Ja Morant is again and has Brook Lopez rotated. It’s November, and the electrical level guard is main the quick break within the third quarter in opposition to a porous Milwaukee Bucks transition protection. The slow-footed Lopez is the one impediment between Morant and a thunderous end on the basket. With Morant going downhill, this can be a viral second ready to occur.
However as an alternative of jetting by way of Lopez for a rim-rocking dunk, Morant does one thing sudden. He slams on the brakes and pulls up for a 3-pointer, lacking badly off the far aspect of the rim.
Morant didn’t dunk on that possession. Which, surprisingly, has been commonplace for the 25-year-old phenom.
This season, Morant hasn’t dunked in any respect. In eight video games, Morant has not accomplished a single dunk, lacking each of his makes an attempt (). Getting back from shoulder surgical procedure, his dunk-attempt charge is a sliver of what it was. , however dunks they aren’t. In the meantime, Morant, a poor 3-point shooter, continues to launch freely from deep.
Morant represents the face of a rising grumble across the sport, that the product is struggling as a result of the mathematics says gamers ought to fireplace up 3s at a excessive charge, which some really feel is on the expense of thrilling dunks on the rim.
On opening night time, after the Boston Celtics launched 61 3-point makes an attempt in a sleepy rout over the New York Knicks, FS1’s Nick Wright, that generated thousands and thousands of views on X, lamented the fashionable taking part in type and referred to as for the league to vary its guidelines. Amongst Wright’s proposals was the suggestion that the NBA ought to make dunks value three factors to incentivize a greater product for followers who, , look like more and more disenchanted with the tv providing.
“I know this sounds insane,” Wright mentioned, “but at its core, the NBA is at its best when dudes are flying over people, meeting ’em at the rim. That is when it’s at its best television product. A bunch of finesse guys hanging out at the 3-point line hoisting 30-footers is not good TV.”
So let’s do this on for dimension. What if dunks had been value three factors as an alternative of two? Would Morant have tried to dunk on Lopez? How would that change alter the sport? And is it addressing an issue value attempting to unravel?
I requested coaches, GMs and basketball specialists about whether or not 3-point dunks would clear up the NBA’s present predicament and the solutions slowly revealed what is basically misplaced in right this moment’s recreation.
With the Celtics operating away with the 2024 NBA Finals armed with a traditionally heavy dose of 3-pointers, NBA groups have copied Joe Mazzulla’s blueprint and smashed by way of earlier excessive marks of 3-balls this season. After settling at about 35 makes an attempt per recreation the previous couple of seasons, groups are launching with extra fervor than ever earlier than. On common, groups try a file 37.4 triples per recreation this season, the biggest year-over-year enhance in a couple of half-decade, in keeping with Stathead.com monitoring.
This was speculated to generate extra dunk alternatives. Opposing huge males have been pulled away from the basket. Driving lanes have opened up. Dunkers must be cleared for takeoff. Nonetheless, regardless of wider pathways to the basket pried open by shooters anchored across the perimeter, the frequency of dunks has remained pretty flat in recent times.
Final Friday, Anthony Edwards, who’s broadly thought-about among the many recreation’s greatest in-game dunkers, delivered a ferocious slam over Kings middle Domantas Sabonis. Those that need extra of these spotlight reel performs from Ant can thank former NBA vet Corliss Williamson. Forward of the sport, Williamson, now a Timberwolves assistant coach, made a remark to Edwards that he was “playing soft” this season. Edwards took it to coronary heart evidently. “I told him I was gonna dunk on one of they a****,” .
Edwards, like Morant, isn’t dunking like he used to. Edwards’ slam over Sabonis was simply his seventh dunk of the 12 months, a season wherein he has seen his dunk charge sliced in half. In the meantime, he’s now taking pictures 11.3 3-pointers a recreation, up from 6.7 per recreation final season. It isn’t onerous to see how Williamson’s “soft” remark could possibly be code for “shooting too many 3s.”
