The truth is, people love field goal percentage

There’s an ongoing debate in NBA circles that looks something like this:

Point: The 3-point shot is ruining basketball! What happened to the MIDRANGE GAME and POST UPS and FOULING PEOPLE UNTIL THEY’RE CONCUSSED?

Counterpoint: The 90s sucked, dude! Pat Riley is the DEVIL! Give me POINTS! Give me MOREYBALL! Give me MOVING SCREENS and EUROSTEPS!

Sound familiar?

It got me thinking. What makes NBA basketball “watchable?” I find this question particularly vexing because I came of age in the 90s, a decade everyone seems to think was awful, yet I remember with quite a bit of fondness. How do I resolve this cognitive dissonance? The 90s had their problems, but they were also pretty sweet! If the league was so flawed, how come I have so many wonderful memories?

Complicating matters is the fact that basketball in 2017 is exceedingly entertaining. There are so many amazing players doing so many unprecedented things. Curry! LeBron! Harden vs. Westbrook vs. Durant!

And yet, the NBA in 2017 has a problem. I didn’t see it at first, because I instinctively favor change over stasis, but there are games where both teams miss what feels like 1,000 combined 3s, and those games are trash, just like the 85-83 slugfests of the 90s were trash. Just a different kind of trash. They leave me feeling empty and alone.

I believe that fun has not yet been maximized. Things are great, true, but I want to see them get even better.

What’s the matter?

How do we reach maximum fun? And how do we know we’ve accomplished our goal using a more objective measure than RUSSELL WESTBROOK RULES, SON!

I believe I’ve found the answer, and it’s so impossibly simple that you’ll think there’s something wrong with me. The key to maximizing fun is maximizing league wide field goal percentage.

“C’mon, bro!” you’re surely thinking.

First of all, don’t bro me if you don’t know me. And second of all, no YOU c’mon, bro. Think about the last time you watched a game you weren’t emotionally invested in. If you’ve ever seen the Hornets play the Magic in February you’ll know what I’m talk about.

Now think about what you rooted for. Was it 3-pointer after 3-pointer after 3-pointer? Maybe, but probably not. I bet you wanted excitement. I bet you wanted competitiveness. I bet you wanted highlight reel plays.

You might be happy when a team whips it around the 3-point line for an open look, and you’d be right to be. Unselfish play resulting in a wide-open, drained 3 is very satisfying. But you might be equally satisfied if the D closes out, forcing the shooter to attack the rim, culminating in a step-back jumper over Kelly Olynyk’s stupid face.

That’s not a great shot from an efficiency standpoint, and it’s not necessarily a winning play, especially if it comes early in the shot clock, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t every bit as satisfying as a corner 3 from Kemba Walker. A made basket suggests competence, while a miss suggests incompetence. If both teams play hard and make a ton of shots, you think to yourself, “What a great game!”

If both teams play hard and miss a ton of shots, you might credit the defense, but then you think to yourself, “What a crappy game!”

That’s why league wide field goal percentage is such an important statistic. It tells us if the style of play currently in vogue is a watchable style of play. Are shots going in? Great! Are they not? Not so great!

Points are window dressing. You want more points? Add a 400-point shot underneath your own basket. The scores would get pretty ridiculous, but games would devolve into fullcourt shot contests, and that would suck. If we look to maximize league wide field goal percentage over points per game, we’ll have a better brand of ball.

Don’t believe me? Let’s test the theory by looking at some historical numbers.

The Golden Age

As luck would not have it, the most impressive stretch of league-wide field goal percentage took place during what many consider to be the Golden Age of the NBA. Take a look at league wide field goal percentage during the five-year stretch from 1982-1986.

1982 — 49.1% (Lakers championship)
1983 — 48.5% (Sixers championship)
1984 — 49.2% (Lakers championship)
1985 — 49.1% (Celtics championship)
1986 — 48.7% (Lakers championship)

Magic. Kareem. Dr. J. Larry Bird. It’s not at all shocking that this era, widely credited with saving the league from the drug problems and poor play of the 70s (at least by Bill Simmons), also saw the highest percentage of made shots.

Let’s put those numbers in perspective. In 2017, league average field goal percentage sits at 45.7 percent. That’s roughly in line with the last 12 years, when field goal percentage stayed almost exclusively in the 45 percent range, dipping below 45 percent twice and above 46 percent once, never by more than 0.2 percentage points. League wide field goal percentage hasn’t touched 47 percent since 1993.

Very interesting! But they’re probably scoring more points now, right? Look at all those 3s!

#Actually, NBA games averaged 105.6 points per game in 2017 versus 110.1 points per game in 1984, when the league was shooting 25 percent on 3-pointers.

