ORLANDO, Fla. — Declining TV ratings. Endless fourth quarters thanks to timeouts, replays and clock stoppages. One-sided blowouts. A new December tournament format struggling to compete with the NFL colossus.
I’m talking, of course, about college football. Back in my day, there was real variety — Oklahoma won a national title running the wishbone! — but now everyone plays the same way. It’s all about passing, and whoever throws it better wins. No wonder ratings are down.
(*Sound of record scratching*)
You were expecting something else?
With every cannon in the hot-take canon seemingly firing on the issue of the NBA’s popularity, or lack thereof, recently, I thought it was time to share some of my grievances with the current discourse.
Let’s start here: I saw an awesome NBA game on Saturday night. The Orlando Magic came back from 22 points down in the fourth quarter to stun the Miami Heat behind the improbable backcourt combination of Cole Anthony, Trevelin Queen and Cory Joseph, with Anthony playing the role of Michael Jordan for an evening.
What’s notable about that is how not-notable it was. I feel like I’ve seen my fair share of awesome games this season, both in-person and on TV, and that’s pretty much been the case ever since the league decided at last season’s All-Star break that it was going to chill on calling so many fouls when players drive to the basket. The result has been some of the most watchable, entertaining and stoppage-free basketball of the last quarter century.
That, to me, is the story: that the league enacted a fairly sudden change to make its product massively better. An underwhelming postseason likely prevented many people from noticing, especially the generalists who parachute into the NBA in April.
That is why I find the current discourse about the game so strange. Very Serious People seem deeply concerned about the NBA’s TV ratings, which is odd since the league just got $76 billion for an 11-year deal for its media rights. Oh, no, what if Jeff Bezos loses money on this? More seriously, those declines have been across every non-NFL sport, including college football.
The entire canon of hot-take cannons seems bizarrely targeted on the idea that the NBA is losing popularity because of where people shoot from. No, not because of the many other problems the league has fixed over the past few years — most notably a massive three-shot foul grifting epidemic but also including excessive clear-path reviews and transition take fouls. No, not because of the injury and player availability issues that remain a vexing problem. No, we’re worried about … shot distance?
Yes, the increase from 39.5 percent of shots coming from 3 in 2023-24 to 42.4 percent coming from 3 this season is notable, though it’s mostly imperceptible to the naked eye when watching a single game. The story isn’t what type of shots are being taken, but how those shots are generated.
To wit: This season’s uptick in 3s is just the latest evolution in replacing all the 20-foot shots with 22-foot shots, and otherwise does little or nothing to change your viewing experience. Check out this excellent story, for instance, by Couper Moorhead on how Miami’s Tyler Herro changed his game to weed out 2-point jump shots and replace them with 3s; he’s gone from taking 3.7 pull-up 3s per game to 4.8, and he might end up making the All-Star team.
Similar stories are playing out all over the league, particularly with the younger generation of players. Zach LaVine, for instance, torched the Celtics on Thursday night with a series of 3-point pull-ups that likely would have been 2s before this season.
As a result, somehow it’s been decided the NBA’s real problem is that the league has replaced this …
… with this:
This is an important distinction when people talk about “too many 3s”: Shots at the basket are the same, and dunks — the most exciting play in the game — are the same 4.7 per team per game that they’ve been for the past two seasons. That may seem counterintuitive, but more 3s equal more spacing, which in turn equals more runway for dunks.
Eight different players are taking more than six pull-up 3s a game; that number was three a year ago and “James Harden” as recently as 2018-19. As with the example of Herro and LaVine above, the changes have mostly served to make some talented-but-frustrating players into more terrorizing versions of the same talents.
I think the better, more pertinent question is: Where are the limits on this? Is the whole league going to be playing Joe Mazzulla ball in five years, with 55 percent of their shots coming from 3? Or are the Celtics unique and so skilled that they can’t be replicated, much like how Harden’s crazy 3-point pull-up rate from the latter part of the last decade (12.1 pull-up 3s per game in 2018-19!) still hasn’t been touched by any of the players in the current era? I’ll add a second question: Should we be concerned if everyone imitates the Celtics? Are we not entertained watching Boston?