DeMar DeRozan, 35, is one other skywalker who has but to dunk this season after tallying 18 slams final season in Chicago. A part of that decline might be chalked as much as his age, but it surely’s additionally indicative of a league that’s more and more asking its wings to go for the lengthy ball. Utah backcourt mates Collin Sexton and Jordan Clarkson have but to dunk after logging 36 mixed slams final season, per Stathead.com monitoring. Guards in right this moment’s recreation dunk 0.32 instances per recreation, down 8% since final season.
So, make dunks value three factors. Simple repair, proper? Not so quick. Canvassing the league, I discovered the 3-point dunk isn’t being met with open arms.
“Going to the rim is still more advantageous than a 3,” mentioned one workforce’s prime basketball govt, “so I don’t think you need to increase dunk points.”
There’s fact within the information. On common, a field-goal try positioned within the restricted space generates 1.32 factors, which is extra priceless than a 3-point shot, which yields 1.08 factors. However that solely scratches the floor of the worth of a rim assault. The basket space is often the place shooters generate treasured foul calls and people alternatives grow to be immediately extra priceless as soon as the whistle is blown. In a way, the additional worth of a dunk try is already baked right into a workforce’s calculus. Which is why there are nonetheless extra pictures within the paint than past the 3-point line in right this moment’s recreation.
One other concern in regards to the 3-point dunk rule? Violence.
“Injury seems like a more likely outcome,” mentioned one Western Convention govt.
Early final season, Edwards missed two video games with a hip harm after crashing onerous to the ground attempting to dunk over OKC’s Jaylin Williams. Williams’ teammate, Chet Holmgren, wasn’t so fortunate earlier this month. After a equally vicious crash to the ground attempting to stop a dunk try by the hovering Andrew Wiggins, Holmgren fractured his hip and shall be out for at the very least two months, jeopardizing the Thunder’s title quest and all however vaporizing his All-Star probabilities.
, the league is already going through an harm disaster. Elevating the stakes to incentivize gamers to collide in midair at full pace doesn’t seem to be a sustainable answer to the NBA’s current issues. Don’t neglect in regards to the problem of accidents from putting the rim along with your hand. (Drew Gooden as soon as claimed he wanted from a wrist harm suffered whereas dunking.)
As a substitute of creating dunks value three factors, one other league govt co-signed certainly one of Wright’s proposals from his aforementioned podcast: make 3-pointers value 4 factors and 2-pointers value three factors. “But I doubt folks would go for that,” the manager conceded.
I reached out to Nick Elam, the Ball State professor and inventor of the Elam Ending basketball innovation that was adopted by the NBA for All-Star Video games and the The Basketball Event for his ideas on Wright’s proposal to extend the reward for a dunk. He initially felt himself getting swayed by the deserves of such an concept. It might probably scale back the variety of 3-point pictures and make for a extra entertaining recreation, he surmised. However finally, he wasn’t satisfied the potential advantages outweighed the downsides.
One impediment, he identified, is the tough matter of officiating. If a participant fouls Morant on a layup, who’s to say that it wasn’t a dunk try and thus warrant three free throws?
“We’ve never had to care [about that],” Elam mentioned. “But under a 3-point dunk rule, we would have to care. We’d have to care so much that these types of fouls regularly result in challenges, replays, controversies with no clear or satisfying outcome, and so on.”
Yeah, no thanks. We might keep away from that downside by making all fouls contained in the 3-point arc two-shot fouls.
However there’s one other downstream problem: What’s a dunk? We’d need to deploy the NBA’s player-tracking cameras on the ring or put some form of volleyball antenna on the rim to inform us whether or not a participant really “dunked” the ball. I’m already dreading the replay evaluations.
Tinkering with the purpose system looks as if a noble train, however these concepts would not do sufficient to handle the center of the issue :
Everybody’s taking pictures the identical rattling pictures.
Elam calls them “shot deserts.” He believes that fixing the NBA’s downside begins with filling within the areas of the ground — particularly, the mid-range zone, which is outdoors the paint and contained in the 3-point arc — which were deserted by groups seeking to squeeze each morsel of effectivity out of each possession.
