Day 268

Fresh Start_268: Fixing Playoff basketball
The days of the 86-82 slug fests in the playoffs are over. Late last night I got a notification on my phone and I just laughed and showed my grandmother. What it said was “Warriors:136; Spurs:100.” Honestly I can’t fathom how that can possibly happen in a playoff basketball game, but it happened and will continue to happy. The Warriors last night went 18/37 from behind the arc, while San Antonio went 8/23. I’m not a mathematician, but that’s 60 three-point attempts in one game last night. 26 of them fell which turns into 78 points. Basketball is truly a game of math and attempting more three’s with the high volume shooters like the one’s Golden State has {Curry, Klay, and KD} is a recipe to play the “run & gun” style of offense.

236 points sound like a total that you would see as the over/under number for a 90’s NBA All-Star game, and now is the total for a Western Conference Finals game (it doesn’t make any sense). Personally, I have never seen so many crooked numbers in the playoffs for as long as I have been watching basketball (roughly 13 years). I am used to scores barely reaching 100, and defensive battles that result in scores in the 80’s and 90’s. One of the many reasons for these scores it seems is that teams can’t defend the 3-point as well late in ball games, sometimes just not closing out. Trying to guard the many different pick and rolls/pops, and motion offense is hard enough as it is—with sometimes guys are just feeling it, but these score totals have to go down. We are talking about PLAYOFF BASKETBALL not a random Wednesday on a back to back in the middle of January or even the All-Star game {this years’ final total 374}, teams have to continue to play for all 48 minutes.

I don’t mind sounding like an old man, but allowing a team to score 136 points on you should atomically eliminate you from the playoffs. Yes, if  you make 15 three’s it will amount to more points than if you took 15 two’s, but the NBA learned how to guard the 15 two-pointers so they forced teams to stretch the floor—ultimately making the league better from the 3-point line. If I had an answer on how to defend it and lower the totals, well let’s just say I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this, but I do think it is time the NBA forces teams to go back inside and value the 2-point shot more.

If teams focused on locking down the 3-pointer with “small-ball” lineups on the floor, the game would slow down and revert back to the old-school way of playing basketball, right before it went back to throwing up 3’s again. The word I’m trying to get at here, is the league as a whole needs to BALANCE the 3-point attempts that their taking by having the defense force them to limit the shots. If you do that, the crooked scores would go down, the games would become tighter, and the “quest for 16-0” would become more and more difficult. In other words better, more entertaining basketball, and isn’t that what we truly want?
Sources:(nba.com)

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