Fair or not, the predominant narrative surrounding the 2024-25 NBA season has been that it has been kind of boring. Or, perhaps more broadly, that the NBA has been trending downward for some time, and now that the holy trinity of superstars that had been holding the league aloft (LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant) is starting to fade, it's just becoming more apparent than ever. Or, if you're an extremist, nobody is watching basketball, the sport is dead and the NBA will surely fold in the coming months.
That last bit is obviously nonsensical, and basketball is far from the only sport dealing with ratings issues in a changing media landscape, but there is a palpable frustration among fans right now that can't really be denied. People are concerned about the future of the sport and the NBA's perceived inaction toward addressing what is currently wrong with it. Some of the things they're concerned about are more actionable than others. The NBA should shorten the schedule. Most would agree that doing so would improve the quality of the product. It's never going to happen for financial reasons. But style-of-play concerns could plausibly be addressed.
The biggest so far this season? The 3-point boom. The average NBA team is taking 37.5 3-pointers per game this season. That's up from a record of 35.2 set in the 2021-22 season. In context, it's amazing it took that long for the record to be broken. After all, the NBA set a high every season between the 2011-12 campaign and that 2021-22 high mark. The defending champion Boston Celtics are on pace to become the first team in NBA history to attempt more 3-pointers than 2-pointers. It's not going to be close, either. As of this writing, the Celtics are taking 11.1 more 3s per game than 2s.
Boston is an extreme, of course. The second-place Bulls take 7.4 fewer 3s per game than the Celtics do. But recent NBA history has taught us that what we once thought of as extremes when it comes to shooting are more often harbingers of what is to come. Nobody thought Mike D'Antoni's Suns, Daryl Morey's Rockets or Stephen Curry's Warriors would become the new norm in the moment. Now, we know all of them to be pioneers.
Do all of these 3s necessarily make the NBA less exciting? There's plenty of data showing that, on balance, most of these triples are replacing mid-range jumpers, not exciting plays at the rim. But the micro trends are concerning. Anthony Edwards is perhaps the most exciting young driver in the NBA. He's taking 10.2 3-pointers per game this season, up 3.5 from a season ago, but he's taking 1.8 fewer shots in the paint per game. There are roster circumstances dictating that trend, but fans want Edwards attacking the basket, not shooting far away from it.
What about older stars? Do we want an NBA in which Russell Westbrook's twilight is spent jumping from disappointed contender to disappointed contender largely because he can't shoot? Are we creating an NBA in which certain types of once-productive players can no longer be viable? Think of how quickly former mainstays like Tony Allen and Roy Hibbert got played out of the NBA. They're not especially exciting players, but diversity in playing styles is important. It's harder to get by doing the dirty work anymore. As the NBA's popular shift away from unencumbered offense in the second half of last season proved, fans like balance. You can argue the degree to which any of these concerns can be traced back exclusively to 3-point volume, but it's undeniably on the mind of both fans and basketball luminaries.
No less an authority on the sport than LeBron James acknowledged the issue last week when he was asked about the declining quality of the All-Star Game. "It's a bigger conversation," James said. "It's not just the All-Star Game, it's our game in general. Our game, there's a lot of f---ing 3s being shot." While commissioner Adam Silver refused to go so far, he did acknowledge fan concerns that offenses are becoming "cookie cutter" and that the NBA is looking into it.
"The answer is yes, [we are having] many discussions about the style of basketball [being played]," Silver told reporters before the NBA Cup final between the Bucks and Thunder on Dec. 17. "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."
The NBA has never been shy about changing rules to make the game more entertaining. Remember, the NBA didn't even add a 3-point line until the 1979-80 season. There have been a seemingly endless supply of ideas to fix this, but it is a delicate situation. Any rule change meant to address league-wide shot-selection would have unforeseen consequences that cascade down across the entire rest of the game. So let's go through a dozen of the most prominent proposals out there and rank them from most nonsensical to most reasonable. Which ones are potentially viable? What are the possible downstream effects of each? The NBA is in no rush to make changes, of course. But these are the sort of factors it will need to consider if it ever does.
12. Eliminate the 3-point line altogether
Well, you isolation truthers have been aching for a return to the mid-range glory days of yesteryear, and this would give it to you. In a world without a 3-point line, but with a modern understanding of spacing and basketball geometry, teams would pack the paint to hitherto unimaginable degrees. Dunks would die. Layups would die. Anything remotely near the paint would disappear from the game. Barring enormous changes to the rules governing defense, NBA games would effectively turn into mid-range shot-making contests. It's hard to say any single rule change could destroy a sport, but this one might actually pull it off. Fortunately, few if any critics of the modern game are actually suggesting it. Even if 3-point volume has gotten out of hand, the existence of the 3-point line itself is universally considered a net positive for the game.
