Fuck the Modern NBA

no, I didn't actually enjoy watching the Celtics breeze to a title by launching six billion threes a game, call me a charlatan

I think the next time someone asks me why I can’t stand the 2020s NBA, I’ll just say “Al Horford, standing at the three point line, ready to chuck.”

Horford, one of the oldest players in the NBA, recently won a richly deserved championship ring with the Boston Celtics. He played essential minutes for the team this season, valuable especially given that uber-talented but fragile center Kristaps Porzingis missed a lot of key games. (“Uber-talented but fragile” is something of a theme in the league these days.) I’m happy for Horford. I just don’t particularly like watching him play. Horford was once known for his lockdown defense and bruising interior game; though he was never a Zach Randolph-style post technician, his athleticism and strength allowed him to bully teams inside, and he had remarkable passing skills for a man of his size. Here in the twilight of his career, though, the Celtics asked him to do something else: constantly float to the three point line and shoot. This is remarkable, given his early career - for his first eight seasons, he shot fewer than .2 threes a game. But the NBA evolved, and quite quickly, in a way that’s been discussed to death - teams started jacking threes at a heretofore unthinkable rate, shunning the midrange jump shots that once defined the league. And so after never shooting more than a half a three a game, in the 2015-2016 campaign he started shooting three a game, and has not shot less than that since. A career 37.9% three point shooter, Horford misses almost twice as many threes as he takes. But that’s winning math in the NBA.

And I’ll tell you, I just hate to watch it! Look at that form. More to the point, I just hate watching the modern NBA, where teams have made the correct tactical decision to just launch and launch and launch three-pointers and in so doing made the project frequently unwatchable. A three-heavy offense is inherently a decision to trade shooting percentage for overall efficiency; coaches and GMs expect misses, even welcome misses, so long as the team is constantly shooting from behind the line. Again, to be clear, I’m not doubting that this is a good strategy. I am doubting that it’s any fun to watch. Missed shots are a big part of the game, but there’s something uniquely dispiriting about watching missed three after missed three after missed three. And every indication is that teams are simply going to double down more and more on the longball, chucking and chucking and chucking their way to victory. Of course, threes mostly don’t go in - league average three-point shooting was 35.1% this year. And with the average number of threes per game going from less than 14 in the 1999-2000 season to more than 35 this past season, that’s a lot of missing! A lot of missing. Like, a lot. A lot a lot. So, so much missing.

Objectively, this is all very effective. Aesthetically, it’s a mess. And it points to this weird defensiveness I’ve seen about the Celtics and their championship, from pretty much everywhere. This New Yorker piece is a good summation of it all - it’s downright touchy about the idea that there’s anything less than appealing about this year’s champion, a notion that’s been repeated over and over again in this year’s playoffs and since. But I’m afraid I have to fall on my sword and admit it myself: I see nothing to enjoy in this Celtics team, and despite a quantitatively dominant regular season and playoffs, they don’t feel dominant to me at all.

The term “dominant” is an aesthetic one, an emotional one, not an objective one. But that’s OK because I have an aesthetic and emotional relationship to sports. The Celtics might be better than the 2000 Lakers in L-V@RP, but watching Shaq throw giant men around without appearing to really try and then destroying the rim, again and again, is just always going to be more impressive than watching Jayson Tatum chuck another missed three. Sorry. So is watching Michael Jordan attack the hoop ruthlessly, so is watching Hakeem Olajuwon put opposing centers in a blender, so is watching Steph Curry and Klay Thompson shooting threes at ungodly percentages with their impeccable form. That’s what dominance looks like. Jayson Tatum on a three-on-one break pulling up to clang yet another awkward three off the front rim, and doing so because that’s what he’s been explicitly coached to do, doesn’t look like dominance. It looks like an ugly, boring war of attrition. And I don’t care that it’s effective. I don’t care. I’m not a GM. The point of being a fan is not to be a mini GM, despite what Twitter would have you believe. The point of being a fan is to watch and enjoy the product, and I don’t enjoy the product. It’s frenetic, there’s no rhythm, and it gives me exactly the feeling I get when a middle infielder who weighs 180 pounds sopping wet takes a wild hack and flies out with a 3-1 count because he’s been taught to prioritize launch angle. Do you really want to be baseball, NBA? Do you really?