Hmmm… What gives?

The Rough and Tumble 90s

Let’s take a look at the 90s, a decade often derided for its sluggish style of play, to see if we can glean more insight. Why not start with 1997, the year the Knicks were infamously bounced from the playoffs after the entire team got suspended for being RAMPAGING 90s-STYLE BASKETBALL THUGS.

In 1997 the entire league shot 45.5 percent, only 0.2 percentage points below 2017’s 45.7 percent. In that same season the league shot 36 percent from downtown, 0.2 percentage points above 2017’s 35.8 percent.

AND YET, offense was, in a sense, trash. Teams averaged an abysmal 96.9 ppoints per game, nearly 10 points less than in 2017.

You: Wait, what? Now I’m confused! I thought you said field goal percentage was the be-all end-all? The percentages from that garbage year are almost identical to 2017!

Me: First of all, I didn’t say that. I said made baskets are nice and that we should look to increase field goal percentage in order to incentivize them. The best basketball takes place when league-wide shooting approaches 50%.

Consider this. The Michael Jordan years were pretty sweet, right? If someone offered you three years of NBA basketball as fun to watch as the first three Jordan championship years, would you turn them down?

Here’s what the league shot during Jordan’s first 3 championship seasons:

1991 — 47.4%
1992 — 47.2%
1993 — 47.3%

Those numbers have not been reached since. Hmm. Maybe the 90s weren’t all bad!

Here’s what league average field goal percentage looked like for MJ’s second three-peat:

1996 — 46.2
1997 — 45.5
1998 — 45.0

All of those numbers are on par or better than what we saw the past five years, though clearly there’s a worrying trend.

I come not to bury the 90s, but to suggest that perhaps both the 90s and today’s NBA are flawed, and maybe 2017 isn’t so much better than 1993 after all. If you look at league wide field goal percentage, a higher percentage of possessions were ending with a satisfying feeling in 1993 than they were today, and neither of those years can touch the Golden Era.

I still feel confident in my hypothesis. I believe the game can be more fun.

How do we improve the game?

That brings us back to our original question. How do we make sure that NBA games are maximized for fun? How do we make the Point and Counterpoint people from our earlier example happy? And most importantly, how do we approach the Golden Field Goal Percentage of 50. I want half my possessions ending in a bucket, dammit!

It seems fairly clear to me that emphasizing the 3-point shot is not the answer. It’s hard to imagine a more 3-heavy league than we currently have, and here we sit, fairly far away from 50%.

Look at that stretch from 1982-86 again. In 1982 the NBA averaged 108.6 points per game while attempting a positively triangular 2.3 3-pointers per game. Those numbers crept all the way up to 110.2 points per game and 3.3 3s in 1986.

It’s not about increasing 3s. It’s about increasing pace. The NBA averaged between 100 and 103 possessions per game during the Golden Years outlined above. That’s anywhere between 4 and 7 more possessions per game than we see in 2017.

Get on with it, then!

If forced to suggest a solution for maximizing fun, aesthetically pleasing basketball, I would gingerly offer that we should make the court larger and move the 3-point shot back, especially at the corners, where goofballs like Marcus Smart are shooting 40 percent.

That 40 percent is a great percentage from that spot, but if every possession ended in a corner 3 with a 40 percent chance of success, that would mean much worse shooting than the modern league’s nadir of 43.7%, the number we hit in 1999, the last time the Knicks made the Finals (ouch!).

Push the 3-point line out far enough, and you’ll start seeing less of them. Here’s the good news: that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, 3s might become even more fun because they’re even more rare.

If you expose yourself to anything frequently enough it loses its luster, no matter how fun it is. It’s one of the crappiest things about being a human. Let’s indulge a bit less, and we’ll enjoy our binges even more.

But that’s not all!

Perhaps more importantly, we should encourage pace. That’s how the great teams of the 80s worked. They pushed the pace, kept 3s to a minimum, and scored a buttload of points.

There’s a number of ways this can be accomplished, probably. Shorten the shot clock? Shorten the amount of time it takes to trigger a backcourt violation?

I’m hesitant to offer my own solution because rules changes often have unintended consequences, and the last thing I want is some unexpected result like teams turning the ball over 1,000 times per game. Luckily we have the D-League where we can experiment with this kind of thing.

It may wind up being that we need a D’Antoni-esque figure to come along and encourage pace above all else, above even space, at which point we’ll see the kind of cultural shift that rules changes can’t enforce. We might need someone that everyone can look at and say, “What that guy’s doing works. I’m gonna try it.”

Next: The 10 greatest mustaches in NBA history

I can only promise you this: if we keep an eye on league wide field goal percentage, we can get to a place that makes us all happy.