Commissioner Adam Silver said on Tuesday that the NBA is assessing how the three-pointer is making the style of the game more uniform as NBA ratings drop.
BOSTON — Joe Mazzulla didn’t need to defend his team’s part in the three-pointer’s rise around the league. It preceded his teams and weaponizing it made the Celtics a monster. They win almost every game now, in part due to their ability to generate as many quality threes as possible. Celtics fans can’t complain. All Mazzulla needed to do was point up at the banner.
This is why it feels like the Celtics win every game. https://t.co/S7IUIk9G15
— Bobby Manning (@RealBobManning) December 16, 2024
In a rare moment where he reflected on his personal thoughts about the state of the game, Mazzulla said he prefers not to watch NBA basketball. He’ll catch some of his favorite college teams like Connecticut, West Virginia, Auburn and others. Overseas cricket and soccer intrigue him, while he sees enough of the NBA at his job and in preparation for opposing teams. The Celtics watch basketball every day, but he’s not putting his feet up in his free time and watching TNT.
“I’m part of the problem,” Mazzulla quipped, but he doesn’t think it’s the threes.
“I think in the NFL, people aren’t like, ‘I want to see less scoring,’” he said. “They’re not gonna make the end zone smaller. They’re not gonna make the field smaller. So scoring is up in other sports. I guess my question would be, ‘why, in basketball, is scoring up being an issue as opposed to other sports? Does anybody want to watch a football game and see less touchdowns?’”
Football favored offense with rule adjustments before basketball, and while both benefited from it stylistically, complaints over threes in basketball compare more to football coaches deciding to go for two-pointers over extra points. The numbers say to do it, and the benefits play out over a long period of time.
On Tuesday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver admitted that a league-wide increase in three-point shooting has led to more uniform playing style across the league in recent years. You can find the rare outliers like Nikola Jokić and Giannis Antetokounmpo, while some mid-range masters like DeMar DeRozan exist in decreasing numbers. In Boston, Jaylen Brown and Kristaps Porziņģis provide a pleasant change of pace for a Celtics team that mostly utilizes its players behind the line. Mazzulla has said many times that they don’t direct players to shoot threes. They hunt the best shot possible, but even after not expecting to carry over their 50 threes per game from the preseason, the team has averaged 51.1 attempts through 26 regular season games.
“It’s just the progression of the game, the evolution of the game, I believe,” Al Horford said. “My rookie year, I would’ve never imagined, I would’ve never imagined 10 years ago, seeing that many three-point shots being shot … at every position, as soon as you come in the league, guys are shooting them and they’re comfortable with them. Whereas before, guys had to develop it here. They had to figure it out. They didn’t shoot them as much or they weren’t as comfortable. But there is a lot of value in team’s eyes with the three-point shooting.”
Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Mazzulla points to the Celtics’ personnel as the reason their system works, and despite an expectation that the league would follow their lead after their championship, two more threes per game league-wide has led to lower scoring. The league’s three-point efficiency fell to 35.9% from 36.6% while its offensive rating dipped from 115.3 to 113.2 points per 100 possessions, according to Basketball Reference’s calculations.
The Bulls, who Boston faces in a home-and-home this weekend, jacked their attempts from behind the line up from 32.1 per game to 43.7, second in the league. They’re scoring six more points per game, but unlike Boston, have struggled to stop opponents from getting three-pointers up. The Celtics, once obsessed with limiting attempts, have shifted back-and-forth between prioritizing rim defense and stopping outside shots — the same dilemma they’ve forced other teams to deal with.
“You’re not gonna stop people from playing their game,” Mazzulla said. “But you gotta (know) what you’re willing to give up there … against teams in general, it’s just a matter of what can we take away, what can we control, what’re we willing to live with? … teams are playing different. I think transition pace is up. I think turnovers are up. I think driving the ball is just as much up as the threes are. So, I think each team is doing a great job of playing to the strengths of their roster. That’s the challenge going into every game.”
That doesn’t sound like a cookie-cutter league. Mid-range shots and post-up plays were deemed too inefficient and diminished, but style of play issues existed before even they were popularized. Interest in the NBA has waned for other reasons: a face of the league crisis, injuries or absences, and a long regular season to name a few. There’s a case, as Silver said, that fans consume the game in clips. Admittedly, that’s how Mazzulla does it.
It does say something, though, that the 2.5-hour product isn’t worth sitting down and watching for this generation of consumers. While the league shouldn’t bend its product to Tik Tok, it can’t be complacent or ignore real issues fans have with it, whether lagging end of games or a record 75 three-point misses in a recent game.
Jayson Tatum is amazing, just won Boston a championship and the style he plays puts the Celtics in the best position to win. His efficiency numbers are down this year and he never got the chance to fully develop the mid-range game he might’ve master in another era and some fans still beg for him to power to the basket more regularly.
Instead, in this era, his job has become taking the tough shots so others get easy ones. When Horford first started taking threes, it struck him how hard the shot was. NBA players make it look so easy that we forget 40% of threes falling is great. That means, with a greater percentage of shots coming there, fewer overall will fall in an average game. A rival earlier this season observed Boston living with some bad shots to play the sheer percentages the three offers.
And when asked earlier this year whether he enjoys the three, Tatum paused, and pivoted to its effectiveness:
“When I first came in, there still was some traditional bigs. We started [Aron] Baynes and Al together sometimes, and even that year, Baynes was shooting a lot of threes,” Tatum said. “I don’t go into the game like, ‘I’m shooting 14 threes tonight.’ Some of them are heat checks, some of them are late shot clock, some of them, I’m feeling good. Obviously, there are the open ones. It’s just the way that we play. We attack guys, we find the advantage, we attack it. You gotta help. If you don’t, we’re gonna make the layup. If you do, we pass it out to the wing … and everybody on the perimeter can shoot.”