And of course this is all made so much worse by the Sneering Haughty Condescending Better-Than-You NBA Hipster White Guy Dipshit (SHCBTYNBAHWGD) media industrial complex. The NBA media is fucking plagued by these guys who seem to have no interest in the world they hold more holy than letting you know how much smarter they are than you. I wrote a piece titled “How the NBA Became a League for Snobs” eleven whole years ago. In that piece I wrote about this maddening tendency of NBA media to attract the kind of guy who needs everyone to know that he’s that kind of guy, someone whose appreciation of basketball can only exist in contrast with the idiot schlubby know-nothing ordinary NBA fan of his imagination. Somehow, it’s gotten worse. I mentioned the backlash to Lebron James and “The Decision” debacle in that piece. As I said, the idea that James took universal heat for it all and didn’t have any defenders was transparently nonsense; almost every glasses-clad NBA hipster was vigorously defending James. They were doing it because of the perception that James had no defenders. That is, of course, the heart of hipsterdom, the need to counterpose all taste against what’s taken to be the inferior public taste, even when (especially when) the hipster holds a belief that’s actually quite popular.

As time goes on, these tendencies deepen. I complained about Zach Lowe in that now decade-plus old piece. I said that I thought Lowe was gifted at explaining basketball, which made it all the more grating that he expressed himself with such theatrical disdain for everyone who disagreed with him about anything. Every single media appearance Zach Lowe does, there’s some part where he theatrically sighs and looks around like he can’t believe what an idiot his interlocutors are, like there’s not a single soul on planet Earth who ever bothered to think carefully about the NBA before. It’s so tired and boring. I’m sorry you find it so terribly troubling to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to analyze a game for a living, brother. If you find it so hard to deal with the existence of people who disagree with you in that domain, you should switch domains. I hear there’s money to be made in crypto. I’m thrilled that horrible poet and self-impressed gasbag JJ Redick has taken a job with the Lakers so that I don’t have to watch him (as often) rolling his eyes in grim condescension at everyone who dares to question him on any subject, ever. The recently-departed Jerry West had a PER 8 points higher than Redick and was, you know, actually transcendently good at basketball, but he had half the “basketball IQ” of Redick, or something. Have fun next January when you’re six games under .500 and the Athletic runs a 5,000-word piece about players rebelling against your coaching style with an “anonymous” Rob Pelinka quote about how you weren’t ready, JJ.

Now the “I’m angry at my dad, and I live now, so basketball now has to be so much better than any time in the past” crowd is coming up with horseshit arguments for why Michael Jordan didn’t deserve his Defensive Player of the Year Award. Hey, Tom Haberstroh: are you familiar with the phrase “isolated demand for rigor”? Because you’ve just put on an absolute clinic in that regard. If you want to make the analysis you think you’re making, you have to do the same exact analysis for every other player of meaningful comparison. Including Lebron James. And if we’re doing that, we have to do it for every aspect of the game. Go look at Lebron James’s assist totals throughout his career and then look at how many “assists” he’s been awarded, at home or on the road. I think you’ll be surprised! Of course the world’s biggest dipshit, attention-begging charlatan Nick Wright, has admitted that he directed Haberstroh in this regard. Guys: first, address whatever beef it is you have with your dads, and second, have the integrity to admit that in about three years you’re going to say that Lebron was always an overrated scrub and that you always knew Victor Wembanyama was the GOAT-to-be. And right after he retires he’ll be a talentless scrub too, because this is about your need to believe that the time period in which you’re alive is the most important time in the history of the universe. I’m sorry your dad never stopped talking about how great Clyde Drexler was. Please, move on.

