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http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/10148890/the-reliance-3-pointer-whether-not-hurting-nba
Good article. As much as I like the 3 and how the Rockets implement it--- for basketball purists, I think JVG poses an interesting question.
Life Beyond the Arc
Is a heavy reliance on the 3-pointer the future of basketball? Plus, a few things to like and not like in the NBA this week.
By Zach Lowe on December 17, 2013
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Nevada Smith, coach of the most innovative pro basketball team you've never seen, says almost all the criticism he hears about his chosen strategy comes from older fans and scouts.
"It's mostly those old-school basketball guys," says Smith, coach of the D-League's Rio Grande Valley Vipers, who have attempted 46 3-pointers per game over their 9-1 start to this season. "They ask why we're doing this. They say it's not basketball."
Smith just laughs it off. The Vipers, Houston's D-League affiliate, average nearly 112 possessions per game — about a dozen more than any NBA team. All that sprinting and 3-point gunning has produced 115 points per 100 possessions, best in the D-League and a number that would blow away the entire NBA. "If we could take a 3 every time down the court," Smith says, "we probably would. There's going to be a game where we shoot 60. I'm telling you. And people are going to think we're crazy."
No NBA team is doing anything close to what Smith and the Vipes1 are pulling in the D-League. But it's not an accident that the Rockets' D-League team is playing this way. Daryl Morey, Houston's GM, controlled the search for the Vipers' coach, and Morey made it clear he liked the run-and-gun style Smith's teams played at Ithaca College and Keystone College, Smith says. "They wanted someone whose teams would play in the 130s," Smith says. "I don't think they'd ever hire someone who played in the 80s."
About 34.7 percent of the Rockets' field goal attempts this season have been 3-pointers, putting Houston just behind the record-setting 35.4 percent share the Knicks put up last season. Threes have accounted for 25.3 percent of all field goal attempts league-wide, above last year's all-time record share (24.3 percent) — and well above the 16 to 18 percent shares the league averaged for most of the mid-2000s. The average team jacks just shy of 21 3-pointers per game, another record rate, up from about 19.9 last season. The Vipers and Rockets might be outliers, but the larger basketball landscape is trending in their direction. All of which raises the question: Are we nearing the point at which the 3-point shot will become too dominant a part of basketball? Is all the long-range chucking good for the game?
As Smith notes, there has always been grumbling among old-school types about the 3-pointer — our dads and grandpas lamenting how those impudent youngsters only care about 3s and dunks, since those highlight plays get them on SportsCenter. But new, more nuanced concerns are starting to bubble up about the dominance of the 3-pointer. One strain centers on the consequences of the idea that math has basically solved basketball. Analytics has won out in shot selection. Just about everyone in the NBA, from scouts to head coaches to GMs, understands that long 2-point shots are bad and 3s are good. There is a strong correlation between 3-point attempts and team scoring efficiency, and an even more specific correlation between the number of short corner 3s a team attempts and its overall points per possession.
The debate on this stuff is over. Math has won, though team-by-team personnel obviously still plays a huge role in a team's shot-selection profile. The triumph of math has produced a fear of standardization among some NBA observers. "We shoot too many 3s now," says Jeff Van Gundy, perhaps the closest thing the NBA has to a populist ombudsman. "We are out of whack. The numbers people have analyzed the game correctly, but we are eliminating a certain segment of NBA players."
In this view, the game is tilting toward uniformity, in both team strategy and the types of players each team will seek to execute that strategy. "As analytics people take control of more teams, you'd think there will be more and more of this," says Rod Thorn, the NBA's president of basketball operations. "Obviously, there are more 3s being taken now. But we're still in the infancy of this, in terms of deciding whether it is good or bad for the game. Remember, we've had people pontificating that the 3-point arc is bad for the game for as long as the 3 has been around."
Larry Brown, one of the game's great teachers, was long an opponent of the 3, says Billy King, the current GM of the Nets who held the same position in Philly when Brown was the coach there. "In the 1990s, everyone was concerned that we didn't have enough scoring," King says. "But now, I guess, some people are asking: 'Is the 3 bad for basketball?'"2
As Thorn's comments indicate, the league is watching the 3-point feast with some combination of curiosity, excitement, and fear. David Stern surprised reporters after a Board of Governors meeting in April by revealing that league officials, owners, and the competition committee had been "monitoring" the uptick in 3-point attempts. The timing was strange. Scoring efficiency had stabilized after a trough in the early 2000s, thanks to the evolution in shot selection and the ban on hand-checking. The abolition of the old illegal-defense rules freed the best defensive gurus to create all kinds of imposing systems, and offenses had finally responded with increased complexity, drive-and-kick schemes, and fast-paced motion offenses that led to crowd-pleasing 3s. What was there to monitor?
