Maybe the solution is with a different type of 3D model, namely the Wilson 3D printed basketball. It has more drag than the regulation basketball, making long shots more difficult. This could restore the balance between long field goals and shots near the basket.
I wouldn't be that pessimistic. Just like Stephen Curry discovered the value of the three-point shot, someone will come along and spot an opportunity by going against the grain of today's paradigm. Perhaps an AlphaGo for basketball will help to find it.
I don't think that will happen broadly, there will be physical freaks like Wembanyama or players with extreme talent like Jokic that will create teams with unique edges, but the mid range jumper is dead and it's a game of 3 pointers and dunks forever now.
I doubt that. Players like DeRozan prove that mid and even long 2s have utility. As defenses optimize to pack the paint while chasing shooters off the line, more opportunities will open up. If it were obvious how, we'd already be doing them!
I read something about Go - that very unusual (maybe even considered bad) playing could beat the super-AIs. They are so tuned to opponents in a "typical" style, that they don't know how to beat a player outside this distribution.
Maybe an NBA team will come up with something like that.
i forgot what year but the year the spurs won the championship against lebron would be unusual today. tons of passing not necessarily for the 3 but to just dislodge the defense enough for a guaranteed bucket
I'd be interested in seeing a link to this. Decades ago, playing defensive "computer chess" used to be a relatively optimal strategy against Chess AIs.
However, I believe Kasparov famously tried to employ this tactic against Deep Blue but by that time it wasn't particularly viable.
I can see it in the case of champion-trained AI, but in the case of Alpha Zero trained AI, it should have encountered virtually every kind of senseless play.
I can't speak for go, but I've seen beginners get an edge in other strategy games by playing a very unusual strategy. The trouble is, it doesn't tend to last - it turns out either that their strategy really is weak, or that it's viable but they don't have the ability to follow up on the early edge they gained. I can imagine a similar thing might happen with sports strategy.
Basketball rules will change. It's becoming a more widespread view that the corner 3 should be eliminated, and perhaps the 3 line moved back in general. In the meantime, threat of 3s makes proactive defense more necessary and that's exciting to watch. Defense has evolved so much since the Jordan era. Some matches are not exciting right now, though.
Corner 3s are shorter because the 3-point curve flattens to give enough space to move between it and the bounds. The action in the corner is also less dynamic because it's hard to drive to the basket from there, so either you shoot a 3 or pass to center which resets the play if you can't find someone driving up center court. Here's a diagram of a regulation NBA court showing the issue. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Basketba...
> Recently, teams have realized three-pointers have higher point value despite their lower scoring percentage.
This was such an eye-opener for me. A high-stakes sport like basketball/the NBA went on for decades without realising the simple math that three pointers are more valuable than two-pointers if you just do the basic math. How many areas in our lives are yet to be optimised with really basic math?
"Really basic math"? Do you think NBA coaches reached this conclusion like this:
1. A player can throw X 2-points in a game.
2. Or he can throw Y 3-points in a game.
3. 3Y > 2X, so we should just throw 3-points all the time.
It's absolutely not what happened. And the reason teams didn't discovery the current strategy decades earlier was absolutely not that they couldn't do basic math.
This assumes the game is static and the question is selecting A or B, but all the variables are intertwined.
How does the percentage change when the other team knows you will go for 3? How much more effective is the three when you are able to have the threat of other scoring? A layup is 80-90% isn’t it worth it to try to create one?
Precisely. Shooting lots of threes with good/decent efficiency also made two pointers more likely as more players would be defending the perimeter. Again, seemingly nobody thought of this for decades.
Then why the first time someone tried it then it worked and it stuck for 15 years or so? Last season there were 35 3p attemtps per game on average vs 18 in the year before Curry’s debut, almost 2x.
It it really impossible to think that it was a huge oversight?
You can’t just tell your players to start jacking more threes and coast your way to success. Many tried, many failed. The game is more complex than that.
When you elect to take more three pointers you necessarily have to resort to shooting more difficult ones, which lowers the expected return on each one. In the real world it's not so simple.
Similar reason why star players often have lower FG% than one might think: they are the ones tasked with trying _something_ when the shot clock winds down and there's no clear play. Not all shots are chosen equally.
> When you elect to take more three pointers you necessarily have to resort to shooting more difficult ones, which lowers the expected return on each one
But then 2 pointers become easier. You can’t defend tightly both the perimeter and the paint at the same time. Sounds like a win-win. Again, nobody seemingly noticed.
You can try to counter it but go ahead and look at the highest volume 3 point shooting teams and compare them to the highest volume layup teams. Part of it is that theyre following analytics so theyre looking for layups more than other teams but gravity is very real and does make it easier to get layups when you shoot more 3s.
> When you elect to take more three pointers you necessarily have to resort to shooting more difficult ones, which lowers the expected return on each one.
Well yeah, the idea is not to go all 3-pointer, it's that the borderline decisions need to adjust a few notches in favor of attempting 3-pointers, until the returns are balanced out.
So in the 2008-2009 season, the one before Curry’s debut, the average number of 3 pointer attempts per game from a team was 18. Last season it was 35, so pretty much 2x.
If it was so intricate why nobody tried it before? And why after someone tried it it seemingly stuck? Is it really that far fetched that it was actually pretty simple and nobody noticed for many years?
Even if you consider the adjustement to the defense, you’d be making two pointers easier as you can’t defend tightly both the perimeter and the paint at the same time.
It was absolutely tried before. The 08 Magic shot threes at a similar % and volume to the 2015 Warriors, yet they got rolled in the playoffs every time.
Yes, 33% for 3pts equals a 50% 2pt shot, so beat that, and you've got yourself a pretty good scorer. But hitting 33% is not trivial unless you make a lot of other adjustments: multiple blocks for the shooters and not just a simple pick-and-roll or pick-and-pop, staggered blocks for a shooter switching from one sideline to the next. This has actually led to less specialization, as every player on the court needs to shoot 3s and defend faster or bigger players as switches became unavoidable.
And with all that, it only led to a "dynasty" when one player who could create his own shot and shoot from nearly anywhere at 35+% (Curry), paired with another ~40% career 3pt shooter and defensive specialist (Thompson) and completed with a power forward who could defend anyone and coordinate the attack too (Green). Even so, they did need another future hall-of-famer in Durant to win two of their last 3 rings.
That same team still has 2 of those core people in them, but they are unable to replicate anywhere near the success.
So if anyone can do this, why doesn't everyone do it?
This math makes sense, but it might not not always be so simple.
