BASKETBALL: Ian Katz
TO the uninitiated spectator, basketball often seems like a game in which scoring points is simply too easy. With teams typically sinking more than 40 baskets per game, individual feats of brilliance tend to get lost in a blur of attacks and counter-attacks. There is hardly time to savour a gravity-defying dunk at one end before some player has drained a three- point shot from an improbable distance at the other.
But this season the refrain, echoed by NBA fans, coaches and veteran players alike, could not be more different. They have been preoccupied by a perplexing question: why can’t players shoot straight any more? In a sport that is reduced to statistics, it is easy enough to understand the source of their consternation. Earlier this month, the average number of points per game scored by NBA teams was 95, the lowest level since the mid-Fifties when the “shot clock” was introduced to force teams to attack more. So severe is the league’s scoring drought that only a handful of teams are averaging over 100 points per game, a mark that every single club in the league exceeded as recently as 10 years ago.
The nadir of the NBA’s scoring slump came in November when the Orlando Magic, once one of the most free-scoring teams in the league, managed to scrape together just 57 points in a game against the Cleveland Cavaliers. It was the lowest total recorded by any team in 42 years.
The breast-beating over basketball’s constipation is particularly intense because it comes as the NBA is celebrating its 50th anniversary. More worryingly, it comes as the league braces itself for life after Michael Jordan, the one-man team who has been the league’s top scorer for most of the past decade.
Though attendances have dropped only slightly compared with last season, just about everyone agrees that low scores spell bad news for basketball.
There have been as many theories about the cause of the NBA’s mysteriously falling scores as there are fans of the game, and established stars such as Jordan have been quick to point the finger of blame elsewhere. Earlier this month His Airness suggested with characteristic good grace that the problem lay with the increasing number of players entering the league without serving a full apprenticeship in college.
“A lot of young kids are coming out early and don’t really understand the aspects of playing the game as a complete player. All they really see is what they lived on through high school.”
It is true that the shooting averages of some of the league’s new young stars are woeful. Of Jason Kidd, Jerry Stackhouse and Stephon Marbury, three of the NBA’s brightest youngsters, none was sinking more than 40% of his shots as of last month. It is also true that the expansion of the league from 23 to 29 teams over the past decade has spread the pool of top-class talent thinner. But there is a flaw in both these arguments: if there are fewer good attacking players in the league, there are presumably fewer good defenders too, so you might reasonably expect the two factors to cancel each other out.
Ironically, it may be that the league’s most recent attempt to increase scoring has contributed most to the problem. Before the 1994-95 season, the NBA moved the arc outside which successful shots score three points two feet closer to the basket.
The idea was to encourage more long-range, high-scoring shots. It worked – only too well. But since players score with far fewer long-range attempts than short-range shots, the overall effect has been to lower total scores.
At the same time, a number of relatively mediocre teams such as Cleveland and Miami have made a speciality of slowing games down and holding their opponents to very low scores.
All of which may simply be evidence that the NBA, at 50, is finally coming of age. After all, can you name a grown-up sport in which the fans do not hanker after better days?