Sprawlball offers an intriguing look at the new NBA

The 3-pointer started as a gimmick, invented by Abe Saberstein for his short-lived American Basketball League in the hopes of creating a home run shot. Pretty much arbitrarily, he set the 3-point arc 23.75 feet away from the hoop on the perimeter and 22 feet away in the corners, yet it has transformed basketball in a way almost nothing else has. While the ABL only lasted one full season and the 3-point line died with it, it was revitalized half a decade later by the ABA who was trying to differentiate itself from the NBA. The ABA featured more wide-open, freewheeling play than the NBA and while part of that was due to the players it attracted — stars such as Connie Hawkins, Julius Erving, George Gervin, and David Thompson — the 3-point line helped. Following the merger of the two leagues in 1976, the 3-point line vanished from view again until the NBA reinstituted it in the 1979-80 season where it again was a gimmick of sorts, a curiosity that was rarely used.

Of course, a lot has changed in the nearly four decades since then and the 3-point shot has truly changed the game, the strategy underlying coaching decisions, and the types of players that teams are searching for. In Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New NBA, Kirk Goldsberry attempts to look at the changes this rule has wrought, trying to make sense of just how the league has changed so much in the past few years and why. Early in the book, he claims that apart from “the forward pass in football, no rule change in American sports history has reshaped the aesthetic of its sport more than the three-point line has in the NBA?” So what is it about this seemingly arbitrary line that has shifted the league so immensely and irrevocably? According to Goldsberry, it really just boils down to efficiency. As he notes, “an average NBA three chucked up by, say, Trevor Ariza, Ryan Anderson, or P.J. Tucker is a better proposition than a post-up play by the league’s best player.” It’s an odd statement on the surface, but nevertheless, one that reveals much about the modern NBA.

While Goldsberry is perhaps best known to the general public for the writing he’s done for Grantland and ESPN, he was originally trained as a cartographer, earning a doctorate from UC-Santa Barbara. He went on to teach geography as a visiting professor at Harvard and has since transitioned into analyzing basketball both as a member of the San Antonio Spurs front office and also as the senior analyst for USA Basketball. With Sprawlball, his first book, he advances the discussion of the use of analytics in the NBA in a way that will delight fans curious about the way the game is changing.

Sprawlball is bookended by an extensive introduction and a concluding chapter that take large-scale looks at the game as a whole — what has changed and how we’ve arrived there and what the future may hold, respectively — and in between features four chapters looking at how this evolution is showcased in the careers of four different players. There are also brief chapters about how shooting speed has been undervalued relative to shooting accuracy, and the evolution of the center position.

The four players that Goldsberry chooses to focus on are Stephen Curry, James Harden, LeBron James, and Kevin Love. With the first three, he describes the varying ways they all have both shaped and adapted to the new reality whereas, with Love, he views him as emblematic of the way that the power forward position has evolved — from being primarily a post player to another shooter and floor stretcher. With Curry, he focuses on how Curry went from shooting many mid-range jumpers while being a below average finisher near the rim early in his career to go on to shift his approach, improving in the process to become perhaps the most impactful player in the league. With Harden, he examines the way he has learned to exploit the league’s rules as adroitly as anyone in NBA history in order to become an MVP caliber player. Finally, with LeBron, he endeavors to explain how he has remained so dominant in this age of 3-point shooting even without having a well-refined deep ball for much of his career.

The book is both informative, filled with stats and shot charts that empirically showcase the validity of his claims, as well as engaging, written in a clear way that is accessible to those who are less familiar with statistical analysis without ever talking down to them. Accompanying Goldsberry’s prose is artwork by Aaron Dana. The book is beautifully illustrated, capturing some of the more notable moments in recent NBA history while also using these illustrations to highlight the distinctive natures of the players themselves. The book is also littered with a number of shot charts, Goldsberry’s signature, which more than hold up as fascinating visual items, even next to Dana’s incredible illustrations.

There are points where Goldsberry editorializes and laments that the league is becoming homogenized and facing an aesthetic crisis which is not a statement that I’m not one hundred percent sure I agree with. While there is uniformity in the sense that teams are prizing the 3-point shot more and more, there is still great stylistic diversity in the way that those teams, and the players they feature, attempt to create 3-point shots. Even the four players he devotes chapters to exploring — Stephen Curry, James Harden, LeBron James, and Kevin Love — all embody this trend in a number of different ways. While Curry feasts on pull-ups and catch and shoots after weaving a through a number of off-ball screens, Harden prefers the step back, James prefers to set up others from the paint, and Love is more of a prototypical catch-and-shoot player at this point. As the phenomenal charts made by our own Ian Levy showcase, despite overarching trends being undeniably present, there is still a wide variance in pace, shot selection, and ball and player movement from team to team. Perhaps, if Goldsberry is correct in his assumption that the Rockets are a vision of the future, then these differences will become more minimized, which would be a greater cause for concern.

The most interesting part of the book is the final chapter where Goldsberry attempts to come up with some ideas that would further democratize the game, allowing players with a disparate set of skills to thrive and not just those who can shoot the three. He notes the fact that the NBA has been willing to shift the rules in the past in order to ensure that the game does not become too dominated by a single style of play. There was the widening of the lane in the 1950s and 1960s to combat the post dominance of George Mikan and Wilt Chamberlain, respectively, as well as the elimination of the hand check rule in the early 2000s which freed up perimeter players as perhaps no other rule before or since. As he writes, “One reason the NBA is so sustainable is that it has constantly monitored and updated its rules. But in the midst of arguably the biggest stylistic upheaval in the history of the sport, it’s curious that the league is suddenly sitting on its regulatory hands, exhibiting much more conservative tendencies about its rule base and the lines on the court.” His suggestions range from the eminently doable and practical — merely moving the 3-point line back a bit — to the truly unlikely, but nevertheless intriguing, namely his suggestion that each team be allowed to place the 3-point line on their home courts wherever they like. In between are a bunch of ideas that have me intrigued, that I would like to see at least tried out in the preseason or something such as instituting some sort of three-second rule in the corners to avoid players just interminably camping out there and repealing the widening lane to incentivize the revitalization of post play.

At times, Goldsberry does come across as a conservative pining for a bygone era that is unlikely to ever return, but it is easy to sympathize with his concern that there is no room in today’s NBA for players as stellar and unique as Charles Barkley, Kevin McHale, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. What he wants is not for the NBA to shut the Pandora’s Box that adding the 3-point line opened four decades ago, but to make adjustments with its presence in mind in order to ensure a stylistic diversity that appears to have largely vanished in light of what the current system prizes. It’s not that teams like the Rockets are trying to ruin the aesthetics of basketball — and even if they were, I personally don’t think they are succeeding anyway — but “aligning their strategies with the incentives and subsidies concocted by the NBA rule-makers.” In his view, it goes all the way to the top and the fact that we see traditional big men seemingly being blackballed from the league while teams break the record for 3-pointers season after season is just a symptom of the rules. Whether a cure is definitively needed remains open to question, but in Goldsberry’s mind, it’s certainly worth considering.