League officials are less concerned with uniformity and the triumph of math than they are with stylistic appeal, per several team sources who have discussed the issue with the league or attended meetings in which officials brought up the topic. The league does not want NBA basketball to look like a pickup game, and it is concerned that games with, say, 70 combined 3-point attempts would take on the feel of a ragged, me-first open gym game. This is what Stern hinted at during that April press conference: "When our teams are hot, it's a thing of beauty. And when they're not, they can go 3-for-41," Stern said.
Aaron Affalo
JOSHUA C. CRUEY/ORLANDO SENTINEL/MCT
Thorn is right; it's too early to do anything but watch for potential issues. There is no real evidence that an increase in 3-pointers leads to unappealing play. It might lead to a quicker overall pace, but fans seem to like a fast-paced game. A Grantland analysis of the last three seasons showed basically no correlation between the number of 3-pointers a team attempts and its turnover rate — an indicator of sloppiness. The 3-happy Rockets are the most turnover-prone team in the league, but last year's chucktastic Knicks recorded one of the lowest turnover rates in league history. This season's Blazers and Clippers both launch a ton of 3s while ranking among the league's half-dozen best at turnover avoidance, per NBA.com.
Coaches and analytics experts agree that NBA teams are not close to reaching the optimum upper limit on 3-point attempts, with the success of the Vipers perhaps serving as evidence. In strict mathematical terms, not even Houston is taking enough 3s. We're still in a place where the huge majority of 3-pointers are the product of the kind of fun ball movement the league sought to unleash by banning the handcheck, scrapping the old illegal-defense rule, and replacing it with the defensive three-seconds rule in the early 2000s. Those tweaks combined to give ball handlers more freedom of movement on the perimeter, and to declutter the lane of both interior defenders and post-up players.
"I really like the direction the game is going," says Terry Stotts, the Blazers' head coach. "It's exciting. When a guy takes a 3, the home crowd is on its feet, and the opponents are like, 'Oh no!'"
Three-pointers also enable comebacks, a huge thing for a league concerned about game-to-game predictability. "The 3 gives you hope of keeping a game close," says Arron Afflalo. "If you're down 16 or 18, and you could only get back into it with 2s — man, that'd be tough."
Even below-average 3-point shooters understand the triple's appeal. "It's just analytics," says Evan Turner, a career 32 percent 3-point shooter who has historically preferred midrange shots — not exactly what his new analytically oriented GM, Sam Hinkie, wants for the Sixers. "Analytics is really popular, so you have to worry about all that smart stuff now. I was never a fan of the 3, but everybody loves it. Fans love it. You don't hear fans saying, 'Yo, another 3? Come on.'"
The league is also far from the kind of uniformity that Van Gundy and others fear, for reasons both real and perceived. Utah has only recently discovered that shots from behind that arc thingy are worth one more point than other shots. Chicago and Memphis are among the league's most 3-phobic teams for the second straight year, mostly because they lack multiple capable shooters. Not everyone is playing like the Rockets, or the Vipers, and most people aren't close to that model. Variety persists. "What I think you want," Thorn says, "is some people playing fast and shooting a lot of 3s, and some people playing slow."
Lots of folks are skeptical that Rocket-ball will ever be the norm. "I don't think there's the personnel to have a league full of Houston Rockets," Shane Battier says. "There's only one Dwight Howard walking this earth, and there are only a handful of 40 percent 3-point shooters."
There also remains widespread skepticism that a 3-happy team can win the title, even though that perception is mostly hogwash. Still, the alleged failures of last season's Knicks, and of the Stan Van Gundy Magic and Mike D'Antoni Suns (massively successful teams), have stuck in the NBA's hive mind — especially after last season, when slowpoke behemoths Indiana and Memphis advanced to the conference finals. The Rockets, after all, have won just one playoff series in Morey's tenure. "That style just hasn't proven as successful or dominant as it might seem," Afflalo says.
