Two mad scientists arguing with each other about how to ruin basketball more. No one asked for positionless ball but we got it anyway. No one voted for soccer style flopping but we got it anyway. No one demanded that the most basic rules about screens, traveling and carrying be comically relaxed.
We know what the American sporting public enjoys viewing the most and the answer is football, a brutal game in which every down is filled with athletic violence. The NBA has gone the other way and engineered an increasingly frictionless game. You can't gimmick your way out of that.
Seth Partnow’s gratuitous dig at Trump is grating. Sure, the guy who wrote The Midrange Theory has informed views on the NBA’s three-point line. But did he ever think twice about tariffs and the economy before Trump was elected? We don’t see many tariff experts opining on NBA rules. His post reminds me why I stopped reading The Athletic.
I think most of the discourse on the NBA is driven by people getting older and having less time to watch sports ( the 30s to 40s cohort is loud on the NBA). People naturally look for attribution for their decline in interest. So they observe the biggest change since the glory days (of whenever they were 12-16 years old). This is the change in shot distribution. So they attribute it to that. But changing it back is not going to give them more time or make them a kid again.
Even just reading the comments here, these people are not going to start watching Clippers-Rockets games if the # of 3s is reduced by 20%.
We all watch less sports as we get older (except Ethan who is about to start covering girls HS basketball to uneath the next great scorer with heterodox social opinions). Everyone everywhere is watching less sports (except football). Changing aspects of game play to more closely resemble the formative years of the 35--45 year old audience is not going to do anything.
Partnow is a hack and his derogatory take on the provable Laffer Curve is ridiculous
Ethan is dead on - this was the same hue and cry about the pitch clock in MLB and the results have been fantastic and restorative - it took the game back to where it was best
Stripping away years of unintended bad consequences from changes not consistent with the platonic ideal of the game is like stripping away coats of bad paint jobs to reveal glorious hardwood underneath m
Most of the serious critique of the laffer curve isn’t that it’s real, it’s that the negative effect on labor supply kicks in at 70% taxation (cf Stuart 1981 in JPE: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/261018) a tax level the United States has never even approached (though I think for that article the tax rate in Sweden was 80% )
Laffer Curve is primarily about maximizing tax revenue. Wikipedia cites the same dated academic research to say 70% could be the right number but fortunately we have real world examples that show it’s somewhere between the high 20s and mid 30s.
A quick scan of some recent HoS articles – "I Like Kirk Goldsberry's Proposal to Ban the Corner 3", "I Also Like Bad College Basketball", "Just Stop Fixing the NBA All-Star Game" - suggest a bit of a theme.
The theme is that we watch sports because we perceive the result as being meaningful. *Meaning* is the key to all of this. How do we derive meaning? Lots of ways. Tribalism. Stakes. The sense that we are watching a true contest. Perceived nobility of the contestants. Community - a sort of meaning via mimesis, where I think something is important because everybody else thinks it is important. Good vs Evil.
Scoring numbers become meaningless if the contest between defence and offence isn't fair. The ASG isn't meaningful because it's not a contest at all. Bad college basketball becomes meaningful if your school is in it, or everyone else is watching.
Aesthetics are purely secondary. To this New Zealander's eyes, the NFL isn't really much of a spectacle, not inherently. But it ticks a lot of those boxes. My theory is that the secret sauce is in all games being played on a Sunday. Does having the whole neighbourhood or family get together to watch a game makes fandom pro-social (and wife-approved) in a way that watching NBA League Pass on your phone doesn't?
I kinda like the idea of extending the 3-second violation to the corners. I haven't heard all of the trickle down effects, but that could be an interesting way of adding more movement without changing the geometry of the court.
I have also heard this idea and thought it was interesting, but I think there is a pretty strong counter argument: moving the line puts a new burden on the players, while three in the corner puts a new burden on the officials. The officials already have a long list of subjective calls to make (often struggling to get it right). I'll echo Ethan's remark that predicting the consequences of a rule change is difficult, but I'm not sure loading another decision on the refs will improve the game.
