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Commish for a day: Let's move the 3-point line back

Photo illustration by Nick Roy / theScore

While professional and collegiate sports are on hiatus, theScore's writers are exploring what they'd do if this pause allowed for changes to the rules and structures of various leagues. In the final installment, we return to the NBA. Previous entries in the series examined MLB, NHL, NCAA, NFL, PGA, and the world of soccer.

The NBA is experiencing an era of unprecedented offensive output, and the single biggest driver of the scoring boom is that teams have gotten wise to the mathematical imperative of hunting the shots that are worth 50% more points than other field goals.

The league's collective 3-point attempt rate has been steadily climbing for the better part of two decades, as threes account for 38.2% of all field-goal attempts this season. The Houston Rockets, as ever, pace the field, with 48.8% of their shots coming from long range. It works out to an average of about 34 threes per team per game. And it's unclear whether we're anywhere close to reaching a breaking point. There's little evidence the trend is going to slow down, let alone reverse itself, any time soon.

It's worth asking whether we're losing something as the game migrates away from the rim. At the least, we can say the proliferation of threes is coming at the expense of other skills that we used to value a lot more highly than we do now, and whether that actually represents evolution on a stylistic level is an open question.

To be clear, I don't think the NBA's current on-court product is in a bad place. The game is fast and fluid, rife with ball and player movement and ornate offensive sets. Games in the 3-point era can sustain tension for longer because teams are rarely out of a game; double-digit leads are no longer safe and comebacks can happen in the blink of an eye.

There's a crucial distinction between a homogeneity of style and a homogeneity of intention. Teams have very similar aims in terms of the type of shots they seek, but they go about creating those shots in markedly different ways. The term "copycat league" gets thrown around a lot, but I don't really buy the idea that every team's out there doing the same things. Any team, on any night, is liable to show you something you wouldn't see from anyone else, whether through coaching wrinkles or the unique abilities of its players.

Tim Warner / Getty Images

But that doesn't mean the product can't be better. Strategic uniformity has its aesthetic limits, and I feel like we may be approaching them. Sure, teams have unique ways of manufacturing 3-point shots, but we ultimately still wind up watching a cavalcade of them every night. There's nothing wrong with threes - they can be thrilling, graceful, picturesque - but the luster starts to wear off a bit when you watch 68 of them hoisted in a game. In the future, that number could climb to 80 or 100. Does that make for a good viewing experience? And if not, how can the NBA reverse the trend and nudge its gameplay back in the direction of tactical diversity?

How about moving the arc back to, say, 26 feet.

At present, the 3-point line is 23.75 feet above the break, and 22 feet in the corners, exactly where it's been painted (save for a short-lived experiment some 25 years ago) since its inception. The league-average success rate on 3-pointers this season is 35.7%, which means the average three was worth 1.07 points. That is, of course, dramatically more efficient than the average mid-range jumper or the average post-up. Hence the steep decline of those once-foundational elements of the game. The math is too overwhelming. Any team that's failed to get on board with the 3-point revolution over the past few years has been left behind.

Moving the arc back would curtail the proliferation of long bombs and create more room for more legitimate cost/benefit analysis, where teams could reasonably talk themselves into focusing more on the interior while treating the 3-ball as a secondary or tertiary objective. It would be about finding the sweet spot, where threes remain a vital and prominent part of the game without completely submerging it and drowning other elements out.

In 2017-18 (the last season in which NBA Savant tracked shots by distance), the league as a whole hit 33% from 26 feet and beyond. There were 58 players who attempted at least 100 of those deep treys, and 25 of them shot better than 35.7% (which, again, was the league average this season). Eleven of them shot better than 40%, including Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and LeBron James.

A deeper arc might make 3-point specialists an endangered species. It might spell trouble for the likes of Danny Green, Duncan Robinson, JJ Redick, and most of the Rockets' supporting cast, who derive so much of their value from their long-range proficiency. It might force the Rockets to reconsider their approach altogether. It might make players who thrive in the in-between space - like DeMar DeRozan - more valuable.

Would that be such a bad thing?

Michael Reaves / Getty Images Sport / Getty

The way the game is structured now, players who possess that one particular skill often provide more value than guys who lack that skill but are vastly more adept in most other facets of the game. That dampens our ability to appreciate more nuanced skills like footwork, post moves, interior passing, or the ability to maintain a live dribble in a sea of bodies. We often focus on that one flaw rather than on myriad strengths. Imagine just getting to watch and enjoy Ben Simmons rather than constantly fretting over whether his lack of perimeter gravity makes him too difficult to build a team around in the modern NBA.

Talented players who are shaky or borderline 3-point shooters could abandon the pretense of working that shot into their games. In a league in which threes were less valuable, that would be a less damning blind spot. They could lean all the way into the skills that make them effective inside the arc, rather than spending so much of their time trying to build themselves into passable outside shooters to avoid being left behind.

This change wouldn't have to compromise the wide-open nature of today's game. Stretching the line out by a few feet might mean fewer players are threats to shoot from distance, but the players who would need to be guarded out there would offer that much more spacing. It would make it that much more difficult for perimeter defenders to help on drives or post-ups and recover out to shooters, or for paint-bound rim protectors to deal with stretch bigs. As it is, plenty of the league's more audacious long-range gunners spot up well behind the arc for exactly that reason.

A handful of players already play as if there's an imaginary arc several feet beyond the real one; guys like Curry, Damian Lillard, and Trae Young, who pull up indiscriminately from 30 feet out and whose percentages hardly seem to suffer for it. If anything, a deeper arc would make the league's best shooters that much more valuable, and their skill that much more pronounced.

And the pace of the game - another factor that's driven both the aesthetic pleasure and the high-scoring nature of the modern game - wouldn't have to slow down at all. If anything, teams might speed up even more, knowing that half-court offense would be harder to come by.

Matteo Marchi / Getty Images Sport / Getty

We would have to account for the spots in the corners, either by widening the court or eliminating corner threes altogether. I'd be much more partial to widening the court - a change that could further open up the run of play - than eliminating the corner three. Those juicy 22-footers may present a significant tactical loophole, but removing them would kill floor spacing across the league and lead to a revival of clogged-toilet offense.

As of now, defenders have to be very wary of helping off of corner shooters. The average corner three goes in 38.8% of the time, which, at 1.16 points per attempt, makes it one of the most valuable shots in basketball. Turn that shot into a 2-pointer, and its value plummets to about 0.77 points. Nobody is commanding defensive attention for a shot with that paltry a return. There wouldn't be enough room above the break for teams to station all their shooters in an attempt to play four- or five-out. The middle of the floor would turn into a hellscape.

You could maintain a shorter corner three, to maintain the increased value and spacing those shots provide, while still making the arc slightly more uniform. The corner three could be 25 feet away, compared to 26 above the break - a change that would necessitate widening the court by six feet.

All in all, this would be a big change that might require teams to rethink strategy, alter their playbooks, and rejig their offenses. It might be a bit ugly in the beginning as teams figured out how to adjust, but it would also provide an opportunity for schematic ingenuity. New ideas and skills almost always catch up to new gameplay parameters eventually.

And if the NBA didn't like how the new product looked, it could always just move the line back to where it was, just as they moved it in - and then back out again - in the mid-90s. It seems worth a try. Aside from a lot of long-range chucking, what does the league have to lose?

Joe Wolfond writes about basketball and tennis for theScore.

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