There is some evidence that teams that shoot lots of 3-pointers are more inconsistent game to game, since the 3-pointer is a lower-percentage shot. In other words: You'll have your 3-of-25 nights, and if you lack other means of scoring, you'll lose on those nights. But the evidence for such inconsistency is a bit wobbly, and it's not hard to find 3-happy teams that have succeeded at the highest levels. The Heat and Spurs, last year's finalists, ranked no. 6 and 7 in 3-point attempts, respectively, and the Hakeem Olajuwon championship teams in Houston held the record for largest 3-point attempt share until the Knicks broke it last season. It's only a matter of time until a 3-dominant team wins the whole thing again.
It's always worth thinking ahead, and there are ideas in the ether if the NBA's 3-point addiction reaches its saturation point. The easiest one: Move the line back, just as the gods of college hoops did when the 3-pointer took over the game at that level. "You want to find a place where it becomes a more difficult decision between shooting the 3 and going in for the long 2-pointer," Van Gundy says. "The beauty of this sport is diversity of play. And right now, the smart people have figured out exactly what shots to get on offense and take away on defense. And that hurts diversity of play."3
Van Gundy and several other folks I talked to also raised the possibility of either eliminating the corner 3-pointer, moving it back, or making it worth fewer than 3 points — all fanciful ideas, but ones the NBA's brain trust has at least thought about in vague terms. "Why can't we say the corner 3 is worth 2.5 points?" Van Gundy asks. "Why does everyone want round numbers? No one has been able to make a good case to me as to why the corner 3 is worth the same number of points as the above-the-break 3. I mean, should we have a 12-foot free throw line for Andre Drummond and DeAndre Jordan? It'd be foolish. But no more foolish than the corner 3."
Moving the corner 3 back would be impossible without widening the court, and that in turn would require making the wealthy "LOOK AT ME I'M SITTING COURTSIDE IN STUPID EXPENSIVE CLOTHES" crowd move back a precious few feet. The league could easily eliminate the corner 3 by extending the arc out of bounds, but that could have drastic implications for spacing. Having a guy stand in the corner opens the lane for the LeBrons and Kevin Durants of the league, since a defender has to pay at least token attention to that player. Ignore him and he'll get a wide-open shot worth three whole points! Cut the value to just two points, and defenders may well abandon those corner shooters in order to clog up the fun stuff.4
Eliminating the corner 3 is a drastic step, but it's not a ridiculous idea. There is something inherently fishy about giving out a length-based bonus point for a longer shot — and giving out the same bonus point for a shot nearly two feet shorter. But tweaking the corner 3 without cramping the offense's spacing is tricky. There is an entire group of NBA players who subsist on corner 3s but cannot shoot nearly as well on the longer above-the-break 3s. Eliminate their sweet spot, and they may not draw much defensive attention. "By the time they take away the corner 3," Battier says, "I'll be in the Caribbean somewhere drinking a mai tai."
Defenses are already getting wiser to the corner 3 anyway. Look at how Chandler Parsons handles weakside defense duty on this Damian Lillard–LaMarcus Aldridge pick-and-roll:
Both Parsons and James Harden end up on the weak side here, and since Harden is closer to Aldridge, it is Harden's job to close out on Aldridge's pick-and-pop jumper. Harden's rotation leaves Parsons standing between two shooters — Wesley Matthews above the break, and Nic Batum on the right corner.
Chandler Parsons
Parsons is smart, and you can see his mental calculator working. Matthews's scorching start notwithstanding, Parsons gets that a Batum corner 3 is worth more than a Matthews above-the-breaker. And so he only stunts softly at Matthews — enough to at least make Matthews think for a beat, but not enough to lose contact with Batum.
And that's the great unknown here: Will NBA defenses become so attuned to eliminating 3s as to cut this conversation short before it really becomes a loud debate? The stewards of the game think so. "It's not an issue at all," says Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavs. "The NBA is like any other market; people copy success. When you copy each other, the industry becomes more efficient. If everyone does the same thing, from a math perspective, no one has an advantage. What will be interesting is where it goes next as we all try to get an advantage."
In Thorn's words: "Defenses are changing."
Van Gundy's camp, for now, is a silent, worried minority. The league is just watching, content but thoughtful: How far will the Vipers and Rockets go? ---
"though time has passed, im still the future" (c) black thought
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