HOW FUN! NOTHING IS MORE FUN THAT A RELENTLESS FOCUS ON LOCKSTEP ATTACHMENT TO RIGID STATISTICAL EFFICIENCY!

It’s just a brutal, brutal sport to enjoy right now. The product gets more and more boring over time. Every team plays identically, and that’s statistically true, so don’t fight me on it. The pundits are obsessed with being smarter than everyone and they won’t allow any challenge to their most sacred nostrum, which is that the league has never had more talent. Perhaps this is true, in some objective sense, but I don’t watch basketball with a protractor, and this supposedly incredibly-talented league sure is full of guys like Donovan Mitchell and Anthony Davis and, yes, Jayson Tatum, who it’s simply impossible for me to be inspired by. Yes, I’m sure Davis has more midichlorians than Shawn Kemp and will rate far higher on the Ringer’s Top 1000 list that Kevin O’Connor will be working on until he’s 80. Cool. If you’d rather watch Davis shoot another half-hearted three and then complain to the ref than watch Shawn Kemp, I don’t know what to say to you other than “eat shit.”

OG Anunoby for TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN MILLION DOLLARS. Golly! Wowsers! Someday, we’ll be able to say “I watched him play.”

The basic modern equation of the sport, sacrificing shooting percentage for shooting volume due to the game’s broken rules and bad incentives, means that you’re constantly rooting for guys who shoot 30% to jack those shots relentlessly. And if your power forward keeps clanging brick after brick and you say “stop taking those shots,” I promise some self-impressed fuckface at Buffalo Wild Wings will launch into an hour-long lecture about how you just don’t understand the modern game. Do you think that the NBA should maybe move the line back a little bit to rebalance the game? Idiot. Do you think someone should tell the NBA the definition of an “arc” and point out that that’s not what they’re painting on their courts? Moron. Do you think that amending the rules to address bad incentives baked into them for the good of the game is part of being a sports league? Dumbass! What’s that sound I hear? Oh, right, that’s Luka Doncic, yelling at a ref while a guy rated 72 overall in NBA2K blows by him like security at a college football game when the fans rush the field.

[touches earpiece] I’m told Nikola Jokic has just called into SportsCenter from Serbia, specifically to remind everyone that he hates basketball and gets no joy from playing it and would rather be doing anything else

Here’s a coach obsessing over the three-pointer breakeven threshold for a C-level high school girl’s basketball team. If I only I was allowed to complain without a certain kind of dude screencapping it for mockery purposes! Look, the league just signed a massive deal so that Amazon - you know, the name you love and trust when it comes to NBA coverage - can serve ads to all four quadrants of your screen at the same time. The salary cap is going up. The salaries are going up. Things are good! Adam Silver has been vindicated. The All-Star game is going to be played on a Slamball court from now on, so that’s nice. Shams and Woj get more ink than All-Star players, and playoff games get absolutely fucking wrecked by the second round of the NFL draft in the ratings. Champion coach Joe Mazzulla says that making shots doesn’t matter, just taking them. (Imagine, caring about making shots! What year is this?) James Harden, somehow, has not been jailed for his crimes against basketball. The league’s three biggest stars are 39, 36, and 35 years old. Ratings are low, national interest is anemic, the next generation of stars are sullen dicks from the former Soviet bloc or guys who appear hell-bent on derailing their careers with gun crimes or play for Minnesota. Kawhi Leonard has been a pioneer in the “just skip the actual meat of having a great career part” space. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander sure is gifted, a real joy. Hope you enjoy watching Isaiah Hartenstein shoot threes! What could be wrong with any of this? Why would anyone miss Patrick Ewing or Allen Iverson? Who am I to blow against the wind?

The Mavericks, the loser in this year’s Finals, shot the second-most threes in the league. The Celtics shot the most. It’s only gonna get worse, and if you don’t like it, JJ Redick will come to your house to shake his head in disgust. Good times.

CLANG!