Some Ramblings about NBA’s 3-Point Rate

Note: I don’t think 3-point line should be moved yet. But it will happen at some point no matter what. 10–15 years out at the latest. Probably. Maybe.

As of last night, out of 15,740 field goal attempts taken in the NBA, 4701 have been three-pointers.

That’s 29.9 percent of all field goals.

Up from 28.5, 26.8, 25.9 and 24.3 percent of field goals the previous four years.

Once the NBA hits 30 percent and someone who’s more famous than me points it out, at some point we might have a huge freak out conversation here (I’m stealing this worry from @dangercart, whom you may wish to follow on Twitter).

In some European competition, with a three-point line that’s slightly closer, teams are edging towards 40 percent rates — and still shooting at a high enough efficiency where they want to shoot more.

I’m not super panicky here because of some old school reasons, though I’m worried about homogeneity of the NBA. When people say the NBA goes in cycles and at some point teams will emphasis something else than corner 3’s and all that good stuff, that’s just dumb.

No the NBA isn’t going to start suddenly doing stuff that is demonstrably a less effective way of playing basketball.

It’s one of those dumb Internet quote things that sounds smart but doesn’t have a basis in reality and is completely bereft of content.

“It’s not how many breaths you take, but how many moments take your breath away”.

I’m particularly unhappy with some of the ideas to fix the perceived three-point problem.

Four-point line?

No.

Moving the three-point line further?

Yeah, maybe. But if we imagine scenarios where we widen the court, that doesn’t help the mid-range at all, but probably just moves three-point attempts towards the rim.

Mid-range shots still aren’t good, and by widening the court the driving lanes are bigger so it’s easier to get to the rim. Also, the distance for defenders to help and recover would get larger so I’d imagine people would basically stop playing help defense and just switch or contain everything. This may actually screw over traditional big men and maybe make the game boring.

The point here isn’t that I don’t think the three-point line should be moved further, but that moving the corner three and widening the court would have consequences that are hard to predict, and it’s possible teams would adapt in a way that isn’t fun basketball.

From a game theory standpoint, we sort of need to figure out what we care about, what we want to watch and what skills to reward.

A three-point line has typically been a measure of rewarding success in terms of how far a player can shoot from. But if that line becomes too easy it loses its meaning since everyone can do that.

One idea I think could be considered (but would never be implemented because it’s rather unintuitive) is eliminating rewarding jump shots based on distance, and do the rewarding just by the idea of the jump shot. Every shot outside of like 3 feet is basically the same anyways, and then the efficiency starts to go down the further out you go (unless you have a three-point line for example).

So one solution you could build is having the three-point line very close to the basket, say at 8ft or something. I haven’t thought this out fully but I’d like to know why it would be a bad idea.

It would seem that this model would basically make the Goldberry graph above a straight line that slowly goes down as we start hitting 20+ feet in distance.

In this universe of basketball, it’s possible maximum emphasis would be placed on versatility, since just scoring from wherever is the goal.

DeRozan would be a king.

Spacing does matter here, since driving lanes are still needed and efficiency would still be higher right at the basket.

In a hybrid model, the three-point line could be brought really close with an additional 4-point line further from the basket (although what the weights in terms of 2–3–4 points would be I’m not sure).

IN CLOSING

Do I think the three-point line should be at 8-feet? In all likelihood no.

But I think the idea here was that when people start talking about the moving the three-point line, the discussion has to go further than “let’s just pull the three-point line back and it will be more difficult to make threes”.

And I think that has value.

The NBA has to be thinking about this stuff right now, and I think superb care should be put into any potential changes (and some point they are coming, in 30 years when 72.4% of the league shoots like Curry at the latest).

It’s hard to go in one direction and then pivot later again.

What do we want to reward?

How will teams and players react to the rewards?

What does it do to player value now?