For example, maybe these probabilities might not always be the same as this in all circumstances. Also, how much risk you might take also might depend on the current score and remaining time (e.g. maybe you are likely to win even with only one more point than your current score, or maybe it depends how much time it takes to make a specific shot (I don't actually know enough about basketball to know if this is relevant)), and on how your opponent can defend against it at a specific situation (and if their defense would allow them to score instead; I don't actually know how much that is relevant either), maybe. There are probably other considerations as well.
(I do not actually know all of the rules or strategy of basketball, so if I am wrong, you can mention what mistake I made.)
In the 2008-2009 season, the year before Curry’s debut, the 3p percentage was 36% vs 2p percentage of 48%. If you took 100 shots of each you’d have 108 points vs 96 so yeah I consider that quite simple.
And call me naive maybe but not arrogant, I’ve never been called that in my life so it’s quite surprising to be called arrogant in HN where I know the average person is smarter than me.
4th down attempts in American football come to mind. Twenty years ago they were rare; mathematically they should be common.[1] Coaches have shifted with the math but not quite as dramatically as it suggests.
It’s a bit of a dodge. In the 80s and 90s, there were a handful of players making 40% of threes and most shooters were closer to 30% so the math didn’t used to be the same.
One possibility is that there are more players who can make 3-point shots at a high enough percentage to make this true. Also, it depends on how good the defense is vs. 2-point shots; if that gets tighter, then the 3-point shot becomes more valuable.
Which also suggests how things may continue to evolve; the best defense vs. 3-point shots probably compromises your defense vs. 2-point shots, and eventually some team will "realize" that they can do better with _fewer_ 3-point shots.
Further complication comes from rebounds; the player taking the 3-point shot is less likely to be able to get the rebound if he misses, relative to a player trying to dunk it. So, the math is not trivial, and it depends on what the other team is expecting/guarding against, which might make it a non-linear system (i.e. constantly evolving over time).
There was a time when chess theory said that there was one perfect, optimal opening, and anything else was a mistake. It was sort of true, until everyone took it as a given, and then doing another opening meant your opponent wasn't as likely to be prepared for it.
While most of what you say correlates, there are other gotchas: moving around a 3pt line leaves a lot more space for defenders to cover, and the real innovation is introducing multiple staggered blocks to open up a 3pt shooter (as a development of pick-and-pop). And moving around an even farther imaginary line at like 40ft from basket and making ~35% of those shots.
So it really is impossible to cover a more than 33% shooter all around the court, and that equates to a better than 50% 2pt shooter.
A tall player who can't make threes, is more limited in the modern NBA and more limiting for roster construction. As a result, a lot more practice would be allocated to shooting from range. Look at someone like Brook Lopez (7-foot centre) who attempted 31 threes total in his first 8 seasons. Then started attempting 250-500 threes/season after that (peaked at 512 attempts).
Developing players who are elite prospects are also now less likely to be pigeon-holed during development into: you're tall as a 12 year old, so just focus on drills for centres. So yes, there would absolutely be growth in the number of capable shooters.
On your point about realisation, teams already optimise to favour threes and high-percentage twos. They try to stretch defence to each extreme, but you need to excel and threaten at both things at any given point because teams will adjust constantly during the game.
Disclaimer: I have only extremely limited exposure to this topic (I worked in sports analytics, attached to a team, quite awhile ago), so take it all as heavy speculation:
1) It seems like there’s a natural resistance to change driven by loss aversion; you see a similar pattern in the NFL with decisions like punting vs. going for it on fourth down. Even if the expected value is positive, the failures are given far more weight than the successes.
2) In general, there's a lot of skepticism toward analytics until they reach a tipping point where they’re impossible to ignore, at which point they take over completely and introduce shifts like the ones shown here.
Moneyball, for example, has plenty of anecdotes about front office staff and coaches dismissing analytics in favor of “gut instincts”—and that was in 2002! In baseball, a sport which adopted advanced analytics far faster than others (obviously in no small part due to teams like that As roster).
Even today, plenty of NBA personalities push back against analytics—Reggie Miller, for example, has been pretty vocal about his distaste for them. He's obviously increasingly alone in that opinion, but it can be really hard to break old habits.
Baseball lent itself to advanced analytics even before player tracking became a thing, since the sport consists of a series of discrete one-on-one matchups with limited possible outcomes.
Coaches and owners are not rewarded for innovation. Fans strongly discourage taking bets that could fail.
And then there’s preparing for the strategy change. Training, practice, and coaching time is extremely limited. How much do you re-allocate to this new approach? You don’t just tell players to take more 3s, it’s more complicated than that.
So in traditional innovators dilemma fashion, it’s much easier to follow when you see that the new way works. It’s easier to convince everyone (fans, coaches, players, owners) to get on board when you can point to Steph Curry doing it right.
I'm guessing that it's more complicated than that. Possibly when the specifications for a basketball court were laid out, the 3-point line was intentionally drawn where it would be a risky shot. And the coaching/playing culture developed with that mindset.
But since then people have gotten at least a little bit taller. We developed more ways in which to train and grow our physical strength. Training got more intense, improving results. And more subtle changes along those lines, which are micro-changes that accrue over time, and often hard to notice.
It can take a while for someone, anyone, to realize that all the various changes have made what was intended to be a risky maneuver into a viable play. It seems obvious in retrospect, but until someone points it out, it's one of those avenues of thought requires you to shake off what you've known your whole life before you can accept it.
Could also be that none of that was relevant, but it's worth considering and keeping in mind.
Ok, so we learn a function mapping position on the court to point value. Clearly a step function was too simple. Might want to fix the values during the games though to make it a bit easier on the fans.
"But since then people have gotten at least a little bit taller. We developed more ways in which to train and grow our physical strength."
The person who shifted this mindset is one of the smallest players in the the NBA though, would be considered small by the standards of any era of the game. And in fact, the game has shifted to smaller players in general in recent years. It's more of a skill/agility thing.
I do believe technology has played a part though. Being able to 3d scan a player's motion and find mechanics adjustments has proven to be quite powerful.
No, because hand-checking was allowed back then. Smaller guards like Mark Price for example, would go off in some games but stronger, bigger defenders would ultimate shut them down because they could feel and follow their movements with their hands. Now, if you so much as think too much of a player, they call a foul - supposedly to help the offense and make the game more entertaining. The result? A watered-down product where any team can win on any given night, but no one cares because defense is nonexistent during the regular season.
The only basketball that really matters happens in the playoffs; the rest is irrelevant and says nothing about the true power rankings.
Even if true this has nothing to do with the value of the sport to the spectator or the competitor. Seeing world-class athletes push themselves to their physical limits is intrinsically exciting even if everyone is on the same page on how to win.
