This article presents a readable overview of today’s NBA trends, but IMO is too absolute in its judgment. Basketball is not a solved sport. There is still innovation, for example with OKC’s historically good defense that relies on playing 5 smaller but faster players. There are still good all-around players. There are still people that hit a lot of mid range shots. We have trends going the other way, sure, but they have their own set of tradeoffs and are neither a total solution nor totally embraced in the NBA. Teams will continue to evolve based on the talents of people at their disposal and their own innovative ideas.
In my opinion, the real problem with the NBA is that we no longer get the marquee matchups in the Finals that we used to during the 90s and 00s, mainly because the season is too long. An 82-game grind isn’t sustainable - it practically guarantees that stars like Giannis, Luka, or Jokic (or their key teammates) will get injured to the playoffs or not at all.
The fact that we’ve never seen Embiid vs. Giannis in the ECF, and that we’ll likely never get Giannis vs. Jokic, the two best players during the 2020s, in the NBA Finals says everything you need to know and it's a bummer.
Aside from 2021, I can’t remember another truly competitive finals where both teams had a real shot at winning. Maybe Boston wasn’t expected to fall so hard against Golden State, but matchups like DEN vs. MIA, BOS vs. DAL, or LAL vs. MIA felt lopsided—one team stacked with talent, the other never really standing a chance.
At this point, injuries, not players or teams, are deciding who moves forward.
> At this point, injuries, not players or teams, are deciding who moves forward.
Football is kinda like this at this point too. Some fraction of the top QBs are going to go down each year, and it feels like a limp to the finish.
That being said, somehow Wilt Chamberlain once played a season in which he only missed 8 and a half minutes total in the entire season, including OT. Amazing. Times have changed but that will never happen again now.
Soccer is slowly getting there. You play for your club in the series, the cup, some europa cup, now also the world club cup, then there's matches with your national team, world cup etc. They are now even contemplating having the world cup more often.
Having more games is an quick way to make more money, but in the long run it waters down the product.
> Wilt Chamberlain averaged more than 48 minutes a game during the 1961-62 NBA season, where he played an average of 48.5 minutes per game; this is considered one of the most remarkable feats in NBA history.
The real problem is the amount of ads and game breaks. Everyone knows basketball is about the fourth quarter so the league has backloaded ads. Now it routinely takes 20-30 minutes to get through the last 6 minutes of a game. Completely breaks the flow of the best part of the show. Second problem is that with the play in 2/3 of the teams make the post season so there is little incentive to try for a top seed anymore.
This is an interesting point. All the breaks also make it so that players get less tired from a cardio standpoint, are able to further exhaust their muscles, and leads to more injury.
I agree with the breaks, but there is a lot of incentive to make the guaranteed playoff seeding. You might only have a one game chance to make it into the playoffs otherwise.
It's weird because almost all of the levels below the NBA are better games than the NBA. Nobody really goes out of their way to follow AAA baseball teams, but college basketball and even some high schools are great games.
The pet theory is that the NBA is a RNG for gambling now the game isn't really the game. TV is near death, so gambling is the only source of revenue that can possibly replace the big TV deal.
My theory is that it’s only a matter of years before the Saudi’s launch a league. It’ll scoop up a large swath of international players including NBA superstars. Jokić becomes very famous and wealthy.
This is why I don’t comment on the internet anymore. You exist in the alternative reality in which every back and forth is a polarized ridiculous showdown.
Jokic is not famous outside of basketball. The Saudi’s would make him so wealthy he’d seem poor today by comparison.
I agree with your point and response. This activity of being players overs to new leagues run by Saudi or adjacent countries has been huge in almost every major sport. Some with much more success than others.
I think a big reason we don't have competitive finals is generally not having a harder salary cap and allowing max for contracts. If a player really is that good they should take up 50% of the cap and to balance it out have terrible other players.
Anything else allows stacking value above cost and leading to team imbalances.
The real problem is the players don’t give a sh*t about the fans any more. You need no better example of that than the All star game tomorrow. In the 90’s it was an amazing, competitive game between the best players in the league. Now…the players can’t even be bothered to jog up and down the court. Load management: players claim their bodies are delicate and can’t play too many games. Why would I want to buy tickets to a game or watch on TV if there’s a good chance the stars aren’t even playing. Guys the 90’s played every game. Players now sign a 5 year contract and the next day ask for a trade. Look at Kevin Durant - great player, but has forced his way out of 3 teams and it’s about to be a 4th. Too much guaranteed money means too little incentive.
If the players don’t care about us, why should we care about them?
They've gotta change up the all star format then. NHL didn't do all star stuff this year; instead they're running a pseduo-national teams tournament with NHL players, and the four teams are all top players playing really hard. I don't know if there's enough non-US players in the NBA to do the same thing, but it's an idea.