This seems like the kind of thing you try out in Summer League and then assess the impact. I'm actually not against that. But definitely pilot it first in the lowest stakes environment!!
The issue w so many 3s isn't corner 3s. It's the incentives. 3 is worth way more than 2, and until that changes, the 3s will continue flying. Ideally, a 3 would be worth 2.5 rather than 3, but obviously there will never be fractions/decimals in scoring. The best idea I've heard is to change scoring from 2s and 3s to 3s and 4s. It's not ideal, and it would change all scoring records, 50 pt games, etc. But as long as a 3 is worth 1.5 times more than 2, it's going to be the dominant shot. If it's 1.25 or 1.33 more than 2, there'll be a better balance and better shot distribution.
All of this is secondary to the NBA's issue of too many regular season games and all the problems that stem from this.
This. There's some very simple rules the NBA should make before they look into some of these more drastic changes. Olympic basketball was 100% more fun to watch because Fiba rules are better. In addition to what you said, get rid of live ball timeouts and for the life of me, stop reviewing plays.
This is a symptom as well as a cause but the most aggravating thing I see is all these big men hoisting away. When they make 3s it feels unfair and when they miss it feels like they're being lazy. Poor Andrew Bynum was born 15 years too early.
came here to post this. Ethan is usually able to avoid stuff like this, but that specific tweet had zero mention of league value and just mentioned that offense would suffer.
Two mad scientists arguing with each other about how to ruin basketball more. No one asked for positionless ball but we got it anyway. No one voted for soccer style flopping but we got it anyway. No one demanded that the most basic rules about screens, traveling and carrying be comically relaxed.
We know what the American sporting public enjoys viewing the most and the answer is football, a brutal game in which every down is filled with athletic violence. The NBA has gone the other way and engineered an increasingly frictionless game. You can't gimmick your way out of that.
I would enjoy a pod with all your NBA takes. Ethan should consider it.
Appreciate you
There is no sports writer who better exemplifies the combination of stupidity and undeserved confidence than Partnow
What makes Partnow stupid? Think he's a pretty sharp guy based on reading his Ringer stuff and hearing him on Dunc'd On and the Athletic occasionally.
Seth Partnow’s gratuitous dig at Trump is grating. Sure, the guy who wrote The Midrange Theory has informed views on the NBA’s three-point line. But did he ever think twice about tariffs and the economy before Trump was elected? We don’t see many tariff experts opining on NBA rules. His post reminds me why I stopped reading The Athletic.
I think most of the discourse on the NBA is driven by people getting older and having less time to watch sports ( the 30s to 40s cohort is loud on the NBA). People naturally look for attribution for their decline in interest. So they observe the biggest change since the glory days (of whenever they were 12-16 years old). This is the change in shot distribution. So they attribute it to that. But changing it back is not going to give them more time or make them a kid again.
Even just reading the comments here, these people are not going to start watching Clippers-Rockets games if the # of 3s is reduced by 20%.
We all watch less sports as we get older (except Ethan who is about to start covering girls HS basketball to uneath the next great scorer with heterodox social opinions). Everyone everywhere is watching less sports (except football). Changing aspects of game play to more closely resemble the formative years of the 35--45 year old audience is not going to do anything.
if they have less time to watch sports why are they watching more football?
Partnow is a hack and his derogatory take on the provable Laffer Curve is ridiculous
Ethan is dead on - this was the same hue and cry about the pitch clock in MLB and the results have been fantastic and restorative - it took the game back to where it was best
Stripping away years of unintended bad consequences from changes not consistent with the platonic ideal of the game is like stripping away coats of bad paint jobs to reveal glorious hardwood underneath m
Was gonna bring this up too... but seemed petty.
True or not, the Laffer curve ain't stupid or obviously false.
