The New 3-Point Line is a Bust

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When I finally tuned in there were less than ten minutes to play. 

9:35 to be exact. 

Kentucky’s Johnny Juzang had just knocked in a 3-pointer to increase the Wildcat’s meager lead to eight, 58-50. Twenty-four seconds later, Texas Tech missed a jumper, foreshadowing the utterly dreadful nine minutes of basketball that were about to unfold. 

Eventually, Kentucky pulled out a 76-74 victory in overtime but I never got that far. The final minutes of regulation play were enough for me. In all, 4 field goals, 10 turnovers, 10 fouls.

On average, over the course of nearly ten minutes of play, two top-20 teams, representing premier D-1 programs with access to the best recruits in the country, collectively generated one basket every two minutes and forty seconds of play. Yikes!

Ten seconds after a timeout at the 1:11 mark, the Wildcat’s Tyrese Maxey missed a quick jumper and was promptly criticized by ESPN’s Jimmy Dykes. “Not a good shot… you gotta run some offense.”

“Jimmy,” I shouted at the screen, “I’ve watched Kentucky ‘run offense’ for the last nine minutes and nothing good has happened.” 

When your offense produces one basket on seven shot attempts during the final quarter of play – that’s roughly a field goal attempt every 1 minute and 43 seconds – there’s not much benefit to “running some offense.” You might as well jack it up and hope that by increasing your attempts something eventually goes in. 

For their part, Texas Tech didn’t fare much better. During those final 9:35 they went 3 for 12 from the field, only catching Kentucky as regulation expired on the back of seven free throws. 

Look, I get it. 

Every team has an off night or stretches in a game when the wheels come off. And lots of time, the bad play becomes infectious, one team dragging its opponent into the mire. Last Saturday’s game between 15th ranked Kentucky and 18th ranked Texas Tech is neither indicative of their true prowess or representative of the state of college basketball this season… but it’s not far off, either.  

We began this season with coaches, commentators, and fans all asking the same question: how will college basketball’s new 3-point line affect the game? 

Will extending the line to the international distance of 22 feet, 1¾ inches curb the game’s growing emphasis on the 3-pointer, leading to greater variety in offensive style and strategy as the NCAA intends? Will shooting percentages at the longer distance remain sufficient to pull defenders even farther from the basket, opening the floor for more dribble drives and offensive maneuvers inside the arc? Will players who lack long-range proficiency rediscover the value of the post up and short range jumpers? 

With two-thirds of the season behind us we can reach some tentative conclusions.

Continue reading…

It’s All Relative

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In the run-up to this season’s Final Four we were greeted by two interesting but unsurprising commentaries. Unsurprising because they merely confirmed what we already knew: that the number of 3-point attempts in college basketball continues to surge, and correspondingly, the number of dunks has followed suit. 

In his April 8th Sports Illustrated piece, citing data compiled by Ken Pomeroy, Andy Staples recounted the record number of treys attempted in the tournament. Back in 2014 and ‘15 the percent of three-point field goal attempts per tournament game hovered around 32% but rose to 35% in 2016, then cleared 38% last season. Through the first 64 games of this year’s tournament, Pomeroy found that the average percent of three-point attempts had grown to nearly 41%.

Hoop Vision’s Jordan Sperber chimed in with a nifty chart, illustrating the trend over a ten-year period.

And what does the dramatic uptick in three-point attempts have to do with the increasing number of dunks generated in this year’s tourney?

Josh Plano’s March 28, 2019 piece at FiveThirtyEight.com revealed that six of this year’s Sweet 16 entries had a dunk share, or percent of 2-point attempts, exceeding 10%. Four years ago, only one did. “This is less about a few dunk-crazed teams and more a reflection of the nationwide trend in college basketball,” reported Plano. On the eve of the Final Four, the season had produced 19,550 dunks, about 2,000 more than just five years ago.  

And the reasons?

