I’m not here to tell you anything new.
I’m just here to visualize what you already know.
And we all know three-point shooting is off the rails.
Even the hardest nosed NBA heads are realizing it.
Shaq’s going off.
Gilbert Arenas is going off.
And so are TVs across America.
Ratings are down some 28% from last year through November.
Three-point shooting is far from the NBA’s only issue.
But it will be the focus of this blog.
I was interested in looking at how we got to where we are today.
When did we go wrong?
Let’s let the data tell us.
Maybe then we can figure out a way out of this.
Or maybe we won’t.
But at least we can better understand how this league got so messed up.
Let’s start at the team level.
Eleven of the top-31 are from this 2024-25 season.
So over a third.
And none are even in the same stratosphere as the Boston Celtics.
And here’s the thing.
The Celtics aren’t even that great as a team in three-point efficiency.
Right behind the 1997-98 Cavaliers who averaged 9.7 threes per game.
It’s still boring to watch a monotonous three-point contest, but at least they’re making them.
This was hardly a random piece of statistical noise either.
Let’s look at the 30,000 ft view on missed threes.
There’s probably no more boring of an outcome for an NBA possession than a missed lazy three.
And there hasn’t been a season in NBA history averaging more per NBA game than 2024-25 so far.
Which, to be honest, you’d expect to go hand in hand with total number missed.
That’s about one three every three field goals.
I think these two graphs give us some indication of when things went awry.
So the problem here is volume.
Let’s dive a little more into volume.
This is my favorite data dive I bet you haven’t heard anywhere.
I think we all know at heart this isn’t just a star-player isolated problem.
This is an everyone problem.
And the data is about to confirm this.
Then I repeated this for every team’s second most prevalent three-point shooter.
Then third, fourth, and fifth.
That’s what you see below with each group separated by the group indicator.
Then things start to skyrocket.
Just like we saw in the prior graphs.
The same inflection point.
I don’t know.
This seems like too many campers like Payton Pritchard.
Given this - I don’t think Shaquille O’Neal is right about one thing.
I don’t think we can just blame Steph Curry for starting this storm.
But I get him being a prime suspect.
That was Steph Curry’s fourth year as a pro.
In 2012-13 those attempts jumped up to 7.7 and would only go up from there.
But as we learned, he wasn’t the only one that commuted to downtown.
Everyone all the sudden started at the same time.
I blame the NBA taking away the hand check for this.
We all know what happened.
Scoring was down, ratings were down, and the league blamed this on defense stifling the offense.
Thank god I grew up in the 90s when I could watch the game at it’s zenith.
Even the two years without Jordan were enthralling and fiesty.
That struggle is what makes team sports compelling.
How many driving range contests get put on TV?
Or bumper bowling leauges?
We need some physicality back.
Maybe not Bill Laimbeer Pistons level.
But 90s Knicks seems about right.
Until the NBA understands this it will continue to falter.