And with that, I’ll give Orlando coach Jamahl Mosley the final word on this, because he made a salient point before the game on Saturday: All of this is subject to change by forces we have a hard time predicting.
“I think the game is always going to change,” he said. “There’s always going to be ebbs and flows to the game. The game is going to be cyclical, and in those moments, you have to go with the flow of some of it.”
Rules Geekery: Get rid of the ‘Whiplash’ challenge
Because the NBA never makes a rule without an unintended consequence striking later, it’s long past time we talked about what I’m calling the “Whiplash” challenge. This was an entirely predictable and preventable, unintended effect of the so-called “Jaden McDaniels rule” on replay challenges implemented after the Western Conference finals last season.
To review, the rule change allows officials to retroactively call fouls on out-of-bounds challenges, so that a team couldn’t lose possession on review because of a missed foul. The intent here was correct; the inspiration was a play late in Game 2 of the West finals when Minnesota’s McDaniels was clearly fouled by Dallas’ Kyrie Irving, but by rule, the refs couldn’t call one after the fact and thus were forced to declare that the ball was out off McDaniels.
The problem is that the fix unnecessarily went half a step too far by calling a foul, rather than merely stating that a play could not be overturned if it was caused by a foul. As a result, we now have the heretofore impossible situation of a challenge leaving a team worse off than it was before challenging the call. That can be the case even if the challenge was sensible, such as one that involved a 50-50 foul call that was missed, for instance.
We’ve already seen several instances of coaches inadvertently sticking their own teams with fouls (and sometimes gifting free throws too) as a result of these challenges. The latest victim was Miami on Saturday night, toward the end of the Heat’s epic fourth-quarter meltdown in Orlando.
With 4:14 left, Dru Smith reached in on Cole Anthony and knocked the ball free; officials called it out off Miami, but the Heat thought it was off Anthony. They challenged, and the refs determined that the ball went out because Rozier fouled Anthony, and thus gave Rozier a foul. (The low-key funniest moment, after the game, was Anthony, who already had one tech at the time, telling people in Orlando’s locker room he was getting thrown out if the challenge was upheld.) It didn’t result in free throws, but it did give Orlando a few extra seconds of shot clock and put a fifth foul on Smith.
What’s funny is that the G League has a much simpler fix for the same problem: Officials won’t overturn an out-of-bounds call if it was caused by a foul. That accomplishes the goal of solving the McDaniels-type cases, while minimizing the unintended consequences of retroactive foul calls.
Hopefully the NBA will reconsider this over the summer and enact this same change for next season.
Rookie of the Week: Kel’El Ware, 7-0 C, Miami
(Note: This section won’t necessarily profile the best rookie of the week. Just the one I’ve been watching.)
Kel’el Ware hadn’t played in nearly a month before Saturday, but with Thomas Bryant traded and Kevin Love out, we got a good look at him Saturday during the Heat’s otherwise disastrous evening in Orlando. And it wasn’t Ware’s fault either: He was a plus-26 in his 14 minutes, making all four shots from the field, grabbing seven rebounds and blocking two shots.
The rookie big man was an All-Summer League selection and was thought to have the inside track for backup center minutes in Miami heading into the year. Instead, he only played in 10 brief cameos during the first two months of the season before Saturday. Ware’s longest outings came in two appearances in the G League for Sioux Falls, where he performed quite well, but he somewhat surprisingly wasn’t assigned for the Winter Showcase in Orlando.
That made more sense when Heat coach Erik Spoelstra announced before Saturday’s game that Ware would be playing. Apparently they decided he was ready. And that, he was.