Nothing to do? If that were true, Olympic weightlifting would be a primetime sport.
The strategy, drama, and player celebrity are all part of what makes a popular spectator sport. Lots of casual viewers found the recent Superbowl to be boring because of the early runaway score, despite lots of great athleticism on display.
And of course it's a tautology that "true fans" will always find something to enjoy.
Interesting to see this pop up on HN because this topic has dominated some sports circles over the last year- the NBA has become unwatchable for some, as teams like last year’s champion, the Boston Celtics, just throw up three’s constantly, regardless if they feel confident that they’ll go in.
I don’t think this is a particularly well written article, but I sort of agree with the sentiment. Basketball just isn’t THAT complex and the talent pool is homogenous enough that most teams can find these archetypes and build rosters that get you to the playoffs.
That said, trends are cyclical. Look at the role of the running back in the NFL. There will always be outlier players like Shaq who will buck the trends and exploit matchups.
“The NBA talent pool is homogenous” is the new worst hn take I’ve seen.
If “most teams can build rosters that get to the playoffs” is true it’s only because the NBA playoffs are so big. I’d assume it’s false based on any interpretation of “can build” you pick.
Realistically only a handful of teams compete for a championship in any given span of years.
My country of Smugistan solved playoff problem years ago. Very simple: every Smugball team makes playoffs. If Americans and Europeans weren't so far behind Smugistanian education system, they would have figured it out too.
1) playoff format rends 6 months of games not very important, the biggest difference is in your seeding. That's..all?
2) another way it makes the previous 6/7 months pointless is that your entire season is based on a single set of games. You can be the best team in the league by far, but then if one player gets injured or you're out of form or unlucky it's over
I just don't like leagues with a playoff system, you either have a league or you have a round robin, both seem directed toward squeezing tv rights, not awarding the best team of a season.
Most sports pretty much have a playoff system to a greater or lesser degree.
That said, basketball has pretty much always been one of the major US sports that can rely on a fairly small number of really good players and the rest don't matter nearly as much. Stars (pitchers, QBs, receivers, etc.) matter elsewhere but probably not individually as much as they do in basketball.
I mean there's the World Cup though that's a bit different. The US (or US + Canada) is big enough that having large leagues of top-level teams makes some sense to have playoffs.
My point is towards the regular season + playoffs which is imho lame.
Imagine a formula 1 season where you watch 20 races and then the best teams play it out in the last 4. That's a giant nonsense in most sports but somehow it spread even to European basket and volley in the 80s, I guess under the American influx.
That's your choice of course. I suspect that a lot of casual fans (raises hand) may largely ignore the regular (long) season but get more engaged in the payoffs, especially if they have a team they care about involved which has obvious financial implications for the teams involved.
Exactly. ;) (Per cogent upthread analysis about maximizing revenue.)
But even casuals may get excited about e.g. the last few games of the Premier League season which determine the league winner (as well as who survives the relegation battle, which is a whole 'nuther drama).
may largely ignore the regular (long) season but get more engaged in the playoffs
you are saying exactly the right words but arguing the wrong side. that is exactly why shit stinks, make the season ALL there is to it, then see whether it is long / boring / … :)
The German Bundesliga has a playoff to see which of the 16th team in tier 1 or the 3rd team in tier 2 goes into tier 1 next year
The English Championship (tier 2) has a tournament of four teams (placed 3rd-6th) to determine who goes up into the Premier League. The final of this is known as the richest game in football, worth £120m+ to the winner.
It could also be argued that the new UEFA Champions League format is a US-style playoff system. Maybe the old format too now I think of it.
These are not playoff systems for a championship but for a promotion/relegation. There are better examples like the Belgian league but they carry over more benefits from the regular season.
The champions league determines the teams going the brackets in 8 "season" games. Instead of > 30.
But even in your bad faith argument the number 1 and for the championship even the number 2 is decided by just the regular season. So they understand that the regular season should mean more than some seeding.
Everyone knows that in 80 games a half are either walkovers or don't mean anything in the end. They are only there for the money and could be cut for a better league. They could, just like 3 pointers, even make it a more profitable option.
These are not playoff systems for a championship but for a promotion/relegation
And again, UEFA CL is NOT (look that up if it is confusing) single country league. Once Chiefs start playing Montreal Destroyers and San Salvador Bulldogs in North America Football league than we can compare US sports leagues with UEFA CL. until then, try to find a country in which there are playoffs after league season is over, only US does this garbage and makes regular season generally un-watchable and meaningless
>My country of Smugistan solved playoff problem years ago. Very simple: every Smugball team makes playoffs.
Not that I disagree with the intent/target of your sarcasm, but there are US leagues where every team makes the playoffs. The Pac-12 did this with its conference tournament for most of its history, for example. One can argue that such is the logical conclusion of separately rewarding the winner of the regular season and tournament.
You mean, a free throw is a chance shot that when missed awards the defense?
Seems like that would have a huge impact on end of game strategy.
It would change the “in the paint” strategy—maybe defense would foul earlier to avoid the 2+1? Hoping instead to split the 2, 1-1 with a miss. Of course, the centers and forwards, who typically aren’t great free throw shooters, are gonna get the ball less. Where does the play go? 3pt land, where it’s way more risky to foul.
To clarify, award the offense a point when fouled shooting a 2-point shot and two points if shooting a 3.
There’s still a free-throw left to earn the old fashioned way.
Mostly the thinking is this encourages post-play since bigs are usually worse free-throw shooters. Also, it should shorten game length which is another recent audience concern.
I like my idea a bit better. Fouls become way more strategic. Maybe you do away with the bonus, though. A foul on the floor just changes possession. A foul during shot becomes almost a toss up. You still have foul limits on players, and maybe you decrease the foul out limit to 4 just for fun. :)
Yes. The season is so long it gets boring tbh. I never watch the season to begin with only the playoffs but a big reason is there’s so many games it’s not really interesting to watch that many games. But if it was half as long and half as many games in the season I probably would watch every one.
How much of the NBA economy is predicated on those regular season ticket and arena sales? And despite viewership dropping off, it isn't zero so the ad money lost is still a thing too isn't it, unless they charge more?
This article presents a readable overview of today’s NBA trends, but IMO is too absolute in its judgment. Basketball is not a solved sport. There is still innovation, for example with OKC’s historically good defense that relies on playing 5 smaller but faster players. There are still good all-around players. There are still people that hit a lot of mid range shots. We have trends going the other way, sure, but they have their own set of tradeoffs and are neither a total solution nor totally embraced in the NBA. Teams will continue to evolve based on the talents of people at their disposal and their own innovative ideas.
