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6:03:00 PM EDT
The NBA and Fundamentals
With the semester over, I am trying to clean out
some files.
In the course of doing so, I came across an article, from a year ago,
by
Michael Sokolove, who does periodic sports writing for the New York
Times
Sunday Magazine. Sokolove penned a piece in 2002 for the Magazine,
“Football is
a Sucker’s Game,” about the price that colleges pay for starting
big-time
football programs, that stands as one of the best sports-related
articles I’ve
ever read. In the 2005 piece, “Clang,” Sokolove takes aim at a familiar
target:
the lack of fundamentals and poor play that characterizes the NBA
today. (the article, written on February 13, 2005, is behind the Times
Select wall).
But, re-reading the Sokolove piece is a reminder of how far the NBA game is thought to have fallen since its heyday, presumably in the 1980s, though before that as well. Sokolove makes clear what’s wrong with contemporary pro basketball. “The addiction to the dunk is emblematic of the direction in which basketball – like all major sports, really – has been heading. Less nuance, more explosive force. Greater emphasis on individual heroics and personal acclaim, less on such quaint values as teamwork and sacrifice.”
Sokolove complains about the disappearance of the mid-range jumper and the almost total reliance on the dunk and the three pointer. The result is a stultifying brand of basketball. Sokolove writes: “presented with players bent on executing highlight reel dunks – but who otherwise do not pass well, shoot well, or move effectively to open spots on the floor – many NBA coaches have slowed the pace to a plodding, unwatchable crawl.”The key morality tale of Sokolove's essay is Kareem Abdul Jabbar. When then Lew Alcindor led UCLA to the NCAA championship in his first season of eligibility in 1967, the NCAA decided that “basket stuffing” should be outlawed. This rule lasted until1976. According to Sokolove, the ban was pivotal in helping Alcindor refine and diversify his game, to include the soon-to-be-legendary sky hook. Similarly, Julius Erving, who likewise played in college during the era of the dunk ban, learned how to finger role and other artful ways of putting the ball in the basket.
The situation today could not be more different. Sokolove argues that the keys to basketball are sharing on offense and communication on defense, part of a game that “ more so than any other sport, is determined by a series of social interactions…” It’s clear what the new, selfish, me-first, dunk-at-all-costs mindset is doing to that delicate social balance. The sums of money now available to superstars, the earlier ages at which prodigies begin to gain attention, the in your face, video-game culture surrounding pro sports and the urge to be on sports center have meant “quite, understandably [that] these young stars, rather than being prone to sharing the ball, are apt to believe they own it.”OK. You get the point. The fans are being cheated, Soklove believes, by a league that stunts rather than develops players (and, for obvious reasons, player development is no longer happening in college, because the best players tend to spend little time in college).
So, is Sokolove, and by extension, years of commentary about the NBA, right?I took a look at basketball reference.com. Sokolove, like many critics of today’s game, often cites the drop in scoring as symbolic of the overall decline in skill level in the league. In 1986, NBA teams averaged 110 points a game. That’s a league full of Phoenix Suns. By 2000, that figure was down to 97 points per game per team. In 2004, a low point, the league’s teams averaged 93 points a game, before creeping back up to 97 in 2005 and 2006. So, does that prove everything Sokolove says it does? Well, it’s the only aggregate statistic he presents, so it’s clear that he, like many other critics of the game, hangs a lot on it.
But, how about some other data? If we’re talking fundamentals, one pretty basic one is free throw shooting. If players are so inattentive to the less sexy, the less dramatic, the less crowd-pleasing aspects of the game, shouldn’t we see an overall decline in free throw shooting?The numbers suggest no such decline. In 2006, the league shot 74.5% from the line.That seems to have been a bit of an aberration since in 2005, the figure was 75.6% from the charity stripe. The league shot 75.1% in 2004 and 75.7% in 2003. Back in 1993, when the league was averaging 107 points a game, it converted 75.4%. In Sokolove’s heyday, 1986, the league shot 75.6%, the same as in 2005. In 1981, when Bird won his first championship, the figure was 75.1%. That’s also what it was in 1977, when Bill Walton, now outspoken gatekeeper of the longed-for past, led the Trailblazers to their only championship. The last time my team, the Knicks, won the title was in 1973. That year the league shot 75.8%. The figures are lower before that, including 73% in 1967.
Not much evidence there for a decline in the fundamentals. Maybe one explanation for the disappearance of the mid-range jumper from today's game isn’t that the players can’t be bothered anymore. Maybe it’s because the level of defense is more intense now than it used to be. This is a possibility that is normally dismissed out of hand, because it’s so fundamentally at odds with the narrative of selfish, bad attitude kids today (and predominantly African-American ones at that) that they’d do something so blue-collar and unglamorous as play defense. But, if guys really can’t shoot from 15-feet anymore, it’s not obvious why free throw shooting proficiency has been essentially unchanged for 35 years now (and was worse before then).
