I Like Kirk Goldsberry's Proposal to Ban the Corner 3

A tariff beyond the arc?

I’m enjoying this NBA season quite a bit, mostly related to the narrative appeal of the Warriors’ “One Last Ride,” and a few other storylines out West. I don’t have some burning need to shake up the league at this exact moment, and yet, I retain the understanding that the sport is still bedeviled by a range of issues. “What’s wrong with the NBA?” is a well worn topic in which everyone’s pet theory is mostly correct. Basketball writer and former San Antonio Spurs employee Kirk Goldsberry has his own pet theory and he’s actually gone through some trouble in demonstrating a potential solution.

I’m into this. I’m not saying I’m completely sold on eliminating the arbitrarily shorter corner 3-point shot, but let me at least sleep on it. I see the appeal. Seth Partnow, also a basketball writer and also a former NBA team employee, strongly feels otherwise.

Seth could well be correct that this radical reform would go disastrously (who knows) but I disagree with his framing. Offensive efficiency isn’t akin to national GDP, the stock market or any other positive measure of economic health that can be reduced by tariffs. Without getting derailed into a conversation about whether those metrics are indeed the true reflection of the nation’s economy, I just want to make the point that offensive efficiency isn’t a reflection of league value. Basically, more scoring isn’t a virtue in of itself.

If it was, then the last five years of pro basketball would have been its best loved version. Instead, when NBA refs suddenly (and secretly) swallowed their whistles last season, the heightened defensive effectiveness was wildly popular with fans. People were sick of all the scoring. It felt cheap. If I must make my own economic analogy, scoring had been subject to a lot inflation. A successful offensive possession had been devalued, reducing the thrill of individual plays.

There’s nuance here. It’s still exciting when Nikola Jokic scores 60 points, or when Steph Curry hits 12 3-pointers, but broadly, the backdrop of this action became an overall problem over the years.

As I wrote back in 2023:

The NBA product is currently out of alignment with that platonic sense of what basketball should be. Too many 3s, too much running, not enough defensive resistance. The combination of altered rules and exploitation of loopholes has resulted in something the fans barely recognize.

What’s the platonic basketball ideal for scoring? We could argue about that, but the league’s tended to be popular when teams roughly average a bit over 100 points in the regular season. I’m calling this phenomenon the Law of Lawler’s Law.

Longtime Clippers announcer Ralph Lawler would excitedly note when a team reached 100 and claim “It’s the law,” that first to 100 wins. Of course, this wasn’t always true, but Lawler’s recognition of 100 offered a familiar reminder that we’re nearing our dramatic conclusion.

My Law of Lawler’s Law is that we want that reminder to happen in a game, but prefer it arrive late in the fourth quarter. With teams averaging roughly 114 points this season, the rule is getting invoked too often in the goddamned third quarter. Perhaps fans hate a 75-73 score, but that doesn’t mean they crave the other end of spectrum. A team scoring 140 is only fun if it happens rarely.

Like Goldsberry, I really do think the sport is in “something must be done” territory. Perhaps action isn’t needed immediately, but offensive optimization of the 3-point shot continues to outpace defensive resistance. Some of this is downstream of Adam Silver’s earlier effort to increase scoring. Some of it is just the natural result of nearly every sort of player obsessively practicing 3-pointers.

The Goldsberry idea is drastic, but it’s also an easily applied way to quickly and directly address the issue. You don’t need to force refs to interpret fouls differently. You don’t need to widen the court so the 3-point line is longer. You just need paint.

The hard part is delegated to all the teams. I’d be fascinated to see what this reform does to defensive strategy. Will certain corner 3-point specialists still hang out there, like fishermen stoically committed to trawling the reduced remnants of once abundant stocks? Does Steph Curry get more valuable when the average difficulty of a 3-pointer is heightened, or less valuable because the defense isn’t as scared of his activity around the baseline?

Coaches, and likely most players, do not want to find out. I’m reminded of Conquest’s rule, “Everyone is a conservative about what they know best.” When the NBA did away with illegal defense, legendary coaches Pat Riley and Rudy Tomjanovich fought hard to save it. They were wrong, in my opinion. It’s good that zone defense was made legal. I also understand how, if you’d come up in the NBA grinding and improbably rising through its ranks, taking the sorts of risks for ambition that Adrien Brody depicted in his Pat Riley portrayal…maybe you don’t want to upend your decades of hard fought knowledge with some novel gambit.

It’s easy to dismissively say, “People hate change,” when faced with reflexive rejection of a thoughtful reform. That’s not the most generous interpretation of why people sometimes hate change, though. That hatred can be rooted in love. If you’ve a deep attachment to the NBA, you’re perhaps wary of the sport getting dramatically altered.

I get that, but would counter that the sport has been getting dramatically altered, progressively towards a point far from its ideal form. One paradox of change is that it’s often needed for preservation. If you don’t make necessary adjustments in response to modern conditions, you can lose the thread of what connects you to the past. I’m not sure if wiping away the short corner would create a product that better reminds fans of what life was like before Moreyball took over the sport. I do know that sports don’t save themselves.