It seems like a very brief and abrupt article. I can understand the part about strategy of three pointers. But how does all the technology and analytics actually change the game, besides "improving form"? Has it allowed better calculation shots with the best odds for a given player? Has it discovered other team's weaknesses to exploit? Etc
Analytics leads to teams converging on the same strategy, at least on offense. The data makes it clear that you should almost never being taking mid rangers or running iso sets. So now those plays are gone from the game.
I think that's unfortunate: the article still has that title, and knowing it wants to lead to such an absolute conclusion can tell a prospective reader if they are interested to be led down that path or not.
That approach to baity titles doesn't generalize, I'm afraid—neither to users nor to titles. In general, baity titles cause threads to fill up with responses to the provocation in the title, making for shallow and ultimately off-topic discussion.
It's standard practice on HN to replace these with titles that are more accurate and neutral, but we always try to do this using representative language from the article itself. Usually that's a subtitle, or the HTML doc title, sometimes it can be the URL slug, or even a photo caption.
Often there's a sentence at the start of an article that walks back the title and says what the article is 'really' about. It's as if the title 'takes' too much and then the article 'confesses' and gives most of it back. These walkback sentences often make good HN titles because they represent the article more accurately. That's what I used in this case.
You are right that it does not generalize: but in this particular case, it was really reflective of the article which was shallow itself (IMO at least).
So I guess that the rule doesn't generalize either, but I can at least understand the reasoning behind it and accept that it might work better on average — thanks for the explanation!
wow really? Did soccer also go through a statistical revolution? I don't watch soccer at all and am pretty surprised to hear this. Did all the teams converge on a winning solution?
because of the structure of soccer (completely different to basketball, it is an invasion sport but statistically very dissimilar), it has completely reversed the ordering of the sport
there is significantly more strategic diversity, and teams that were unable to compete ten years ago are now able to compete effectively with wealthier teams (there is no catchup mechanic in soccer unlike US sports, ffp rules have also played a role but in the EPL at least the primary factor has been smaller teams using their budget more effectively)
the most recent changes have been: premium for coaches (distinct from managers) has increased significantly and a greater focus on set pieces (but this is going back to the future, twenty years ago EPL had a period where teams did this to level the field...today, they are doing this and it appears to be permanent).
it is also worth adding, i would say the majority of clubs that have tried a naive statistical approach have failed. Liverpool tried and are leading but are completely reliant on one player, Arsenal are doing better but reliant on set plays and their recruitment has been poor (they have had a stats team for over ten years at this point), the teams that have done well with stats (Brighton and Brentford) have a hybrid approach (and Brighton is further down the road with this, and have done significantly better...they use non-public resources far better, integrated with sport science, etc.)
if stats in soccer is a 90-minute game, we are still at minute 5
he has changed strategy multiple times based on team composition
possession-based at Barca, more pragmatic at Bayern, first City teams used wing-backs and insane attacking then acquired more defensive players and went back to suffocating opposition
playing out from the back is ludicrous only because teams who are unable to play that way insist on doing it, and the credibility of that strategy as a global minima has already passed (largely due to the issues Burnley had last year and Spurs/Southampton had this year)
this year has proved that there are multiple ways to win. imo, the most boring manager is Arteta who does the defensive stuff without (almost) any attacking players (and is, thankfully, failing...the worst thing would be a manager playing like a Serie A side and winning)
Pretty much all teams play more or less the same style of building up with the goalkeeper because data shows that even though you suffer more goals it's offset by scoring more.
In my opinion, the real problem with the NBA is that we no longer get the marquee matchups in the Finals that we used to during the 90s and 00s, mainly because the season is too long. An 82-game grind isn’t sustainable - it practically guarantees that stars like Giannis, Luka, or Jokic (or their key teammates) will get injured to the playoffs or not at all.
The fact that we’ve never seen Embiid vs. Giannis in the ECF, and that we’ll likely never get Giannis vs. Jokic, the two best players during the 2020s, in the NBA Finals says everything you need to know and it's a bummer.
Aside from 2021, I can’t remember another truly competitive finals where both teams had a real shot at winning. Maybe Boston wasn’t expected to fall so hard against Golden State, but matchups like DEN vs. MIA, BOS vs. DAL, or LAL vs. MIA felt lopsided—one team stacked with talent, the other never really standing a chance.
At this point, injuries, not players or teams, are deciding who moves forward.
I think a big reason we don't have competitive finals is generally not having a harder salary cap and allowing max for contracts. If a player really is that good they should take up 50% of the cap and to balance it out have terrible other players.
Anything else allows stacking value above cost and leading to team imbalances.
> At this point, injuries, not players or teams, are deciding who moves forward.
Football is kinda like this at this point too. Some fraction of the top QBs are going to go down each year, and it feels like a limp to the finish.
That being said, somehow Wilt Chamberlain once played a season in which he only missed 8 and a half minutes total in the entire season, including OT. Amazing. Times have changed but that will never happen again now.
Soccer is slowly getting there. You play for your club in the series, the cup, some europa cup, now also the world club cup, then there's matches with your national team, world cup etc. They are now even contemplating having the world cup more often.
Having more games is an quick way to make more money, but in the long run it waters down the product.
> Wilt Chamberlain averaged more than 48 minutes a game during the 1961-62 NBA season, where he played an average of 48.5 minutes per game; this is considered one of the most remarkable feats in NBA history.
It's weird because almost all of the levels below the NBA are better games than the NBA. Nobody really goes out of their way to follow AAA baseball teams, but college basketball and even some high schools are great games.
The pet theory is that the NBA is a RNG for gambling now the game isn't really the game. TV is near death, so gambling is the only source of revenue that can possibly replace the big TV deal.
My theory is that it’s only a matter of years before the Saudi’s launch a league. It’ll scoop up a large swath of international players including NBA superstars. Jokić becomes very famous and wealthy.
This is why I don’t comment on the internet anymore. You exist in the alternative reality in which every back and forth is a polarized ridiculous showdown.
Jokic is not famous outside of basketball. The Saudi’s would make him so wealthy he’d seem poor today by comparison.
I agree with your point and response. This activity of being players overs to new leagues run by Saudi or adjacent countries has been huge in almost every major sport. Some with much more success than others.
