I awakened this morning to a text read from a sports-loving friend of mine who had turned of Monday night's Knicks Celtics game three minutes into it. "It's nothing but put up a three-point shot. No ball movement, everyone's standing around, no flow." His closing remark was that he was choosing between the hockey playoffs and going to bed. Given that scenario, I choose bed, but that's just me.
His are typical complaints about NBA basketball these days. The league seems to have reached a critical mass in terms of criticism about every game looking the same because of too damn many three-point shots.
In one of the many examples I can offer, let's return to game one of the Boston/New York series, when the Celtics attempted 60 three-point shots and missed 45 of them. Boston lost that game, and some would say that started them on the road to the perilous position in which they now find themselves; down 3-1 and apparently without the services of their best player, Jayson Tatum, who, in karmic payment to the gods for him jacking up too many three-point shots, was injured during the end of last night's game. And even in last night's loss, by the way, the Celtics took 48 three-pointers.
Now, I apologize if this three-point shot essay is a little too sportsy for the non sports fan, but it does have a metaphorical connection to real life. The increasing dependence on pro basketball teams on the long shot has been said to mirror modern life — take the easy way out. Just come down and cast out a bomb, don't bother doing the hard work to move around and set screens and get yourself closer to the basket. Turn your back on the tried and true that has worked for years.
But I find that nonsensical. The dependence — the overdependence — on three-point shots is not a failure of character or moral fiber. It is a trend that caught on by an overreliance on analytics and a tendency to mirror what is perceived as effective, because when the three-point shot first started to come into vogue a decade ago, it was effective. The Golden State Warriors won championships in 2015, '17, and '18, and again in 2022, by relying heavily on Steph Curry's three-point mastery. Few ever said that Curry takes too many three-point shots, and his long-range artistry is a thing of beauty; something that has been studied by physicists at Berkley.
Even last season, the two teams that took the most three-point shots ended up in the NBA Finals — the Dallas Mavericks and those same Celtics. And need we even mention Caitlin Clark, whose long-range bombing quite literally turned women's basketball into must-watch television?
Now, there is an ironic dimension to this. When I first started watching basketball seriously in the late '50s, the complaints centered on players shooting too close to the basket. We were worried about big giants overtaking the game, and thus the dunk shot was banned for a decade. When I started covering basketball for Sports Illustrated in the 1980s, coaches were deathly afraid of the three-point shot.
The most three-point shots Larry Bird ever took in one season was 237. Steph Curry takes 800. There were many, many times when Bird should've taken three-pointers. The math bears it out.
But, yes, I do agree that three-pointers have taken over the game to a too-large extent. Or, rather, missed three-pointers have taken over the game. The three-point shot is here to stay, but if we have a team come along that wins championships by playing another way, the league will follow along. In a league that follows analytics slavishly, the best analytic still begins with W — win.