The 90s All Star games were 160-150 affairs and had all sorts of sideshows. And players should absolutely maximize wealth which includes protecting their health. And there has never been a time when every person played all out, that’s just nostalgia creeping up on you.
I think the difference is that teams are more cautious because they don't want a season disrupted by a major injury. Zion the other day said that the Pelicans were the limiting factor in his sitting back-to-backs. Players frequently come back on minutes restrictions (Kawhi previously, Exum currently).
"Only 3s and layups" is the current easiest strategy to build a proficient offense, but it's certainly not the only way.
You don't even have to look far for an example. The Denver Nuggets won a championship a year and a half ago while nearly attempting the fewest 3s in the league.
> In the past, the team built its roster around a big name like Shaq. Most of the offense were from the center. This has now changed...
Is the author not aware of Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, (Wembanyama... soon)? The winners of the last 6 MVP awards? If there were enough talented bigs to go around, every team in the league would be building around them because it works really, really well.
wow really? Did soccer also go through a statistical revolution? I don't watch soccer at all and am pretty surprised to hear this. Did all the teams converge on a winning solution?
because of the structure of soccer (completely different to basketball, it is an invasion sport but statistically very dissimilar), it has completely reversed the ordering of the sport
there is significantly more strategic diversity, and teams that were unable to compete ten years ago are now able to compete effectively with wealthier teams (there is no catchup mechanic in soccer unlike US sports, ffp rules have also played a role but in the EPL at least the primary factor has been smaller teams using their budget more effectively)
the most recent changes have been: premium for coaches (distinct from managers) has increased significantly and a greater focus on set pieces (but this is going back to the future, twenty years ago EPL had a period where teams did this to level the field...today, they are doing this and it appears to be permanent).
it is also worth adding, i would say the majority of clubs that have tried a naive statistical approach have failed. Liverpool tried and are leading but are completely reliant on one player, Arsenal are doing better but reliant on set plays and their recruitment has been poor (they have had a stats team for over ten years at this point), the teams that have done well with stats (Brighton and Brentford) have a hybrid approach (and Brighton is further down the road with this, and have done significantly better...they use non-public resources far better, integrated with sport science, etc.)
if stats in soccer is a 90-minute game, we are still at minute 5
he has changed strategy multiple times based on team composition
possession-based at Barca, more pragmatic at Bayern, first City teams used wing-backs and insane attacking then acquired more defensive players and went back to suffocating opposition
playing out from the back is ludicrous only because teams who are unable to play that way insist on doing it, and the credibility of that strategy as a global minima has already passed (largely due to the issues Burnley had last year and Spurs/Southampton had this year)
this year has proved that there are multiple ways to win. imo, the most boring manager is Arteta who does the defensive stuff without (almost) any attacking players (and is, thankfully, failing...the worst thing would be a manager playing like a Serie A side and winning)
Pretty much all teams play more or less the same style of building up with the goalkeeper because data shows that even though you suffer more goals it's offset by scoring more.
It seems like a very brief and abrupt article. I can understand the part about strategy of three pointers. But how does all the technology and analytics actually change the game, besides "improving form"? Has it allowed better calculation shots with the best odds for a given player? Has it discovered other team's weaknesses to exploit? Etc
Analytics leads to teams converging on the same strategy, at least on offense. The data makes it clear that you should almost never being taking mid rangers or running iso sets. So now those plays are gone from the game.
When analyzing non-computing problems through a computer science lens, the human element merely muddies the path to a concrete answer. It’s best to avoid that ambiguity and complexity.
I think that's unfortunate: the article still has that title, and knowing it wants to lead to such an absolute conclusion can tell a prospective reader if they are interested to be led down that path or not.
That approach to baity titles doesn't generalize, I'm afraid—neither to users nor to titles. In general, baity titles cause threads to fill up with responses to the provocation in the title, making for shallow and ultimately off-topic discussion.
It's standard practice on HN to replace these with titles that are more accurate and neutral, but we always try to do this using representative language from the article itself. Usually that's a subtitle, or the HTML doc title, sometimes it can be the URL slug, or even a photo caption.
Often there's a sentence at the start of an article that walks back the title and says what the article is 'really' about. It's as if the title 'takes' too much and then the article 'confesses' and gives most of it back. These walkback sentences often make good HN titles because they represent the article more accurately. That's what I used in this case.
You are right that it does not generalize: but in this particular case, it was really reflective of the article which was shallow itself (IMO at least).
So I guess that the rule doesn't generalize either, but I can at least understand the reasoning behind it and accept that it might work better on average — thanks for the explanation!