The real problem is the players don’t give a sh*t about the fans any more. You need no better example of that than the All star game tomorrow. In the 90’s it was an amazing, competitive game between the best players in the league. Now…the players can’t even be bothered to jog up and down the court. Load management: players claim their bodies are delicate and can’t play too many games. Why would I want to buy tickets to a game or watch on TV if there’s a good chance the stars aren’t even playing. Guys the 90’s played every game. Players now sign a 5 year contract and the next day ask for a trade. Look at Kevin Durant - great player, but has forced his way out of 3 teams and it’s about to be a 4th. Too much guaranteed money means too little incentive.
If the players don’t care about us, why should we care about them?
They've gotta change up the all star format then. NHL didn't do all star stuff this year; instead they're running a pseduo-national teams tournament with NHL players, and the four teams are all top players playing really hard. I don't know if there's enough non-US players in the NBA to do the same thing, but it's an idea.
The 90s All Star games were 160-150 affairs and had all sorts of sideshows. And players should absolutely maximize wealth which includes protecting their health. And there has never been a time when every person played all out, that’s just nostalgia creeping up on you.
I think the difference is that teams are more cautious because they don't want a season disrupted by a major injury. Zion the other day said that the Pelicans were the limiting factor in his sitting back-to-backs. Players frequently come back on minutes restrictions (Kawhi previously, Exum currently).
The real problem is the amount of ads and game breaks. Everyone knows basketball is about the fourth quarter so the league has backloaded ads. Now it routinely takes 20-30 minutes to get through the last 6 minutes of a game. Completely breaks the flow of the best part of the show. Second problem is that with the play in 2/3 of the teams make the post season so there is little incentive to try for a top seed anymore.
I agree with the breaks, but there is a lot of incentive to make the guaranteed playoff seeding. You might only have a one game chance to make it into the playoffs otherwise.
This is an interesting point. All the breaks also make it so that players get less tired from a cardio standpoint, are able to further exhaust their muscles, and leads to more injury.
When analyzing non-computing problems through a computer science lens, the human element merely muddies the path to a concrete answer. It’s best to avoid that ambiguity and complexity.
"Only 3s and layups" is the current easiest strategy to build a proficient offense, but it's certainly not the only way.
You don't even have to look far for an example. The Denver Nuggets won a championship a year and a half ago while nearly attempting the fewest 3s in the league.
> In the past, the team built its roster around a big name like Shaq. Most of the offense were from the center. This has now changed...
Is the author not aware of Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, (Wembanyama... soon)? The winners of the last 6 MVP awards? If there were enough talented bigs to go around, every team in the league would be building around them because it works really, really well.
This happens at times in all sports. The NFL is a prime example. QBs were lighting up big, heavy defenses with deep passes. Then teams ran two high safeties to prevent this. This year, offenses adjusted again to run more against the smaller linebackers and nickel/dime packages.
With the quantification of sport, it has becoming increasingly common for people who only look at the statistics to assume that some global strategic minima has been achieved. In reality, in every competitive invasion-based game strategies adapt.
The adaption varies by sport - without going into the weeds, basketball is less random than other invasion sports so there has been typically been a higher premia on player talent so you see high levels of strategic adaption to individual players...by contrast, you don't see this in soccer to the same degree, apart from the top one or two players - but it happens all the same. For some reason, the assumption is that without quantification none of this stuff would be obvious...but if you look at the history of almost every invasion sport there have been strategic adaptions over years/decades/centuries because this stuff is obvious to people playing it.
To be clear, this doesn't happen in non-invasion sports. There is no strategic adaption so you see interesting things like the ability to compare statistical records over long periods (to a certain degree, over very long periods the rules often change and there can be adaption due to generally increasing physical capacity of athletes).
In other words, there is always someone who wants to spoil the fun. The beauty of invasion games is that there is no global minima (and there is a profound lack of joy in non-invasion sports when someone has a higher level than the competition, and just annihilates everyone every match).
This reads as someone who looks at data but doesn’t actually play basketball, coach basketball or generally know basketball. Numbers can only tell you so much, and 2025 Celtics and the rise of Steph have led to more 3s but the sport of basketball is not as predictable as the author suggests. For example, look at the college game, which doesn’t reflect this trend as much as the NBA does.
College players are much more inconsistent because they're younger and less experienced. There are not many 20 year olds you can depend on to consistently make 3s. There are also a lot more teams which spreads the talent pool around. In my opinion, it amounts to a more exciting product to watch, even if it's less polished.
Yes, I agree. Love the college game. I think people don’t realize how talented NBA players really are, which sounds crazy to type - but I believe its true.
There probably are as many 20 year old college kids who can hit threes as there are pros who can hit them, but they are spread over many more teams.
Unless you have a correctable mechanical problem with your shot, the ability to hit a three point basket is more of a natural ability than a learned skill. Those guys just have incredibly good hand-eye coordination.
It's basically just seems like a riff off of a Bloomberg article published yesterday, titled "The NBA Has Fallen Into an Efficiency Trap", without any of the details in the article, besides the 3-pointer trend chart, which is basically a carbon copy. I'm not even sure this article is suggestive of someone simply looking at the data. Given the close timing, they probably just read the Bloomberg article, or a different blog inspired by the Bloomberg article, as opposed to just coming to this conclusion as a NBA aficionado.
I haven't looked at the NBA in more than 20 years and recently started watching it again. I was shocked. Not necessarily by all the three point shots, but more about the carrying of the ball, the multiple extra steps that players take before dunking or laying up, and getting extra free throws when it's the offensive players who rams into a still standing defender. If I want to watch rugby or ice hockey, then I watch rugby or ice hockey, this jumping into defenders has nothing to do with basketball if you'd ask me. And this Donkic trade to the Lakers because of gambling money, ughh... it's an ugly organisation.
Ah, this is the current grouse about the league, that it is all pace and space and somehow the art is lost. Sports go through eras. I will simply assume the author was not alive to watch Pat Reilly’s Knicks play their version of juego bonito, but while the over reliance on threes can make individual games hard to watch, the league has more talent that I can remember and there are so many fun players. It is bold to declare basketball is now deterministic in Year Two of Wemby and with all the other people capable of doing things we thought unique a generation ago. Plus there are some great minds as coaches right now. I think Spolestra, Daigneault and Mazzula will have something to say about how the game is played.
Professional athletes are freaks of nature being given millions of dollars to optimize for the problem. If you give them an unopposed chance to score, you're going to have very unfun sports.
The same problem is happening in baseball pitching and football kicking.
Not a particularly well written article, but I haven't ever really believed that jacking up threes is a global maximum in the basketball optimization problem.
For example, if you have a team that posts up in the middle, actually moves the ball around and not just around the perimeter, and utilizes the shot clock well, this is going to wear down a team by forcing them to play rough defense, reducing the effectiveness of the three point shot over the course of the game.
