SALT LAKE CITY — Nobody can dispute that it pays to shoot 3-point shots in the NBA. Do the math: They’re worth 50 percent more points than regular field goals.
Three of the four teams that qualified for the conference championships — Rockets, Cavaliers, Celtics — ranked 1-2-3 in 3-point attempts this season; the fourth team, the Warriors, was sixth.
If you want to win, you must shoot threes.
But it’s taken over the game. It’s ruining basketball. It’s become too much of what was once a good thing and an exciting play.
Exhibit A: Monday’s Western Conference Finals, in which the Rockets and Warriors shot a combined 83 3-point shots. That’s bad enough, but the results were worse. They made only 23 of them. The Rockets alone made just 7 of 44 3-point shots, or 15.9 percent. During one stretch they whiffed on 27 straight. Pick anyone out of the 7.6 billion people on the planet and any one of them could have done just as well as the Rockets.
This is the way of the basketball world. Thirty-four percent — more than one-third — of all shots taken during the 2017-18 season were from beyond the 3-point line — an average of 58 3-point attempts per game. Ten years ago, it was 22 percent (36 shots per game); 20 years ago it was 17 percent (26 shots per); 30 years ago, 7 percent (13 shots per).
For the first five seasons after the 3-point shot was introduced to the NBA in 1979, there was an average of fewer than five 3-point attempts per game. It was 16 years before it reached double digits. By the end of next season it will be more than 60 per game.
Almost half — 48 percent — of the Rockets’ shots this season were 3-point attempts. The Cavs and Celtics were just under 40 percent.
Contrary to what most might think, players are no better at shooting the 3-point shot than they were 25 years ago; they’re simply shooting more of them. They made 36 percent of their 3-point shots during the 1994-95 season; they made 36 percent this season. Meanwhile, field-goal attempts and scoring have declined since the beginning of the 3-ball era.
“I still hate it,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich told CBS Sports in 2015. “I’ll never embrace it. I don’t think it’s basketball. I think it’s kind of like a circus sort of thing. Why don’t we have a 5-point shot? A 7-point shot? You know, where does it stop … ?”
The 3-ball has altered the game profoundly. When players are grabbing offensive rebounds and running away from the basket so they can chuck up another three, something is wrong. The mid-range jumper is dead. It’s threes, frees (free throws) and layups.
Instead of a team game, we get isolation basketball — players standing around the 3-point arc while one player shoots a three or drives to the basket for a layup that is barely contested. There’s no inside presence, no defense, no rebounds — offensive rebounds have declined steadily since the introduction of the trey, so there are fewer second shots.
There is little variety in the style of play. It’s, well, boring. If every third batter hit a home run in the Major Leagues, the homer would grow stale too. If the NFL went almost strictly to the pass game, it would get old, too (wait, the NFL has already done that).
James Naismith wouldn’t even recognize today’s game.
“I am no fan of the three,” Bob Ryan, the widely respected long-time Boston Globe columnist, wrote in 2016. "I think it’s the worst rule development of my lifetime. I think we have gone completely 3-point crazy. Believe me, I know how heretical this is. But I believe the game has changed irrevocably because of the three, and not for the better.
"People argue that it allows comebacks that never would have taken place, absent the three. Well, yeah, so what? To me, it’s all artificial. I think the three distorts the game on every level.”
Popovich told USA Today in 2014, “To me it’s not basketball, but you got to use it. If you don’t use it, you’re in big trouble. But you sort of feel like it’s cheating.”
The 3-point shot is here to stay, and, with a few tweaks that is a good thing. No one wants to return to the days where the ball is throw into the post, where two lugs lean on each other like sumo wrestlers. There was nothing exciting about watching players play with their backs to the basket whose only skill was being tall.
But why not move the 3-point line back? Force teams to use the shot more judiciously. For that matter, widen and lengthen the court — players have gotten so big that they’ve outgrown it. Something needs to change.