It's Time to Nerf the 3 Pointer

After being adopted in 1979-80, the NBA has finally discovered that 3 pointers are worth considerably more than 2 and fully optimized its power in recent years.

Consequently every team builds their team around a well spaced offensive attack. Perimeter players are essentially required to be capable 3 point shooters, and even bigs are heavily preferred to be threats from deep. This has resulted in offensive efficiency at an all-time high.

On one hand, it is nice to see the league has finally bought into basic arithmetic to optimize offensive efficiency. It is odd to watch a game from 10 years ago and see players actually spot up from mid-range and provide no spacing and being in position to do nothing other than take an inefficient shot.

On the other hand, it illuminates that it was always ridiculous to have shots beyond the arc be worth 1.5x as many points as interior shots. It is simply an absurd ratio even if took approximately 40 years for the masses to grasp its gravity. And now that everything is fully optimized, it has had some negative impacts on the game overall.

How Much Offense is Too Much?

Most sports prefer to be offensively friendly to keep fans engaged and entertained, as people typically get more excited by points than the prevention of them.

But this is a bigger issue for sports other than basketball, which is by far the highest scoring major sport in existence. It can get boring watching a 0-0 soccer game, or a baseball game where teams go for hours without scoring, or an NFL game with scant big plays and a 13-3 final score.

This has never been an issue for basketball, as it is the only sport where points happen more often than not and teams routinely score 100+, even in less offensive eras.

Now halfway through the ‘23-24 season, NBA teams are averaging a hyper-efficient 115.8 pts per 100 possessions. This is because every team has optimized their spacing and shot quality such that offensive efficiency is maxed to the gills, and it is well worth the hit of playing smaller and slightly less effective defenses.

The most dominant play in basketball is a slam dunk, but at this current level of hyperefficiency that play is not a big deal as an easy 2 points it is merely +0.84 pts better than an average possession. Conversely, any sort of stop is +1.16 pts better than an average defensive possession.

This means that an opposing player getting called for a travel or charge is 38% more impactful for a team that getting a highlight reel dunk. You gain more value by the opponent getting called for 3 offensive fouls in a row than you do by your own team dunking 4 times in a row.

That is grotesque pointsflation. It reduces from the viewing experience when points are so highly expected to happen, and stops are the scarce outcome. Teams have averaged more than 1 point per possession for the entirety of the 3 point era, but never crossed 1.1 pts/possession until 2018-19. Ideally offenses should not score aboev ~1.1 pts/possession, and 1.15+ is way too high.

And even if you love points being cheap and meaningless, there are other downsides that come with the 3 point arc.

Every Team Plays the Same Style

Everybody plays the pace and space offense where they load up on shooters and let it rip any time an open attempt comes available, because it is not viable to play otherwise.

As recently as 10 years ago, there were more unique team building approaches that led to unique personalities from team to team. The Lob City Clippers started Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan as two non shooting bigs and were insanely effective and fun to watch. The Grit and Grind Grizzlies started two non shooting bigs in Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol AND a non-shooting guard in Tony Allen, and were also a good and fun team. The Paul George Pacers built around elite defensive players funneling shots to big Roy Hibbert in the middle protecting the rim.

Now different stars have different styles. There is a big difference between the style that Jokic plays compared to Embiid compared to Giannis compared to Steph, etc. But they are all built around the same— with as much shooting and versatile defensive players as possible, so everybody can play the same style and jack up the same shots at a slightly different %. It’s much more boring than past eras.

Players Are Less Well Rounded and Dynamic

The other unintended consequence of the 3 point arc is that it disproportionately overvalues the singular skill of shooting over every other aspect of basketball.

If there is a young prospect who does everything great but has a broken shot, his value gets reduced to what are the odds he eventually develops into a capable 3 point shooter. If a player is an elite shooter but not good at anything else, he is a viable prospect so long as he doesn’t get played off the floor on defense.

Players like Roy Hibbert are extinct because he cannot defend in space and every team has at least good spacing. Players like Tony Allen are extinct because no matter how awesome his defense is, it is too costly to play a non-shooter on the perimeter. And players like Zach Randolph and Blake Griffin better learn how to shoot ASAP, or get paired with a unicorn rim protector and shooter like Chet Holmgren or Victor Wembanyama. Otherwise they may get limited to situational usage due to lack of floor spacing provided.

Being a stretch 4 used to be a unique feature when most teams played two non-shooting bigs. Now it is a pre-requisite to get on the floor.

This makes the NBA collectively less athletic and less dynamic, because there is no role for these players who were good a decade ago. Now they are all getting displaced by whatever guy can stand in the corner and make 3’s while being vaguely passable otherwise.

This reduces the overall level of talent in the game, as one dimensional players get rewarded for being blessed with the disproportionately valuable dimension of shooting in modern basketball.