Part of the reason of the decline e of interesting basketball is the insane relaxation of rules. Offensive players can travel, carry, flop, ect. all the while knowing that defensive players are handicapped in the contact they can initiate.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadMaybe the solution is with a different type of 3D model, namely the Wilson 3D printed basketball. It has more drag than the regulation basketball, making long shots more difficult. This could restore the balance between long field goals and shots near the basket.
Clearly that justifies it.
Maybe an NBA team will come up with something like that.
However, I believe Kasparov famously tried to employ this tactic against Deep Blue but by that time it wasn't particularly viable.
But why stop there? What about the foul line, key width, court size/half court line?
I feel like the rim height is sacred, but what about backboard size/shape?
Some of these dimensions are different in the international game.
(Not that people bank off the backboard, but hit the rim, backboard, in, type accidents)
This was such an eye-opener for me. A high-stakes sport like basketball/the NBA went on for decades without realising the simple math that three pointers are more valuable than two-pointers if you just do the basic math. How many areas in our lives are yet to be optimised with really basic math?
"Really basic math"? Do you think NBA coaches reached this conclusion like this:
1. A player can throw X 2-points in a game.
2. Or he can throw Y 3-points in a game.
3. 3Y > 2X, so we should just throw 3-points all the time.
It's absolutely not what happened. And the reason teams didn't discovery the current strategy decades earlier was absolutely not that they couldn't do basic math.
A 3 point shot with 36% chance to go in (league average) = 1.08 points per attempt.
A mid-range 2 point shot with 45% chance to go in = .9 points per attempt.
The math is very basic.
(Also, any league average for three pointers will suffer from obvious selection bias.)
How does the percentage change when the other team knows you will go for 3? How much more effective is the three when you are able to have the threat of other scoring? A layup is 80-90% isn’t it worth it to try to create one?
Comparing probability of shot A vs shot B is just not a sufficient model. Its not simple math to model basketball.
It it really impossible to think that it was a huge oversight?
Is this the first time a team has tried to shoot 3s?
> It it really impossible to think that it was a huge oversight?
I’m not saying biasing towards 3s, with serious threats inside, is a bad strategy. Im saying multiplying a shooting percentage doesn’t tell you that.
You can’t just tell your players to start jacking more threes and coast your way to success. Many tried, many failed. The game is more complex than that.
Similar reason why star players often have lower FG% than one might think: they are the ones tasked with trying _something_ when the shot clock winds down and there's no clear play. Not all shots are chosen equally.
But then 2 pointers become easier. You can’t defend tightly both the perimeter and the paint at the same time. Sounds like a win-win. Again, nobody seemingly noticed.
Meanwhile Denver won it all with some of the lowest volume of threes in the league.
Well yeah, the idea is not to go all 3-pointer, it's that the borderline decisions need to adjust a few notches in favor of attempting 3-pointers, until the returns are balanced out.
> Not all shots are chosen equally.
I agree, that is a proper issue to figure out.
If it was so intricate why nobody tried it before? And why after someone tried it it seemingly stuck? Is it really that far fetched that it was actually pretty simple and nobody noticed for many years?
Even if you consider the adjustement to the defense, you’d be making two pointers easier as you can’t defend tightly both the perimeter and the paint at the same time.
Yes, 33% for 3pts equals a 50% 2pt shot, so beat that, and you've got yourself a pretty good scorer. But hitting 33% is not trivial unless you make a lot of other adjustments: multiple blocks for the shooters and not just a simple pick-and-roll or pick-and-pop, staggered blocks for a shooter switching from one sideline to the next. This has actually led to less specialization, as every player on the court needs to shoot 3s and defend faster or bigger players as switches became unavoidable.
And with all that, it only led to a "dynasty" when one player who could create his own shot and shoot from nearly anywhere at 35+% (Curry), paired with another ~40% career 3pt shooter and defensive specialist (Thompson) and completed with a power forward who could defend anyone and coordinate the attack too (Green). Even so, they did need another future hall-of-famer in Durant to win two of their last 3 rings.
That same team still has 2 of those core people in them, but they are unable to replicate anywhere near the success.
So if anyone can do this, why doesn't everyone do it?
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_stats_per_g...
https://www.basketballforcoaches.com/effective-field-goal-pe...
For example, maybe these probabilities might not always be the same as this in all circumstances. Also, how much risk you might take also might depend on the current score and remaining time (e.g. maybe you are likely to win even with only one more point than your current score, or maybe it depends how much time it takes to make a specific shot (I don't actually know enough about basketball to know if this is relevant)), and on how your opponent can defend against it at a specific situation (and if their defense would allow them to score instead; I don't actually know how much that is relevant either), maybe. There are probably other considerations as well.
(I do not actually know all of the rules or strategy of basketball, so if I am wrong, you can mention what mistake I made.)
And call me naive maybe but not arrogant, I’ve never been called that in my life so it’s quite surprising to be called arrogant in HN where I know the average person is smarter than me.
[1] https://malteranalytics.github.io/nfl-4th-down/
Which also suggests how things may continue to evolve; the best defense vs. 3-point shots probably compromises your defense vs. 2-point shots, and eventually some team will "realize" that they can do better with _fewer_ 3-point shots.
Further complication comes from rebounds; the player taking the 3-point shot is less likely to be able to get the rebound if he misses, relative to a player trying to dunk it. So, the math is not trivial, and it depends on what the other team is expecting/guarding against, which might make it a non-linear system (i.e. constantly evolving over time).
There was a time when chess theory said that there was one perfect, optimal opening, and anything else was a mistake. It was sort of true, until everyone took it as a given, and then doing another opening meant your opponent wasn't as likely to be prepared for it.
So it really is impossible to cover a more than 33% shooter all around the court, and that equates to a better than 50% 2pt shooter.
Developing players who are elite prospects are also now less likely to be pigeon-holed during development into: you're tall as a 12 year old, so just focus on drills for centres. So yes, there would absolutely be growth in the number of capable shooters.
On your point about realisation, teams already optimise to favour threes and high-percentage twos. They try to stretch defence to each extreme, but you need to excel and threaten at both things at any given point because teams will adjust constantly during the game.
1) It seems like there’s a natural resistance to change driven by loss aversion; you see a similar pattern in the NFL with decisions like punting vs. going for it on fourth down. Even if the expected value is positive, the failures are given far more weight than the successes.
2) In general, there's a lot of skepticism toward analytics until they reach a tipping point where they’re impossible to ignore, at which point they take over completely and introduce shifts like the ones shown here.