11. Make dunks worth three points
This idea sounds fun at first. Dunks are the most fun play in basketball, aren't they? Shouldn't we be incentivizing them? Well, interrogate it for even a moment and you start to see the problems. As exciting as, say, a poster from Anthony Edwards is, those aren't the majority of dunks. No, to find a guard on the dunk leaderboard this season, you have to go all the way down to No. 20, Amen Thompson. There are a smattering of forwards above him. Mostly, it's centers. Those centers are, to put it mildly, not the kind of ultra-powerful dunkers you'd enjoy rebuilding the game around. Ivica Zubac ranks fifth in the NBA in dunks this season. He is not Shaq. The primary way most of these big men get their dunks is through pick-and-roll lobs. Do we really want to make half-court offense more heliocentric by encouraging top ball-handlers to focus even more on the two-man game? We obviously don't want to encourage inefficient post-ups.
There would be a few notable beneficiaries here. If dunks counted for three points, Giannis Antetokounmpo would be averaging 36.8 points per game. There aren't many players like him, but think of a healthy Zion Williamson, or anyone else of that ilk who might emerge. We'd be giving them superpowers. The surprise beneficiary? The Oklahoma City Thunder. There's no easier way to generate dunks than generating open-court turnovers. Do we want teams gambling for steals more often than they do? That's not as clear cut. More gambling likely leads to more ball movement designed to punish defenses when they fail. That's a good thing. The most common end result there is probably more open 3s, which we're trying to discourage.
Here's a pickle: how exactly are we defining a dunk? We've never had to do it before because points have never depended on a definition. The dictionary definition is to "score by shooting the ball down through the basket with the hands above the rim." What if someone throws the ball through the rim like Dwight Howard did in the 2009 Dunk Contest? What if someone fumbles the ball through the rim on a clear dunk attempt? Do you trust officials to make the distinction in the moment? Are we introducing more replays to the game? Nobody wants that.
What about safety? Think about the precarious circumstances under which many layups in traffic are attempted. Do we want players thinking that they should be trying to dunk those balls? That seems like a recipe for a lot of contact, awkward falls, ill-advised contortions and scary landings. The NBA's injury problem is rampant enough. The league could help on this front by allowing players to hang on the rim, which is much more of a safety maneuver than a taunting gesture anyway, but that would only go so far.
This is a fun concept. It just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If the NBA wants more dunks, there are better ways of creating them.
10. Move the 3-point line back
Let's start with the obvious: there isn't enough space on the court to move the corners back. We're going to talk about the corners in a few other sections, so I won't go into too much detail beyond saying that the NBA probably isn't going to change the physical dimensions of the court. So for our purposes here, we're talking about the rest of the arc.
At its deepest point, the NBA's 3-point line is 23 feet, nine inches away from the basket. Last season, 270 players attempted at least 100 3-pointers. That is an arbitrary number, of course, but it's round and easy to work with. Let's say we move the line back. Here's how many players attempted at least 100 shots from each successive foot we add to the line:
| Number of feet from the basket | Number of players to attempt at least 100 shots 2023-24 |
|---|---|
24 | 230 |
25 | 201 |
26 | 114 |
27 | 36 |
28 | 7 |
29 | 2 |
30 | 0 |
In theory, this gives us a bit of a roadmap. Move the line back to 24 or 25 feet and shot diets change only slightly. At 26 feet, the change is more pronounced. At 27 or more feet, it starts to fall off of a cliff. So potentially, the NBA could just decide roughly how much it wants shot diets to change and move the line accordingly, right?
Well, no, because the players who shoot 3s consistently aren't monolith. Moving the line back a foot or two isn't going to change much for, say, Stephen Curry. It changes everything for other players, who are able to exist in the NBA largely because they are making relatively short 3-pointers. Those players aren't just going to shoot from the same distance for fewer points. They'd get run out of the league with all of the other mid-range specialists if they did so. No, they'd just move back and shoot from further away. And that creates major problems because, obviously, other shooters are not Stephen Curry. If they shoot from further away they're just going to miss.