Since 3s are value 50 % greater than 2s, and so they convert at about the identical charge as mid-range jumpers, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine why groups want one over the opposite. And now it appears everybody is smart to the mathematics that has resulted in what appears like a widespread sameness to the league.
“Yes, there are too many 3s — offensive possessions are stagnant and predictable,” Elam instructed Yahoo Sports activities. “For several years, large shot deserts have emerged on NBA courts, essentially anywhere inside the 3-point arc, except within arm’s reach of the rim. The sport is in need of recalibration to distribute shots more evenly around the court.”
The numbers present a large migration. In 1996-97, the primary season of shot-location information, the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls paced the league with 41.5 mid-range pictures per recreation whereas the common workforce took about 32 makes an attempt from that space. Over time, as analytically pushed basketball minds started to see the wasteful common payoff of 20-footers, heaps of those self same bounce pictures obtained pushed past the 3-point line.
“Yes, there are too many 3s — offensive possessions are stagnant and predictable. The sport is in need of recalibration to distribute shots more evenly around the court.”Nick Elam
This season, the main purveyors of the mid-range, the Sacramento Kings, take simply 14.1 pictures from the identical space that Jordan loved, with nearly all of the NBA taking single-digit makes an attempt per recreation.
The loopy factor? It’s gotten to the purpose that groups will go whole video games with out scoring from the mid-range space in any respect. That is what I’ll name the desert video games.
Remarkably, this season there have been 24 situations wherein a workforce didn’t rating a single level within the mid-range space, in keeping with NBA.com/stats monitoring. This can be a mind-boggling determine. For many years, we by no means noticed one such recreation — whilst lately as 2010-11. Then one. Then two. Quickly, 13. A giant bounce in 2018-19 to 64 (the Moreyball Rockets gained 65 video games the 12 months earlier than). Then, a plateau round 80 such video games.
Till this season.
This season, we’ve already seen 24 such video games, which implies we’re on monitor for — prepare for this — 136 desert video games. It occurs nearly each night time now.
The issue of league-wide sameness that Wright and Elam describe doesn’t simply bear out within the sheer variety of desert video games. In a captivating twist, desert video games aren’t the unique property of 1 radical NBA workforce — say, the Boston Celtics — seeking to hyper-emphasize the 3-point shot. In actuality, 14 completely different groups this season have performed a complete recreation with out scoring within the mid-range. And it’s not simply the great groups. Up and down the standings, groups have deserted the mid-range. The league’s chief in desert video games? The three-11 Utah Jazz.
This can be a radical change in technique that has transpired proper earlier than our eyes. When Stephen Curry got here into the league in 2009, we went the complete season with out seeing a desert recreation. Curry was the transcendent shooter that lit the hearth. James Harden/Moreyball fanned the flames. The Celtics poured gasoline on it. Now it’s wildfire spreading throughout the league.
In 2022, I had the chance to reasonable a panel on the MIT Sloan Sports activities Analytics Convention referred to as . Amongst these on the panel sat JJ Redick, now the top coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, and Daryl Morey, who leads the Philadelphia 76ers’ entrance workplace. The subject of 3-pointers inevitably got here up. Redick, who performed in Philadelphia for 2 seasons earlier than Morey arrived, shared a narrative a couple of Sixers staffer encouraging him to commerce a mid-range shot for a sidestep 3 as a result of the chances had been higher. Redick needed to maintain it in his bag.
“Sometimes,” Redick mentioned, “in a possession, the best shot is that pull-up [mid-range] jumper.”
Quick ahead two years later, Redick’s Lakers and Morey’s Sixers performed a recreation wherein neither workforce scored a single level from the mid-range space — that’s, till LeBron James swished a 12-footer from the left baseline with 3:16 left within the fourth quarter. We had been moments away from the NBA’s first-ever “shot desert” recreation wherein each groups failed to attain from the complete mid-range space, per NBA.com monitoring.
Monitor it subsequent time you watch an NBA recreation. Discover how groups hardly ever take the open mid-range shot, opting as an alternative to drive into the paint and kick. Drive and kick. Drive and kick. Till an open 3 is created. Or the rim protectors cry, “Uncle.” The Celtics gained a championship with this model of basketball.
