The Tic-Tac-Toeization of the NBA

How can basketball be saved?

The NBA All-Star Weekend has evolved into a sort of African-American Academy Awards with various fun events to justify all the partying. But the actual All-Star Game itself has gotten absurd due to the three-point revolution. Last year, the Eastern Conference defeated the Western Conference 211-186.

The NBA still makes plenty of money, but many fans and some players are increasingly finding the modern computer-analyzed game of basketball boring. You see, a number of years ago, a team of MIT data nerds crunched millions of numbers and came up with a revolutionary conclusion: a basket made from three-point range (23’9” diminishing to 22’0” inches in the corners) was worth 50% more than a basket from two-point range!

Armed with this revolutionary insight, only a few decades after the NBA adopted the three-point line, players finally started to shoot a lot more three-pointers and a lot fewer long two-point jump shots. Scoring went up and the best three-point shooter, Steph Curry, won four NBA titles.

This change was fun for awhile, the way that new offenses in football are fun until the defenses finally figure them out. But lately, this strategy of only shooting short 2s or long 3s looks less like a fun fad doomed to be replaced by some other innovation, and instead more like the ultimate forever solution to the game of basketball. From ESPN:

"I think as a league now, we look so deep into analytics, and you hear people saying out loud, we want a 3 or a layup. Don't be shooting too many midrange jumpers," Milwaukee guard Damian Lillard said Saturday. "You hear that, and I think it just kind of takes away the originality of the game, I would say. It's meant to be played at three levels. It's meant to be played a certain way.

"But it's a copycat league that we play in, and you can't have everybody playing one way, a successful way and you playing a different way. You've got to get in line with what's working to win, and right now that's what it is."

I’m reminded of how when I was eleven I took a summer school course in fun math, the most memorable part being a segment revealing the secret of how to never lose again at tic-tac-toe.

But that turned out to be not so fun.

How can the NBA keep basketball from becoming as boring as tic-tac-toe?

Paywall here.