The average NBA player shot 36.6% on 3-pointers last season. At 25 feet or longer, that number falls to 35.5%. At 27 feet or longer, it falls to 33%. Those numbers might not seem significant on their face, but at the scale we're talking here, they mean quite a bit. We want certain players shooting from the logo. For the most part, these shots get meaningfully worse, and if defenses no longer think they need to defend the 3-point line quite as vociferously, we get a lighter version of the effect we covered above in potentially removing the line altogether: more defense at the rim, so fewer layups and dunks. So this one creates a double-whammy. More missed jumpers. Fewer exciting plays at the basket. Oh, and a sizable dead zone added to the court where nobody is going to want to shoot.
9. Cap the number of allowable 3-pointers
The concept here is that after a team either attempts or makes a certain number of 3-pointers, either within a prescribed time period (a quarter, let's say) or the entire game, any shot from behind the arc only counts for two points. We can write this one off with one scenario. Say a team is down three points with a few seconds remaining, but has hit their maximum allowable amount of 3s. We don't want them to have a chance to tie the game? Of course we do.
Sadly for this proposal, there are a number of other problems with it. The first is one we've covered several times by now: take away the 3-pointer as an option and suddenly defenses just pack the paint. Therefore if a team hits its maximum early, suddenly it not only loses possible points from deep, but it becomes much harder to score at the rim. Now, you might argue that this could be a positive. The downside to losing the 3-point possibility would be so overwhelming that teams would have to be more judicious about when to attempt them. Would this lead to players passing up wide-open looks? Would the best shooters force the issue just to make sure they reached the cap? The cap would basically have to be handled by quarter, because if it was a full-game number, nobody would ever try end-of-quarter heaves.
Here's another problem: three-shot fouls. Even if they are rare, the fear of them is a big part of what allows plays to develop late in comeback attempts. The league has enough of a free-throw problem late in games. This would only exacerbate it. Defenses would simply foul in the back court if they had any kind of lead. Independent of the shooting issue, the Elam Ending could solve that. One of the reasons the NBA hasn't adopted it is the confusion it would generate among fans. Imagine fans not knowing how many 3-pointers their team is allowed to take late in a game. It's the same issue. There are just too many downstream effects here for this idea to be viable.
8. Add a 4-point line
The concept of a 4-point line is fun on paper. In practice, the math of it would be extremely difficult to balance. For a 2-point shot to be worth an average of one point per possession, it would need to be made at an average of 50%. For a 3-point shot to be worth one point per possession, it would only need to go in an average of 33.3% of the time. For a 4-point shot to reach that same plateau, it only needs to go in 25% of the time. This creates a logistical nightmare, because scenario either creates a shot that is too easy or one that is too hard.
Remember, we just measured the accuracy of a 27-foot 3-pointer when we discussed moving the 3-point line back. A 27-foot 3-pointer goes in around 33% of the time. Therefore, if the line was 27 feet away from the basket, 4-pointers would be worth, on average, 1.32 points per possession. The greatest offense in NBA history, last year's Celtics, scored 1.222 points per possession, so that shot is obviously too valuable. Could we potentially keep pushing the line back until we land on a percentage that falls in line with the league's current average from 2- and 3-point range? Well... maybe? The danger you run into here is sample size. Once you go back to a certain distance, most of the shots from that range become heaves, so figuring out a fair point becomes pretty difficult.
The truth is that finding the right distance would probably require a ton of trial and error that couldn't take place in the G-League because the shooters are so much worse than they are in the NBA. Can the NBA really afford to spend years figuring this out? That's years of players either spamming a mathematically broken shot or, in an outcome that would probably be worse, players taking and missing a ton of these shots, which leaves us in a worse place than we're in now? Sure, there's a scenario in which the 4-point line is mostly ignored except by players like Curry, but this goes back to Antetokounmpo averaging 37 points per game in a world in which dunks are worth three. We'd be handing a superpower to a small group of players at the expense of the field.
So, is it possible that a 4-point line could help? I suppose, in that it could potentially stretch defenses further if it landed at the right place, thus creating more opportunities inside of the arc. But getting the line just right would be such a delicate process that the juice likely wouldn't be worth the squeeze.
7. Allow hand-checking behind the arc
This is a recent idea courtesy of Ethan Sherwood-Strauss. The thinking here is that if physicality increases behind the arc, players will be incentivized to operate more within it. We immediately have to specify that we are referring to on-ball contact. Increasing the amount of physicality defenses can get away with off of the ball impedes ball-movement, which leads to slower, less entertaining play.