Ultimately, I don’t suppose I assist the 3-point dunk rule even when I do wish to incentivize the Morants and Edwardses of the world to be dunking extra. From an harm standpoint, a 3-point dunk rule appears like one thing the place the treatment is worse than the illness. In such a world, high-flying athletes can be too injured to play in the long term and/or too protecting of their careers to dunk each time down the ground. Are you able to think about the trainwrecks in a fastbreak scenario to interrupt up a dunk? When you thought clear-path foul controversies had been dangerous now, simply wait.
Any form of rule change has to handle that we’ve deserted an enormous space of the ground. If it wasn’t obvious earlier than, the sudden rise of shot desert video games ought to hammer it house.
“You think the mid-range jumper is a lost art now?” Elam mentioned. “Just wait until it is quantifiably even less efficient, relative to a dunk, than it is currently.”
Additionally, if dunks had been value three, I feel we’re occupied with the incorrect guys. It’s not the flying wings who would profit most. I really suppose essentially the most priceless gamers can be the Rudy Goberts and Giannis Antetokounmpos — guys who can dunk and stop dunks.
Who am I kidding? The MVP would most likely be Victor Wembanyama. Till the top of time.
The NBA ought to take a look at what Main League Baseball did in 2023 to ban the shift and introduce the pitch clock. The league acknowledged the relentless data-driven pursuit of Three True Outcomes (strikeouts, walks and residential runs) ruined the range of motion on the sector. The sport turned too predictable and the league took motion in opposition to the rampant sameness.
Within the NBA, we in the end wish to watch competitors, however our consideration is determined by the aspect of shock to maintain us locked in. The sport, in its present kind, is missing a few of that spontaneity and creativity. If the purpose is to create extra shot range, replenish the shot deserts and make the sport extra unpredictable, I’ve three different concepts that I want to the 3-point dunk:
I like this idea from Goldsberry, the godfather of all basketball mapping. , and make the NBA’s shot financial system extra truthful and “disincentivize loitering.”
I’m with it in concept. My important concern is that the sport can be completely performed within the center third of the ground. Why would you go anyplace close to the corners if there’s no added bonus? Perhaps you may get extra open pictures there. However I fear that eliminating the nook 3 is creating two parallel shot deserts on the outer thirds of the ground. However yeah, dudes standing idly within the corners ain’t it both.
That is, in some methods, essentially the most smart tweak within the short-term. You would possibly say, However what about all of the court-level seats that we’d lose?! My former editor/boss all the time laughed at that concern. He’d get into the fundamental geometry of all of it and level out {that a} wider court docket creates extra courtside seats for house owners to promote. So what for those who’d lose just a few seats within the second and third row? Looks as if a billionaire downside, not one for the common NBA fan. Even nonetheless, lowering provide would probably enhance demand. As one govt put it: “They would make more money if they expanded the court as fewer seats always equals more money.” To that time, have you ever tried to purchase a ticket at Cameron Indoor Stadium?
From a basketball perspective, it doesn’t clear up the shot range downside. I’m unsure there’s a full repair for that until you go full and add a 25-point basket (17 toes above the ground) and 50-point basket (25 toes and 6 inches). Watching a teenaged Kevin Garnett rejoice by screaming in Gary Payton’s face as a result of GP hit a 50-pointer … my eyes are welling up from nostalgia.
I’m campaigning for the 2-3-4 system the place there’s a deep 4-point line and a shorter 3-point line that brings again the mid-range. that incentivizes brand pictures. They’re superior, however slapping a deep 4-point line on the court docket doesn’t clear up the shot desert downside.
So, we shorten the previous 3-point arc. Make it 15 toes on the apex (the place the nail on the free-throw line at present is now) and broaden it to about 17 toes within the corners. Something inside it’s 2 factors. Take the previous 3-point arc and slide it again to 35 toes. That’s the four-point line. Make it 40 toes? Certain, let’s see what occurs. In between these strains, that’s the 3-point zone.
I would like brand pictures and mid-range pictures and paint pictures. I would like all of it.
Principally, I would like shot choice again.
