Is the NBA’s 3-point revolution actually a 2-point revolution in disguise?

Very few general managers, even very skilled ones, leave a concrete legacy behind once they exit the front office — but the game will remember Daryl Morey’s Houston Rockets for a long time. Even if the Rockets never win a championship, Morey has the distinction of altering the NBA game for good. Even though Morey has been singularly inventive in his salary cap manipulation, and even though he has been endlessly creative in the trade market, what will reverberate through history is that he was right about the 3-pointer. Specifically, that NBA teams did not shoot 3-pointers nearly enough. It seems that each year, Morey’s Rockets are achieving some new distinction in 3-point shooting. Few have been as memorable as this year’s innovation: the 2017-18 Rockets are the first team, ever, to attempt more 3-pointers than 2-pointers.

This is not the only record that Morey and Mike D’Antoni’s incredibly agile offense are about to break — although this next tidbit is getting hardly any attention. With 58.1 percent team-wide accuracy on 2-point shots, the Rockets are on pace to be the most accurate 2-point team of all time, smashing the full-season 55.8 percent record held by LeBron James’ Miami Heat in 2013-14.

Houston’s unprecedented 2-point success makes a surprising amount of intuitive sense: if a team makes a 3-point shot their default shot, they’ll only attempt 2-pointers when they have a higher-accuracy look. Check out how much room team-accuracy leader Clint Capela (68 percent) has to operate in, as the defense stretches past its breaking point to guard the unforgiving 3-ball threat:

While Houston’s shooting habits are more extreme than any other team’s, the entire league is converting 2-pointers like they never have before:

Even okay 3-point teams are elite 3-point teams

If they all hold their current two-point accuracies, there are four teams other than the Rockets who will end up among the top ten most-accurate 2-point teams of all-time: there are the Cavaliers (54 percent) and the Pelicans (55.5 percent), and the Raptors (56.1 percent) and Warriors (57.3 percent) would break the Heat record from a few years earlier, while still trailing the Rockets’ 58 percent.

It’s not a surprise to see the Warriors’ lethal offense ripping through the league like this. And, despite their slow start to the season, I’m not surprised to see Cleveland up there, either: their ineffective defense has stolen the thunder from an elite offense, and any team led by the monstrously effective LeBron — 63.5 percent on 14.4 2-pointers per game — has a shot at success. The oddities here are the Pelicans and Raptors — the Pels are bottom-five in 3-point accuracy, and the Raptors are only a few slots better.

Suddenly, New Orleans has put together a ridiculously creative and unselfish offense. There are 54 players in the league who average at least 30 minutes per game while assisting on at least 10 percent of their teammates’ total baskets. The Pelicans and the Warriors have four of those players apiece, tops in the league, with E’Twaun Moore being the surprise addition along Jrue Holiday, Anthony Davis, and DeMarcus Cousins. When you watch the baskets that big men Davis and Cousins assist on, it’s clear that New Orleans is uniquely capable of making some sweet basketball music.

The Raptors don’t even move the ball around that well. DeMar DeRozan has taken more than three times as many 2-pointers as any other teammate, at a good-but-not-historical 51.4 percent rate. Toronto is unique among teams because they can play 48 minutes of highly efficient, highly unselfish power forwards and centers. Between Lucas Nogueira, Jakob Poeltl, Pascal Siakam, Serge Ibaka, and Jonas Valanciunas, Valanciunas is the only one shooting under 60 percent — and he’s not that far off — from inside the arc.

It’s kind of crazy that some of these historically great two-point performances are happening basically independently of any notable 3-point effort. I do wonder: is this a function of the league being full of smaller and less physical centers than ever? We may very well be at the point where a team could glean value by focusing on big, tough 2-point defense, and letting those 3-pointers fall as they may.

There are more super-efficient players than ever

For the first sixty-something years of the NBA, there were 56 times when a qualifying player finished the year with a 2-point percentage of 60 percent or better — about one a year. Then, last season, there were seven players who accomplished the feat, including the very-high-usage LeBron and Kevin Durant. And now, this year, there are ten players who are accomplishing this, with six more lurking between 58-59 percent.

While this year’s group of ten players includes efficiency mainstays like DeAndre Jordan, some of those guys have truly come from out of nowhere. After shooting just 43.8 percent on two-pointers as a rookie in Oklahoma City last year, Domantas Sabonis has found incredibly creative pick-and-roll partners in Indiana, shooting 60.2 percent even with the taboo mid-range jumper as a staple. His former teammate Enes Kanter has also leapfrogged his previous career best by about five percentage points, cleaning up inside while opponent bigs mind Kristaps Porzingis on the outside.

The very-efficient role player is also an underappreciated new invention. Before this season, there were only 13 times when a player: played at least half the season, averaged between 10-30 minutes, and shot better than 65 percent of 2-pointers. Four of those 13 occasions happened just last season — Nogueira, Andre Iguodala, Montrezl Harrell, and Tyson Chandler. This year, counting players who have played at least 10 games, there are 14 guys over 65 percent.

There are more super-efficient team games than ever

Here’s an accomplishment so outlandish that, historically, it’s happened less than once a season in the thousand-plus NBA games each year: a whole team shoots better than 70 percent on 2-point shots on the night. From 1963-64 until 2015-16, it happened a total of 45 times. Then, last year, it happened 11 times. And now, this season, not even a quarter of the way into the year, it’s already happened six times, and with six different teams doing the honors — including the offensively challenged Atlanta Hawks. Surprisingly, a number of these games have come when the team is not exactly in the groove on 3-pointers. For instance, back in October, the Rockets hit 80 percent of their 2-pointers up against only 23.4 percent of their 3-pointers.

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Time will only tell what team accomplishment we will refer to as a Morey Game. There have been 46 times in league history where a team has hit 20 or more 3-pointers in a game — a full 15 of those belong to Morey’s Rockets, with Steve Kerr’s Warriors in second place with nine games. But then: out of those 62 total times when a team has shot better than 70 percent on 2-pointers, Morey was at the help for eight of those. No other franchise, in their entire history — across all their GM’s — has more than four.

All stats accurate as of games played on Nov.

22.