Allowing hand-checking outside of the arc probably does cut down on ball-handlers dribbling aimlessly at the top of the arc before settling for the triple. That's not a bad thing, especially at the end of games. It also could serve to force the ball out of the hands of those stars earlier in possessions, forcing more ball-movement and incentivizing the league's best players (and, in many cases, best athletes) to improve as off-ball players. That's a potentially interesting outcome as well. The idea of, say, Edwards morphing into an elite cutter could create some very exciting plays at the rim.
The obvious danger here is that eliminating hand-checking once upon a time might have saved modern basketball. Does anyone want to see the Pacers and Pistons play more playoff games where the first team to 75 wins? OK, that's obviously an extreme, but remember, the NBA has already introduced more defense to the game through changes that came at last year's All-Star break, and the impact has been significant. NBA teams are scoring 2.2 fewer points per 100 possessions this year than they did last, which is the biggest scoring decrease since the 1998-99 lockout year. How much scoring are we really prepared to sacrifice?
The NBA is a stars league. The most exciting of those stars are the ones that create their own shots off the dribble. Impeding those players through increased physicality ultimately does more harm than good. The NBA just isn't going to be enthusiastic about making life harder for the players fans came to see. The idea does have some merit, but it probably does more harm than good.
6. Eliminate corner 3s entirely
Ah, the corner 3. The savior of the mediocre shooter. The average NBA player makes 38.4% of his corner 3s this season. That's only a shade worse than the 39.6% they are shooting on long 2s, which are of course worth one fewer point. The 3-point arc extends only 22 feet in the corners, meaning it is almost two feet shorter than the line is at its deepest point. As such, almost every NBA action includes at least one player parked in the corner. Often, shooters are stationed in both.
These are the least exciting 3s in basketball: mediocre shooters camped out away from the action waiting for a pass that takes the ball out of the hands of someone that is often doing something more exciting. It shouldn't be a surprise, therefore, that this is the shot many fans point to as emblematic of the wider 3-point shooting issue. This season, 24% of all 3-pointers have come from the corner. I think most fans would embrace an NBA with 24% fewer 3s. That would take the league to a shot diet somewhere between the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons. There are a number of other factors involved here, but that is right around the period most fans would agree the NBA last peaked.
The thinking here is that the 3-point line could just be redrawn so that it ends before we reach the corners of the court, but doing so creates all of the same problems we've covered with eliminating the line or moving it back... just not quite to the same degree. Removing the corner 3 doesn't just turn back the clock on 3-point volume a decade or so because those teams were using the space that the threat of the corner 3 created to attack the basket. The Warriors are perhaps the most famous jump-shooting team in NBA history, but the 73-win 2016 outfit also ranked 10th in the league in restricted area shots per game. They were an example of jumpers and layups working in concert. Remove the corners and that becomes substantially harder. Not quite as hard as it would be if there was no 3-point line or a line that was much further out, but enough that the effort ultimately causes more problems than it solves.
5. Allow teams to draw their own 3-point lines
While I would not personally advocate for this solution, this is the line at which I, personally, would start to at least consider trying some of these ideas in the G-League. Baseball stadiums all have unique dimensions. Soccer fields aren't standardized either, and the unique charms of individual playing environments are part of the fun of those sports. A home run in some stadiums is a pop fly in others. The Astros even used to have a hill in center field. No, I'm not advocating for anything that extreme in the NBA, but, at the very least, the concept of 3-point lines that are unique to each team does at the very least sound entertaining.
There would have to be limits, of course. The Bucks couldn't draw a tiny 3-point line right under the basket and contend that all of Antetokounmpo's layups now count for an extra point. But assuming there were reasonable limits applied to this process—say, a 3-point line that must be between 20 and 25 feet away from the basket at all points, but can otherwise deviate as much as the team likes—has a lot of fun potential. It would force teams to be adaptable. It would make home-court advantage more significant. It would even allow teams to build their rosters strategically to accommodate their own design. Would this necessarily cut down on the number of 3-pointers attempted? No. But one of the core problems with all of these 3-pointers is uniformity. This idea ensures that different teams would play differently.
That's our first problem, though, and it has less to do with the teams than it does the players. The NBPA would raise the obvious concern here that this approach could impact the earning power of its members. Imagine an elite corner 3-point shooter winding up on a team without corners, for instance. This wouldn't be a problem if players could choose their teams freely, but obviously, they don't, and by the time a player reaches unrestricted free agency, his reputation is close to cemented. Certain players in certain situations would lose tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars. That is a nonstarter even if that money legally has to be redistributed to other players. While NBA contracts are not a perfect meritocracy as it is, the NBPA would prefer to keep things as close to one as is reasonably possible. That starts with maintaining uniform court dimensions.