Everything is More Random

Shooting is a frustrating aspect to be the most valuable aspect in basketball, since it is also the most random and unpredictable.

For prospects, it is the least stable trait to predict in the longterm. Kawhi Leonard shot 25% 3P in two NCAA seasons at San Diego State, and has been an elite NBA shooter making 39.2% career 3P. You never see guys go from mediocre athletes or rebounders or defensive players in college to elite in the NBA, but with shooting it happens.

Predicting an NBA career for a teenager is already challenging enough with so much long term randomness in player development, but with the increased value on shooting it is more random than ever.

It also is massively unstable from game to game. Last year the Heat became the first team to ever make the NBA finals after getting net outscored by opponents in the regular season.

Miami’s run can largely be reduced to them shooting 34.4% 3P in the regular season, and then 45% vs Milwaukee and 43.4% vs Boston. This is in spite of their best regular season shooter Tyler Herro being out for almost the entirety of the playoffs.

Conversely, the Celtics went from 37.7% 3P in regular season to 30.3% vs Miami, and lost in 7 games. Make no mistake about it— the Celtics were the better team and played better in the series, but the Heat won on sheer randomness.

This may be more of a feature than a bug to some people, as many love a good Cinderella run. The NBA playoffs is historically scant on playoff upsets compared to other sports, so maybe the randomness can be seen as a positive.

But this left us with one of the least interesting finals matchups in NBA history, as Miami simply did not belong and was not competitive with Denver outside of game 2 where they shot 17/35 from 3.

Either Boston or Milwaukee vs Denver would have likely been a great finals, and we were robbed of that because Miami happened to have their best shooting luck in those series on top of good injury luck with Giannis getting hurt.

What is the Solution?

The funniest resolution to fixing this would be to eliminate the 3 point arc altogether, which would be an interesting experiment at least for a short while. But ultimately this is likely too extreme, as it may make the game too sloppy and unskilled, as there is nothing wrong the concept of more points for longer shots.

Making the arc deeper is another possible solution, but the overall effect would be unclear. It would require widening the court to make the corner 3 deeper which could work out well, but is a significant change to the game. Players who are dangerous shooters from a deeper arc will be more rare, but also possibly even more valuable since the floor will be even more spaced than before. This could be an OK solution, but it may not be great if it creates a rift between the teams that are able to acquire elite shooting vs the teams that cannot.

The simple and easiest solution is to fix the ratio of 3 to 2. It is way too high. This makes a 33.3% 3P similar value to 50% 2P in terms of eFG%, and even more valuable in terms of points/possession because of the additional offensive rebounding opportunities that come with a 66.7% miss compared to 50%.

20 years ago in 2003-04, the average team shot 46% 2P and 34.7% 3P, which highlights how absurd the 1.5x ratio is when spacing is not optimized. A well below average 3 point attempt was still worth more than an average 2 point attempt, and an average attempt was massively overpowered.

The simple and obvious solution is to increase the value of 2s and 3s to 3s and 4s, so the ratio of 1.33x to 1 is much more reasonable. This makes a 50% 3P equal to a 37.5% 4P in eFG terms, and 50% 3P equal to ~36% 4P in pts/possession depending on oreb rate and pts/possession after oreb.

That way elite shooting still gets rewarded, but being a slightly below average shooter isn’t a huge advantage over being a non-shooter like it in the current NBA. It would be a viable strategy to ignore a 34% 4P shooter, which makes it a viable strategy to play non shooters, which makes a number of different player types and team strategies viable, which makes the NBA dynamic and interesting again.

For free throws you can simply make 1 free throw worth the points equal to shot attempted until last two minutes of the game where players take individual throws. Or make the final free throw worth 2 points if you insist on keeping current free throw standards.

And for historical records you can just convert 3s to 2s and 4s to 3s since teams will play similar to most of NBA history when the 3 point arc was massively underutilized.

Conclusion

It is ironic that optimizing shot quality has reduced the quality of the NBA product. But there is a reason why teams shied away from playing this way for so long— because it is counterintuitive that loading up on shooters and playing the 3 point lottery is the optimal basketball strategy. And because it is more random, less dynamic, and relatively boring to watch.

People inherently did not want the 3 point arc to re-shape the game like this. The goal was to add excitement of a more valuable shot and an extra dimension to the game. But because nobody paused and did basic arithmetic when implementing the 3 point arc, the game is now held captive by the failed math of boomers.

Fortunately this can easily be fixed by simply adjusting 2s and 3s to 3s and 4s and the game will be saved. But nobody is even talking about this as a possibility when it is the painfully obvious thing to do.

Sure, it may slightly rug some teams who are investing heavily in shooting, but shooting will still be valuable. Just give a few years grace period for everybody to prepare and then we can enjoy a golden era of NBA basketball where shooting is valued correctly and teams can play different styles without being massively suboptimal.