General Managers and Coaches Think the NBA Changed Its Rules Midseason

Did Adam Silver make the call?

Here’s a January 31st quote from Joe Dumars, executive vice president and head of basketball operations of the National Basketball Association:

We’re going to see offensive eruptions with this kind of pace and the amount of 3s people shoot. But there’s no push here at the league office from me or anyone else that we want to see a certain score. I left that Boston-Denver game saying, ‘wow, great game.’ That’s what fans want. Fans want to leave a game or watch a game and at the end say, ‘that was incredible.’ The score is secondary to that. Fans just want to see great games.

On Friday night, eight of 16 teams failed to score over 100 points. Going into the All-Star break, the average points scored by a team was 115.7 (!). If that’s your in season norm, eight teams not exceeding 100 is quite the statistical anomaly. Or it would be, if a sudden scoring drop wasn’t part of a surprising recent trend, noticed and studied on Tom Haberstroh’s Substack, The Finder.

For now, people within the league (as opposed to the league office) regard Joe Dumars’ quotes as a classic admission by defense. Why? Because he said “there’s no push here at the league office from me or anyone else that we want to see a certain score,” before scoring plummeted. It’s like if the police didn’t even know a woman was missing and a guy goes, “Look, there’s no way I left a woman’s body in the woods, by the creek behind that farm! No way no how!”

Now that nearly everyone within the NBA believes Adam Silver’s league secretly changed its rules, midseason, due to public pressure, a lot of questions are left unanswered. The result is better, in my opinion, but the process appears subject to whim. Here’s what NBA people are asking behind the scenes.