“We’re seeing more dunks,” ESPN analyst Jay Bilas told The New York Times, “because there are more spectacular athletes out there.” More significantly, though, Bilas cited the symbiotic relationship between 3-pointers and dunks. 

The rise of the three as a strategic weapon has created an either-or game: you shoot the three or drive to the rim for a high percentage layup or dunk. You avoid all other lower percentage 2-point attempts. Throw in the long-range accuracy of a Carson Edwards or Kyle Guy and the crazy athleticism of players like Zion Williamson and Ja Morant, and you end up with lots of threes and dunks. 

Again, interesting but not really surprising. 

While the three-pointer has greatly influenced offensive schemes and strategy, I sometimes wonder if the media echo chamber has overly dramatized its importance, imbuing it with near magical qualities when its actual benefits are, in many ways, quite relative.

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The Basket is True North

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When I launched better than a layup in 2014, I outlined ten laws or principles that undergird the game and define its nature. Since then, I’ve presented detailed essays on the first two.

Time Trumps Territory is appropriately basketball’s first law for it is the cornerstone upon which the remaining laws are built. We learned that basketball is fundamentally a game governed by time, not by the space in which it takes place. We play within the dimensions of the court and are constrained by its boundaries, but we don’t capture territory. Instead, we pass through it and must assault the basket according to timelines established by various clocks: the game clock, the shot clock, and the various “countdowns” employed by the officials to govern different situations of play – inbounding the ball, crossing the half court line, etc. Additionally, we must contend with other forms of time that are not governed by an actual clock: tempo or pace, reaction time or long it takes for one player to react to the movement another player, and rhythm or how well the moving parts of the game are “timed” or in sync with one another.

There are no static lines or fronts in basketball. It’s not a stop-start-stop game during which the offense and defense align across from one another, snap the ball to initiate play, then, do it all over again in a contest to seize territory. Instead, the action is continuous and fluid, the teams seesawing back and forth between offense and defense, the position of the players constantly shifting in relationship to the ball, the basket, and the movement of one another.

And, it is in the midst of that continuous and fluid action that we discovered basketball’s second law, Space Shapes Time. One’s ever-shifting position on the floor in relationship to the ball, the basket, and the other players shapes time, either shrinking or stretching it. Identifying and reacting properly to the angular and spatial relationships between these elements minimizes the disadvantages of the slower players and maximizes the opportunities of the quicker ones. Spacing between players creates avenues to the basket or chokes them off.

In a game of time, characterized by ever changing spatial relationships, coaches and players need a set of navigation tools to help them recognize and make choices quickly. What are the principles by which you read or “see” the game and its myriad of choices? How does one plot the game’s “latitudes and longitudes” accurately? How does one develop “court sense”?

Understanding basketball’s third law – The Basket is True North – provides the navigation tools needed to answer these questions.

Click here to read Basketball’s Third Law

Digging Deeper

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At the tail end of last season, Jordan Sperber, analytics guru, blogger, and video coordinator for the New Mexico State University men’s basketball team, penned an insightful reflection on the concept of “offensive balance.”

Rather than retreating to conventional wisdom on the subject – the idealized notion that balanced scoring where everyone shares the ball and no one player dominates is inherently “better basketball” – Sperber dug deeper, revealing that it’s a bit more complicated than what the typical fan may imagine.

Using Loyola Chicago’s inspiring Final Four run as his starting point, Sperber constructed a statistical baseline, charting last season’s the top five scorers for every team in the country and developing a matrix to separate balanced squads from the unbalanced. Continue reading…

Hey, baby, it’s better than a lay up!

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Thanks, Dickie V!

While Midnight Madness has already come and gone on many college campuses, today– October 15th– is the traditional start of college basketball and time for me to return to the blogosphere.

Here’s a short list of the topics I’d like to cover in the months ahead. Several appeared on my “to do list” a while back, but I never got around to them; others are additions. In all cases, I hope you’ll find them representative of the tag line for this site, “challenging basketball’s conventional wisdom.” Continue reading…