Moneyball, for example, has plenty of anecdotes about front office staff and coaches dismissing analytics in favor of “gut instincts”—and that was in 2002! In baseball, a sport which adopted advanced analytics far faster than others (obviously in no small part due to teams like that As roster).
Even today, plenty of NBA personalities push back against analytics—Reggie Miller, for example, has been pretty vocal about his distaste for them. He's obviously increasingly alone in that opinion, but it can be really hard to break old habits.
Coaches and owners are not rewarded for innovation. Fans strongly discourage taking bets that could fail.
And then there’s preparing for the strategy change. Training, practice, and coaching time is extremely limited. How much do you re-allocate to this new approach? You don’t just tell players to take more 3s, it’s more complicated than that.
So in traditional innovators dilemma fashion, it’s much easier to follow when you see that the new way works. It’s easier to convince everyone (fans, coaches, players, owners) to get on board when you can point to Steph Curry doing it right.
But since then people have gotten at least a little bit taller. We developed more ways in which to train and grow our physical strength. Training got more intense, improving results. And more subtle changes along those lines, which are micro-changes that accrue over time, and often hard to notice.
It can take a while for someone, anyone, to realize that all the various changes have made what was intended to be a risky maneuver into a viable play. It seems obvious in retrospect, but until someone points it out, it's one of those avenues of thought requires you to shake off what you've known your whole life before you can accept it.
Could also be that none of that was relevant, but it's worth considering and keeping in mind.
The person who shifted this mindset is one of the smallest players in the the NBA though, would be considered small by the standards of any era of the game. And in fact, the game has shifted to smaller players in general in recent years. It's more of a skill/agility thing.
I do believe technology has played a part though. Being able to 3d scan a player's motion and find mechanics adjustments has proven to be quite powerful.
The only basketball that really matters happens in the playoffs; the rest is irrelevant and says nothing about the true power rankings.
The strategy, drama, and player celebrity are all part of what makes a popular spectator sport. Lots of casual viewers found the recent Superbowl to be boring because of the early runaway score, despite lots of great athleticism on display.
And of course it's a tautology that "true fans" will always find something to enjoy.
https://youtu.be/IgEkocfa62g?si=63y0a_Zk8CxJ-5rM
Another proposal would be to widen the court so the 3 point line would be a complete half circle.
That said, trends are cyclical. Look at the role of the running back in the NFL. There will always be outlier players like Shaq who will buck the trends and exploit matchups.
If “most teams can build rosters that get to the playoffs” is true it’s only because the NBA playoffs are so big. I’d assume it’s false based on any interpretation of “can build” you pick.
Realistically only a handful of teams compete for a championship in any given span of years.
Not really, it's still 16/30 (I don't like playoff formats btw, so American).
1) playoff format rends 6 months of games not very important, the biggest difference is in your seeding. That's..all?
2) another way it makes the previous 6/7 months pointless is that your entire season is based on a single set of games. You can be the best team in the league by far, but then if one player gets injured or you're out of form or unlucky it's over
I just don't like leagues with a playoff system, you either have a league or you have a round robin, both seem directed toward squeezing tv rights, not awarding the best team of a season.
That said, basketball has pretty much always been one of the major US sports that can rely on a fairly small number of really good players and the rest don't matter nearly as much. Stars (pitchers, QBs, receivers, etc.) matter elsewhere but probably not individually as much as they do in basketball.
My point is towards the regular season + playoffs which is imho lame.
Imagine a formula 1 season where you watch 20 races and then the best teams play it out in the last 4. That's a giant nonsense in most sports but somehow it spread even to European basket and volley in the 80s, I guess under the American influx.
I just don't like it.
Exactly. ;) (Per cogent upthread analysis about maximizing revenue.)
But even casuals may get excited about e.g. the last few games of the Premier League season which determine the league winner (as well as who survives the relegation battle, which is a whole 'nuther drama).
you are saying exactly the right words but arguing the wrong side. that is exactly why shit stinks, make the season ALL there is to it, then see whether it is long / boring / … :)
But it’s true that the lack of a tournament which determines the league champion makes regular season games much more meaningful and exciting!
The German Bundesliga has a playoff to see which of the 16th team in tier 1 or the 3rd team in tier 2 goes into tier 1 next year
The English Championship (tier 2) has a tournament of four teams (placed 3rd-6th) to determine who goes up into the Premier League. The final of this is known as the richest game in football, worth £120m+ to the winner.
It could also be argued that the new UEFA Champions League format is a US-style playoff system. Maybe the old format too now I think of it.
The champions league determines the teams going the brackets in 8 "season" games. Instead of > 30.
But even in your bad faith argument the number 1 and for the championship even the number 2 is decided by just the regular season. So they understand that the regular season should mean more than some seeding.
Everyone knows that in 80 games a half are either walkovers or don't mean anything in the end. They are only there for the money and could be cut for a better league. They could, just like 3 pointers, even make it a more profitable option.
The UEFA CL is a league-then-playoff championship system. There are other examples, as you yourself acknowledge.
Bad faith argument? How dare you.
UEFA Champions League is the finest competition in world football. It's a league-then-playoff system. Real Madrid ring any bells?
The winner of the Championship playoff joins the best, richest league in the world. Bottom feeder, lmao.
These are not playoff systems for a championship but for a promotion/relegation
And again, UEFA CL is NOT (look that up if it is confusing) single country league. Once Chiefs start playing Montreal Destroyers and San Salvador Bulldogs in North America Football league than we can compare US sports leagues with UEFA CL. until then, try to find a country in which there are playoffs after league season is over, only US does this garbage and makes regular season generally un-watchable and meaningless
This is the first time you've mentioned anything about a single country. Those goalposts just won't stay still will they mate. Must be the wind.
Not that I disagree with the intent/target of your sarcasm, but there are US leagues where every team makes the playoffs. The Pac-12 did this with its conference tournament for most of its history, for example. One can argue that such is the logical conclusion of separately rewarding the winner of the regular season and tournament.
Seems like that would have a huge impact on end of game strategy.
It would change the “in the paint” strategy—maybe defense would foul earlier to avoid the 2+1? Hoping instead to split the 2, 1-1 with a miss. Of course, the centers and forwards, who typically aren’t great free throw shooters, are gonna get the ball less. Where does the play go? 3pt land, where it’s way more risky to foul.
I still like the idea.
There’s still a free-throw left to earn the old fashioned way.
Mostly the thinking is this encourages post-play since bigs are usually worse free-throw shooters. Also, it should shorten game length which is another recent audience concern.
