places. Worryingly, his league requires changes immediately to prepare precedents for institutionalizing stronger changes in the future. Because everything changes, and we can’t change that. And we can’t change “82 games,” the NBA’s 30 owners aren’t creative enough businesspeople to achieve this, they’ve told and shown us over and over.

Before the NBA’s fans lose interest, those owners better develop a way to conjure compelling stakes out of its regular season product.

And cut out the damn three-pointers.

Now, reliably, some music from a million years ago:

SPINNING WHEEL

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