Ware is long and mobile and can be a rim protector on defense who provides vertical stretch capability at the offensive end. He also has some shooting touch. Watch here, for instance, as he comes off the corner to smash Tristan da Silva’s drive into the hardwood then runs the floor for a transition dunk:
Ware still needs to make better choices on when to go for blocks. He had a JaVale McGee-like awful goaltend in the third quarter and probably should have had another on one of his two blocks. (Orlando’s Wendell Carter Jr. was ejected protesting the call.) Also, with his thin frame, Ware can still struggle with physicality. That said, seven boards in 14 minutes was a good sign. Watch here as he fends off Orlando’s Goga Bitadze under the basket then snags a one-handed traffic rebound:
The overall takeaway from Saturday is that Miami should probably continue to force-feed Ware backup center minutes whenever it can. That may not be every night when Love and Bam Adebayo are healthy, but Ware-Love combos are also possible, and Miami’s other frontcourt bench options don’t seem particularly inspiring at this point.
Prospect of the Week: Dink Pate, 6-8 SG, Mexico City Capitanes
(Note: This section won’t necessarily profile the best prospect of the week. Just the one I’ve been watching.)
With the G League Winter Showcase in Orlando this past week, NBA scouts got a chance to take a closer look at Dink Pate, the draft-eligible guard who ended up in Mexico City this season after the G League Ignite program was shut down. Given the distance involved in getting to most of his other games, talent evaluators grasped this opportunity enthusiastically; no game I went to this weekend had anywhere near as many NBA personnel in attendance as Pate’s first game of the Showcase on Friday against Rip City.
GO DEEPER
This NBA Draft prospect can’t wait to meet LeBron, but a G League stop in Mexico is first
He chose quite a day to have arguably the best game of his career. Pate’s shooting has always been suspect (26.5 percent career in his two G League seasons), but he went on a heater that included four straight second-half 3-pointers on his way to a career-best 26-point effort, to go with six rebounds, four assists and three steals. That included a couple off-the-dribble chances where he showed complex footwork getting into his shot, even if the motion up top remains clunky.
In the biggest picture, Pate is an interesting player because of his intersection of size, age and athleticism. He won’t turn 19 until March and is listed at 6-foot-8 and has easy elevation off the ground that he showed with an early-game transition Statue of Liberty dunk.
Dink Pate is on the move and throwing it down with authority!😤
Tune in LIVE to catch the @CapitanesCDMX take on Rip City Remix on ESPNU pic.twitter.com/BDtb89OgaK
— NBA G League (@nbagleague) December 20, 2024
Scouts also noted that Pate seemed to have lost some extra poundage from a year ago. The question is how much juice he can have as an on-ball player, and whether his shooting can become reliable enough to make him consistently threatening off the ball. Pate can dribble, but he has struggled to break down opponents in the half court, and it doesn’t help that they go under all his ball screens. That’s why his shooting performance on Friday was such a good sign: It boosted him to 40.4 percent from 3 on the year, albeit on low volume. From the line, he’s at the exact same 72.7 percent mark he made a season earlier.
That said, his game on Friday was a pretty clear outlier … as he proved the next day. In Mexico City’s loss to Wisconsin, Pate shot 1 of 7 from the field and finished with a pedestrian five points in 16 minutes. If this were the NBA Scouting Combine, his agents would have shut him down after that first game, but that’s not how things work in the Showcase.
For the season, Pate’s numbers have hewn more closely to the second game. His stats aren’t tragic, especially compared to other 18-year-old one-and-dones who have come through G League Ignite, with an 11.8 PER and notable jumps in both his steal and rebound rates, but he’s also shooting just 44.3 percent inside the arc and has more turnovers than assists. His whole stat line, however, is a marked improvement from the G League Ignite disaster of a season ago, when he frequently played at point guard and was totally overmatched in that role.
Overall, Pate projects as something of a project for whatever team picks him, but he shows enough promise that he will almost certainly be gone in the first 40 picks. The enthusiasm from Friday presumably will wane by draft night six months from now, so his second half of the G League season should be a heavily determinant factor in whether he can push into the first round.
(Photo of Tyler Herro: Maddie Schroeder / Getty Images)