I like my idea a bit better. Fouls become way more strategic. Maybe you do away with the bonus, though. A foul on the floor just changes possession. A foul during shot becomes almost a toss up. You still have foul limits on players, and maybe you decrease the foul out limit to 4 just for fun. :)
It's standard practice on HN to replace these with titles that are more accurate and neutral, but we always try to do this using representative language from the article itself. Usually that's a subtitle, or the HTML doc title, sometimes it can be the URL slug, or even a photo caption.
Often there's a sentence at the start of an article that walks back the title and says what the article is 'really' about. It's as if the title 'takes' too much and then the article 'confesses' and gives most of it back. These walkback sentences often make good HN titles because they represent the article more accurately. That's what I used in this case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
So I guess that the rule doesn't generalize either, but I can at least understand the reasoning behind it and accept that it might work better on average — thanks for the explanation!
But still data-lization is taking the fun out of basketball, that's for sure.
because of the structure of soccer (completely different to basketball, it is an invasion sport but statistically very dissimilar), it has completely reversed the ordering of the sport
there is significantly more strategic diversity, and teams that were unable to compete ten years ago are now able to compete effectively with wealthier teams (there is no catchup mechanic in soccer unlike US sports, ffp rules have also played a role but in the EPL at least the primary factor has been smaller teams using their budget more effectively)
the most recent changes have been: premium for coaches (distinct from managers) has increased significantly and a greater focus on set pieces (but this is going back to the future, twenty years ago EPL had a period where teams did this to level the field...today, they are doing this and it appears to be permanent).
it is also worth adding, i would say the majority of clubs that have tried a naive statistical approach have failed. Liverpool tried and are leading but are completely reliant on one player, Arsenal are doing better but reliant on set plays and their recruitment has been poor (they have had a stats team for over ten years at this point), the teams that have done well with stats (Brighton and Brentford) have a hybrid approach (and Brighton is further down the road with this, and have done significantly better...they use non-public resources far better, integrated with sport science, etc.)
if stats in soccer is a 90-minute game, we are still at minute 5
possession-based at Barca, more pragmatic at Bayern, first City teams used wing-backs and insane attacking then acquired more defensive players and went back to suffocating opposition
playing out from the back is ludicrous only because teams who are unable to play that way insist on doing it, and the credibility of that strategy as a global minima has already passed (largely due to the issues Burnley had last year and Spurs/Southampton had this year)
this year has proved that there are multiple ways to win. imo, the most boring manager is Arteta who does the defensive stuff without (almost) any attacking players (and is, thankfully, failing...the worst thing would be a manager playing like a Serie A side and winning)
The fact that we’ve never seen Embiid vs. Giannis in the ECF, and that we’ll likely never get Giannis vs. Jokic, the two best players during the 2020s, in the NBA Finals says everything you need to know and it's a bummer.
Aside from 2021, I can’t remember another truly competitive finals where both teams had a real shot at winning. Maybe Boston wasn’t expected to fall so hard against Golden State, but matchups like DEN vs. MIA, BOS vs. DAL, or LAL vs. MIA felt lopsided—one team stacked with talent, the other never really standing a chance.
At this point, injuries, not players or teams, are deciding who moves forward.
Anything else allows stacking value above cost and leading to team imbalances.
Football is kinda like this at this point too. Some fraction of the top QBs are going to go down each year, and it feels like a limp to the finish.
That being said, somehow Wilt Chamberlain once played a season in which he only missed 8 and a half minutes total in the entire season, including OT. Amazing. Times have changed but that will never happen again now.
Having more games is an quick way to make more money, but in the long run it waters down the product.
The pet theory is that the NBA is a RNG for gambling now the game isn't really the game. TV is near death, so gambling is the only source of revenue that can possibly replace the big TV deal.
https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/nba-signs-new-tv-deal-det...
Jokic is not famous outside of basketball. The Saudi’s would make him so wealthy he’d seem poor today by comparison.
You don't even have to look far for an example. The Denver Nuggets won a championship a year and a half ago while nearly attempting the fewest 3s in the league.
> In the past, the team built its roster around a big name like Shaq. Most of the offense were from the center. This has now changed...
Is the author not aware of Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, (Wembanyama... soon)? The winners of the last 6 MVP awards? If there were enough talented bigs to go around, every team in the league would be building around them because it works really, really well.
The adaption varies by sport - without going into the weeds, basketball is less random than other invasion sports so there has been typically been a higher premia on player talent so you see high levels of strategic adaption to individual players...by contrast, you don't see this in soccer to the same degree, apart from the top one or two players - but it happens all the same. For some reason, the assumption is that without quantification none of this stuff would be obvious...but if you look at the history of almost every invasion sport there have been strategic adaptions over years/decades/centuries because this stuff is obvious to people playing it.
To be clear, this doesn't happen in non-invasion sports. There is no strategic adaption so you see interesting things like the ability to compare statistical records over long periods (to a certain degree, over very long periods the rules often change and there can be adaption due to generally increasing physical capacity of athletes).
In other words, there is always someone who wants to spoil the fun. The beauty of invasion games is that there is no global minima (and there is a profound lack of joy in non-invasion sports when someone has a higher level than the competition, and just annihilates everyone every match).
College players are much more inconsistent because they're younger and less experienced. There are not many 20 year olds you can depend on to consistently make 3s. There are also a lot more teams which spreads the talent pool around. In my opinion, it amounts to a more exciting product to watch, even if it's less polished.
Unless you have a correctable mechanical problem with your shot, the ability to hit a three point basket is more of a natural ability than a learned skill. Those guys just have incredibly good hand-eye coordination.
there is absolutely no sport today that is as predictable as nba. check this next thursday 2/20, boston is playing philly
- boston will score between 108 and 125 points
- they will attempt between 48 and 58 3's
- they will make betwee 19 and 25 of them
I can make another 5 of these, they will be true as it is always all the same these days
While you’re at it, do it for “another 5” and let me know how you get on.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-14/forget-do...
Agree on offensive players drawing fouls.
The same problem is happening in baseball pitching and football kicking.
Is that why I don't enjoy watching it at all anymore?
For example, if you have a team that posts up in the middle, actually moves the ball around and not just around the perimeter, and utilizes the shot clock well, this is going to wear down a team by forcing them to play rough defense, reducing the effectiveness of the three point shot over the course of the game.
Part of the reason of the decline e of interesting basketball is the insane relaxation of rules. Offensive players can travel, carry, flop, ect. all the while knowing that defensive players are handicapped in the contact they can initiate.
Yet Wemby is the most hyped young player since LeBron because of his incredible versatility.