The NBA‘s All-Star Game ratings plummeted 13 percent from a season ago, while the league’s regular-season viewership was down five points coming out of the break, according to Front Office Sports.
That’s an obvious concern for a league that once dominated Americans’ attention throughout the winter and spring, but it’s not a problem with a clear solution.
Critics have accused current players of being too soft, too ‘woke’ and less competitive than their predecessors.
But one criticism of the league benefits from a shocking new statistic compiled by Sportico. With many old-school fans complaining about the modern NBA’s over-reliance on 3-point shooting – something that often distracts from other areas of the game – the website published a chart using statistics from Basketball Reference.
Remarkably, just 4 percent of all field goal attempts came from 3-point range during the NBA’s 1985 season, which makes sense, seeing as the long ball didn’t exist in the league until 1979.
Now, though, that mark somehow sits at 42 percent, meaning nearly half of all field-goal attempts are being taken from long range. And this trend has been snowballing for years, with records for both made and attempted 3s seemingly being set every season going back a decade.
Anthony Edwards #5 of the Minnesota Timberwolves shoots the ball against Chet Holmgren
Warriors star Stephen Curry has drained more 3-pointers than anyone in NBA history
‘It’s crazy,’ former NFL star Jumbo Elliott wrote on X after watching the Boston Celtics beat the New York Knicks. ‘Saw Celtics [veteran center Al] Horford today have a mismatch on a Knicks guard down low and twice after getting fed kicked the ball out for missed three point shots.’
‘No wonder the game is unwatchable nowadays, brick after brick even in situations where you don’t need to be shooting 3-Pointers,’ another added.
‘They need to move it back again,’ one fan remarked, refencing the league’s decision to expand the shooting arc for the 1997-98 season. ‘The 3-pt shot has ruined the game.’
It’s true that 3-point shooting helps NBA teams to space the floor. Take the Golden State Warriors, who famously benefit from having the game’s most prolific 3-point shooter, Stephen Curry, drawing defenders out of the paint and towards the perimeter.
But the emphasis of 3-point shooting has come at the expense of the mid-range and post offense, where Michael Jordan famously tormented defenses during the league’s most popular era.
‘My 3-point shooting is something that I don’t want to excel at because it takes away from all phases of my game,’ Jordan told one television crew in the 1990s. ‘My game is a fake, drive to the hole, penetrate, dish off, dunk, whatever. When you have that mentality, as I found out in the first game of making 3s, you don’t go to the hole as much.
‘You go to the 3-point line and you start sitting there waiting for someone to find you. That’s not my mentality. I don’t want to create that because it takes away my other parts of my game.’
Jordan’s old teammate and current Bulls analyst Stacey King shared that interview on Instagram, where many fans agreed with the Hall of Famer.
Jordan once said he didn’t want to excel at 3-point shooting because it could hurt his game
‘This right here,’ one fan wrote. ‘Basketball used to be ball movement, great passing & watching athletes fly through the air. Nobody wants to watch 80 30 point shots during a game. No more athleticism on display.’
For his part, NBA commissioner Adam Silver believes a league of cookie-cutter offenses is a bad thing, although he stopped short of blaming the problem strictly on 3-point shooting.
‘The answer is yes, [we are having] many discussions about the style of basketball [being played],’ Silver said in December, as quoted by ESPN. ‘I would not reduce it to a so-called 3-point shooting issue. I think we look more holistically at the skill level on the floor, the diversity of offense, the fan reception to the game, all of the above.’
But as far as the game’s popularity, Silver didn’t seem too concerned.
‘I think the game is in a great place,’ he said. ‘I love watching the games, and I think we have some of the most skilled athletes in the world competing — and it’s unfair, I think, to the players to lump them into categories as 3-point shooters or a midrange shooter or big man playing under the basket. It’s an amazing game.’
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