General managers and statisticians would probably have misgivings as well. How can you evaluate players under these circumstances? As a statistic, 3-point percentage individually would have no meaning. Baseball has ways of dealing with this, but baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team sport. Basketball is way too interconnected to judge players under wildly different circumstances. You're not just looking at an individual players shooting percentages in this case. You're trying to figure out how an entire offense is affected by the arc it is playing with. This probably leads to a lot of bad contracts and trades.
And then there's the matter of timing. How often would teams be allowed to draw their lines? Every year? Every game? Only once, when the stadium opens? The answer here changes the strategic component of this concept wildly. Imagine a team being locked into building a certain kind of roster in perpetuity because it settled on the wrong 3-point line a decade earlier. As unappealing as that sounds, would it be that much worse than giving fans whiplash by expecting them to adjust to new lines every year? This idea is fun. It's probably just a bit too radical to be realistic.
4. Shrink the lane
When George Mikan was dominating the early history of professional basketball, the lane was widened from six feet to 12 to slow him down. When Wilt Chamberlain arrived a decade later, the NBA countered his dominance by again widening it from 12 to 16 feet. That is where it remains today. The theory of widening it back then was that centers had such an inherent advantage based on their size that they needed to be forced to post up further away from the basket. Now, however, post-ups have mostly fallen out of favor, at least relative to their former dominance. The thinking here is that by shrinking the lane, perhaps back to the college size of 12 feet, would lead to a post-up renaissance.
The obvious question that follows would be whether or not we want a renaissance for post play. It's not exactly the most exciting form of offense, though it at least could encourage a bit more offensive diversity. Of course, if teams started doubling in the post more, that could just lead to big men kicking the ball out for more 3s. This concept would need copious testing at the G-League level to even measure viability, much less desirability.
It also comes with a number of obvious drawbacks. We've covered how some of these changes could make certain, modern superstars even more lethal. Well, shrinking the lane would make life substantially easier for big men like Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid. Now, even for them, post-ups aren't an especially efficient form of offense. For instance, even with passes included, the Nuggets are scoring only 1.117 points per possession on Jokic post-ups this season. That's nothing to write home about, and it shows how hard it is even for elite post players to score in the post at scale. But Jokic is already averaging 31 points and 10 assists this season, and Victor Wembanyama is coming. A few years ago, when DeAndre Jordan was a First-Team All-NBA selection, helping post play might have been a priority. Now? It's likely healthy enough.
And that's before you consider the defensive ramifications here. The smaller the lane, the easier it is for rim-protectors to camp out under the basket. Now, they have to step out every three seconds to avoid a three-in-the-key technical foul. Again, we have Wembanyama's future to consider here. Players are going to have a hard enough time scoring on him as it is. Allowing him to operate in an even smaller space could have serious ramifications. Still, the concept is at least interesting enough to warrant some testing.
3. Widen the court, make the 3-point line uniform
Here's one solution to neutralizing the corner 3: make the arc uniform. There's far less incentive to take corner 3s if we move the corners as far away from the basket as the rest of the arc. There's precedent for this one, too. The NBA adopted a uniform 3-point arc ahead of the 1994-95 season and kept it through the 1996-97 campaign. The catch? Instead of making the corners further, the rest of the arc was brought in. The 3-point line was a uniform 22 feet around. We know this approach can influence shot-selection because it led to the NBA's first true 3-point boom. League-wide 3-point attempts rose almost 55% immediately after the change, and when the NBA changed the arc back, they immediately fell over 32%. In basketball terms, this is a pretty elegant and reasonable change.
Here's the main problem: the NBA court is not wide enough to move the corners back. Think of how little space exists in the corners as it is. For this plan to work, the NBA would need to widen the court, and for that to work, teams would need to be comfortable potentially removing some seats and losing revenue in ticket sales to accommodate the extra space that the court would now need. That seems unlikely.
And then there's the possibility that this solution solves one problem but creates another. Sure, teams would no longer be quite as fixated on corner 3s, but a wider overall court means that there is suddenly more space that defenders need to account for. With enough shooting on the floor, this change could actually stress defenses even further and lead to more 3s, not less. This is the solution that would require the most strenuous testing at the G-League level. It is broadly plausible. But we just don't know what changing the dimensions of a basketball court would do to the game as a whole, and we'd have to find out before instituting a change like this on the NBA level.
