The Not-So-Beautiful Game?

The Olympics—with all those great NBA players on the tube—has got me thinking hard and critically about the state of the pro game. If fútbol in recent years has become known more and more as “the beautiful game”—o jogo bonito—professional basketball is becoming increasingly unpretty.

I say this reluctantly—I’m a long-time fan of the NBA—and not just because of the hapless way Game 7 of the NBA Finals ended, with Golden State missing its last 9 field-goal attempts and Cleveland missing seven of the last eight it attempted.

The problem for me relates more to the fact that seven of the nine missed shots Golden State players hoisted up were threes. Although many younger fans and players seem to like such long-range bombing, as a born contrarian, I tend to agree with old-schoolers like Spurs’ coach Gregg Popovich, who quite correctly has pointed out that the three-pointer is “like a circus sort of thing.”

Now I’ll be the first to admit that shooting from long range is an art, and that Stephen Curry, his splash brother Klay Thompson, and a sizable contingent of players in the League are remarkably accurate firing from parts hitherto unknown. The problem is that the three has skewed and distorted the game, seemingly rendering every player a marksman (in his own mind), which has had disastrous effects on the quality and aesthetics of the game.

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It’s not just the fact that 28.5 percent of the shots attempted in the NBA this year were launched from behind the line. It’s the fact that the seductive siren song that is the trey has lured everyone away from the hoop, in so doing, leading to the depreciation of “mid-range” shooters, giving birth to 7-foot “stretch 4s” dawdling in the corners, and converting 6-5 guys into alleged “rim protectors,” thus creating a vacuum in the lane.

I wonder what the great Bill Russell, who attended the NBA Finals, actually thinks of today’s game?

With the above enormities in mind, let me make a suggestion that might help to reduce the distortive effects of Curry’s spicing up of the game via the over-reliance on the three: A penalty for missed shots from beyond the line. Such a penalty would serve as a disincentive to mediocre shooters to fire rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) from the hinterland. What kind of penalty? The devil is in the details, of course, but a little back-of-the-envelope calculating will at least get us thinking about the problem.

The overall field-goal percentage in the NBA in 2015-16 was 45.2. Disaggregated, the percentage was 49.1 percent from two-point range and 35.4 percent from three. Essentially, this means that without taking into account other variables—turnovers, free-throws attempted/made because of fouls committed during acts of shooting, etc.—shooting from two-point range generated 98.2 points per 100 possessions this year, while shooting from three-point range generated 106.2. In essence, it’s more efficient to launch threes.

The teams in the NBA all know this and therefore load up on players can can shoot from outside—or at least think they can—which is making the lane akin to a hazmat zone, leading to the unnatural extinction of post players, and confounding venerable strategies of coaches who like to go inside or play inside-out. Instead, we’re left with everyone straddling the three-point line in search of a long shot or watching increasingly boring pick-and-roll plays commencing 25 feet from the hoop with only relative runts left to stop drives into the lane.

A penalty for errant threes might just mitigate these problems. For the sake of argument, let’s impose penalties of 0.5/0.75/1 points per miss from beyond the arc and see what happens. A brief exercise involving various shooting percentages from two- and three-point range and 20 shots can serve as what economists call a “sensitivity test” and give readers a flavor of what I have in mind.

Points Generated per 20 Shots:

chart_1

If, for some reason, one prefers not to go the disincentive route, one can achieve somewhat similar results by reducing the rewards of the three to, say, 2.5 points. Using that approach, the points generated per twenty shots at various shooting percentages appear below:

Points Generated per 20 Shots:

chart_2

Reducing the value of the three-point shot to 2.5 points gets the results close to the same place as is the case by subtracting a half point for every missed “three.” The 2.5-point shot approach, however, is more forgiving to poor shooters from long range.

What’s the takeaway of these exercises? Much lies in the eye of the beholder, of course, and how one feels about threes. To me, the 1-point per miss penalty is clearly too high, and the 0.75-point penalty probably is, too. The half-point penalty seems about right, but I could also live with the 2.5-point long-range shot. Such approaches would still reward skilled long-range shooters—those who shoot over about 40 percent—but raise the value both of players operating close to the basket and of decent mid-range shooters.

To be sure, there would be some obstacles to overcome in implementing a half-point penalty per missed three or changing the 3 to 2.5 points, but certainly the technology is now there.

I understand why people have become so enamored of long-distance shooting. When on, Curry is transcendent, and I’d be the first to admit that the WWE-like matches in the late 1990s between the Knicks and the Heat were difficult to watch.

But unless something is done—extending the three-point line out even farther or perhaps only allowing threes in the last two minutes of each quarter or half are other possibilities—basketball as a game involving players of different sizes, playing different positions, and displaying different skill sets is in danger of losing out to a radically simplified and, yes, unappealing game marked by 10 players on the outside, while seldom looking in.

Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He often writes about sports.