OK, that’s just one stat. I also wondered about assist-to-turnover ratio, perhaps the best measure there is of efficiency, teamwork and good decision-making, all presumably absent from the modern game. In 2006 and 2005, it was 1.47 assists for every one turnover. In 2004, it was slightly worse, 1.42 to1. In 2000, it was 1.44. Back when Jordan secured his first three-peat in 1993, it was a bit higher, 1.55 to 1. In the golden year, 1986, it was 1.46 to 1, a fraction lower than in the past two seasons. In 1981, it was 1.36 to 1. In 1977, 1.16.
Well, that didn’t work very well for the sky-has-fallen crowd, now did it? If the game is as Sokolove describes, is there a reasonable explanation for why assist to turnover ratios would have been no better twenty years ago than they are now, and considerably worse before that? I have a possible answer: defense (see a theme here?). That’s right. Here's the thing about NBA basketball when I was first watching in the 1970s and 1980s: very little defense was played. There was much less working a shot clock for a good shots, because there was much less reason to. The game wasn’t more skilled, it was just easier to score, symbolized by pull up and shoot-first guys like Pete Maravich and Bob McAdoo. The way defense is played now requires more ball movement and more effort to get off a decent shot. Players are bigger and faster now, and can cover more ground in a confined space. That partly explains why stretching defenses via the three point shot has become such a key part of the offense.
OK, let’s try another one – assist to basket ratios. In 2006, 58% of baskets resulted from an assist. It was 59% in 2005, and 61% in 2004, the nadir of fundamental basketball, if one goes by points per game. In 2000, it was also 61%. That was also the figure in 1993. In 1986, it was 60% and 59% in 1981. In 1977, 56%. In other words, baskets are no less likely to be the result of teamwork and selflessness in 2006 than they were in 1986 or 1977.
You know what the biggest statistical change has been over time: teams used to take way more shots and they used to go the free throw line more. They weren’t less selfish, they weren’t better at hitting 15-foot shots when those shots were uncontested (i.e. when they were free throws) and they weren’t more careful with the ball.
Look, I am a Knicks fan. Though I loved the Riley teams of the 1990s, I know they played some brutal basketball. Watching Heat-Knicks could be a mind-numbing experience, and the 2003 finals, between the Spurs and the Nets was also self-mutilation material. In other words, I know there's been some ugly basketball the past few seasons. But, even leaving aside these very entertaining 2006 playoffs, and acknowledging that the league has benefited from an infusion of great new talent in the past five years, from LeBron, to Wade, ‘Melo and Stoudamire (two of whom never went to college, the subject, I promise, of another column) the evidence that players today are more selfish and less fundamentally sound is not really so obvious after all. In fact, were it not for the powerful prejudices clouding popular judgments about the NBA game, we might settle on a pretty obvious explanation for why scoring has dropped in the lasttwo decades. It’s defense – played much more vigorously and consistently now than was the case back in the day. That defense, in turn, is requiring greater, more careful exertions on offense than was once the case. It might not be pretty, but a closer look at the numbers suggests that low scoring is not really an indictment of the attitude, effort and seriousness of purpose of today’s NBA player.
Instead, it might be a more serious indictment of Sokolove and the like for coming to conclusions about the causes of low-scoring that are little more than pre-existing biases about “kids today.”
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First and Foremost, Aside From the Issue at Hand...
I have to address the use of stats in general....You can't measure "passing" by assist numbers and you can't measure "ball movement" by assist numbers. You also can't measure the quality of decision making in said passes or assists by assist stats.
On the Subject At Hand...
I think the "better in the old days" stand just for the heck of it is indeed a problem. Things should be taken in a case by case basis.
On offense however, I do think there has been a decline in fundamentals, midrange jump shooting, team play, ball movement, moving without the ball and shot selection ect.
I do also think that there were some teams in the 80s that didn't play much defense and put too much emphasis on offense, and the teams that did play good defense had to work twice as hard to stop those teams as a result. Just like you have to work twice as hard to stop the Warriors, Hornets and Suns today.
But overall, I do think the 90s and 00s defenses are better, but I do think there has definitely been a decline in offensive fundamentals at the same time. As the NBA became a bigger commercial force, more and media emphasis gravitated to the more commercial aspects of offense.
The 90s did a great job of combining the defense with the offensive fundamentals of and that's the blueprint that the Champions in recent years have been following. That's why the Spurs have been so successful, for example. -
Colin Cowherd on ESPN radio had a good rant about this the other day. His was a rare voice of "don't tell me things were better in the old days because they weren't." Refreshing. This can be applied to every sport except possibly boxing, which isn't really a sport.
6/27/08 10:23 AM
I do agree that the decline in the midrange shot has hurt the NBA. There are a lot of players shooting a lot more 3s than they should. For those that develop a midrange game, it is a dependable, consistent shot and a higher % shot than the 3-point shot.
There's also a BIG difference between a good free throw shooter and a good midrange jump shooter or midrange pull-up jump shooter. Same range, but different skills. However, the primary issue of midrange shooting is shot selection, not "ability to shoot from 15-feet."
There are a lot of players who are decent 3-point shooters who shoot FAR too many 3s. They shoot 500 and make 34% and the media tells them they are great 3-point shooters...but they aren't. Those same players would have more consistent and efficient scoring if they had instead developed and relied on a midrange shot. It's an issue of shot selection and decision making. It can even be seen working at this very moment in the players that utilize it.