Most of the serious critique of the laffer curve isn’t that it’s real, it’s that the negative effect on labor supply kicks in at 70% taxation (cf Stuart 1981 in JPE: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/261018) a tax level the United States has never even approached (though I think for that article the tax rate in Sweden was 80% )
Laffer Curve is primarily about maximizing tax revenue. Wikipedia cites the same dated academic research to say 70% could be the right number but fortunately we have real world examples that show it’s somewhere between the high 20s and mid 30s.
A quick scan of some recent HoS articles – "I Like Kirk Goldsberry's Proposal to Ban the Corner 3", "I Also Like Bad College Basketball", "Just Stop Fixing the NBA All-Star Game" - suggest a bit of a theme.
The theme is that we watch sports because we perceive the result as being meaningful. *Meaning* is the key to all of this. How do we derive meaning? Lots of ways. Tribalism. Stakes. The sense that we are watching a true contest. Perceived nobility of the contestants. Community - a sort of meaning via mimesis, where I think something is important because everybody else thinks it is important. Good vs Evil.
Scoring numbers become meaningless if the contest between defence and offence isn't fair. The ASG isn't meaningful because it's not a contest at all. Bad college basketball becomes meaningful if your school is in it, or everyone else is watching.
Aesthetics are purely secondary. To this New Zealander's eyes, the NFL isn't really much of a spectacle, not inherently. But it ticks a lot of those boxes. My theory is that the secret sauce is in all games being played on a Sunday. Does having the whole neighbourhood or family get together to watch a game makes fandom pro-social (and wife-approved) in a way that watching NBA League Pass on your phone doesn't?
Doesn’t go far enough, get rid of the 3-pt line all together.
I kinda like the idea of extending the 3-second violation to the corners. I haven't heard all of the trickle down effects, but that could be an interesting way of adding more movement without changing the geometry of the court.
I have also heard this idea and thought it was interesting, but I think there is a pretty strong counter argument: moving the line puts a new burden on the players, while three in the corner puts a new burden on the officials. The officials already have a long list of subjective calls to make (often struggling to get it right). I'll echo Ethan's remark that predicting the consequences of a rule change is difficult, but I'm not sure loading another decision on the refs will improve the game.
This seems like the kind of thing you try out in Summer League and then assess the impact. I'm actually not against that. But definitely pilot it first in the lowest stakes environment!!
The issue w so many 3s isn't corner 3s. It's the incentives. 3 is worth way more than 2, and until that changes, the 3s will continue flying. Ideally, a 3 would be worth 2.5 rather than 3, but obviously there will never be fractions/decimals in scoring. The best idea I've heard is to change scoring from 2s and 3s to 3s and 4s. It's not ideal, and it would change all scoring records, 50 pt games, etc. But as long as a 3 is worth 1.5 times more than 2, it's going to be the dominant shot. If it's 1.25 or 1.33 more than 2, there'll be a better balance and better shot distribution.
All of this is secondary to the NBA's issue of too many regular season games and all the problems that stem from this.
Test it in the g league
3's aren't good shots for most players. You are just getting MathBalled to death. Which no one wants
remove def 3 seconds - like fiba - forcing the defense to move away from the most valuable area of the floor is a gigantic advantage
i'd copy fiba's goaltending rules as well
This. There's some very simple rules the NBA should make before they look into some of these more drastic changes. Olympic basketball was 100% more fun to watch because Fiba rules are better. In addition to what you said, get rid of live ball timeouts and for the life of me, stop reviewing plays.
I like the compromise: a 3-second (or 5-second) rule on occupying the corner.
This is a symptom as well as a cause but the most aggravating thing I see is all these big men hoisting away. When they make 3s it feels unfair and when they miss it feels like they're being lazy. Poor Andrew Bynum was born 15 years too early.
Does anyone actually think this: "I just want to make the point that offensive efficiency isn’t a reflection of league value."???
I don't believe so. Seems like a strawman argument.
came here to post this. Ethan is usually able to avoid stuff like this, but that specific tweet had zero mention of league value and just mentioned that offense would suffer.