2. Introduce a technical foul for three-in-the-corner
This is the solution to the corner 3 problem I'd endorse, pending a successful trial period in the G-League. Eliminating the corners entirely is too much of a drain on spacing. But putting a timer on their use? That feels like a fair compromise, and one that encourages player-movement and offensive creativity. By all means, draw up a play that generates a corner 3. San Antonio's hammer play is plenty exciting. But most fans could probably get behind the idea of preventing PJ Tucker from camping out in the corner for the entire shot clock waiting for James Harden to potentially pass him the ball.
The immediate obstacle here would be enforcement. Remember when the NBA instituted an in-game technical foul for flopping before last season? You could be forgiven if you didn't. After a brief period in which it was called frequently, it has largely been forgotten. One could argue that players are flopping less now because they know they can be whistled for it, but players know that flops are much easier to enforce than a three-in-the-corner technical foul would be because they come in the middle of the action. Monitoring players in the corner wouldn't be as high a priority for officials as watching the ball or the play develop. Three-in-the-key exists, but remember, there's only one key. There are two corners on opposite ends of the court. Realistically, the NBA might need to add an extra official to enforce this, and that costs money few leagues ever want to spend.
That's the only significant problem that would need to be solved for this to theoretically be implementable. It's a minor enough change not to completely redefine NBA offense as many of the other ideas we've covered above would, but a significant enough one to force teams to evolve in ways that have the potential to be fan-friendly. Three-in-the-key exists because nobody wants to see a center handcuffed to the rim. Well, nobody wants to see shooters planted in the corner either, so why not approach the problem in similar terms?
1. Change the scoring system
Every approach we've covered so far has involved changing the rules or playing surface in some distinct way. Whether or not they would work is a matter of opinion, but they're all fundamental changes to the game of basketball itself. Changing the scoring system wouldn't be. The rules would be the same. The court would be the same. The only thing that would need to change would be the numbers on the scoreboard.
Right now, a 3-point is worth 50% more than a 2-pointer. If 3-pointers were worth four points and 2-pointers were worth three points, the difference between shots behind the arc and shots inside of the arc would fall to only 33.3%. That may not make mid-range jumpers "good" shots, but it's a meaningful improvement. The average shot between 10 and 16 feet this season goes in 43.4% of the time and generates 0.868 points per possession. The average 3-pointer, on the other hand, goes in 36% of the time and creates 1.08 points per possession. The 3 is obviously significantly more valuable, but that gap shrinks if you change the value of the shots. Under the 3s and 4s scoring system, those mid-range jumpers are suddenly worth 1.302 points per possession while those shots behind the arc are worth 1.44. The longer shot is still more valuable, but the gap is small enough that a wider variety of players could suddenly justify taking mid-range shots again.
The further in you go, the better those numbers look. Ironically, we covered the ripple effects of making dunks count for three points earlier. Well, in this scenario, we're literally doing that, but without the crippling decline in spacing that would come if that were the only thing we were changing. Sure, a dunk generates fewer overall points than a shot behind the arc would, but dunk attempts obviously go in far more than 36% of the time. On a points-per-possession basis, dunks are more valuable than ever in this world, but the court circumstances needed to generate them are still in place.
There are two significant problems here. The first is less practical than optical. This change eviscerates the record book. Top scorers would suddenly start averaging 40 or more points per game. Someone would probably score 100 points in a game. Even if the ball isn't actually going in more often, it would be jarring for fans to tune in for a standard game to see a score in the 140s or 150s. Comparing players across eras would become far more difficult. This might not change the actual basketball being played on the court, but it absolutely changes the way fans engage with the game. That's an issue, but it's one fans would hopefully adjust to over time.
The more immediate issue is what to do about free throws. The NBA has enough of a downtime problem to give players an extra free throw every time they step up to the line. There have been proposals in the past for players to take a single free throw that would count for all of the available points. That might be a necessity, and if this rule change forces the NBA to consider that one more closely, this could wind up killing two birds with one stone as the pace of games does need to pick up.
Nobody is going to want to stick their neck out for a change this drastic. That is going to be true for any of the ideas we've covered here. But left unabated, league-wide 3-point volume is going to continue to rise. History has not yet shown us an upper-bound. Today, the Celtics are taking more 3s than 2s. Tomorrow, everyone could be doing it. Fair or not, fans don't seem especially enthused about that brand of basketball. The NBA is going to have to do something to stem the tide. It might be one of the things we've covered. It might be something nobody has considered. But this is basketball now, and it will remain basketball unless the NBA decides otherwise.
