Stat Inflation is Bigger Than Any of the NBA's (Many) Other Problems

who cares about a triple double anymore? who is thrilled by a 50 point game?

There’s a concept in competitive video game culture that holds that, at elite levels of play, players will ruthlessly optimize the fun out of the game. Once you start treating a video game like an actuarial phenomenon, once you chase ruthless optimization above all else, the enjoyment dissolves. What emerges is technically correct, maximally efficient, and utterly joyless. Well, the NBA may not be a video game, but the stars are putting up video game numbers every night, and the league has arrived at that exact sad state of affairs: optimization killed the joy. Gamers call it “the meta,” sometimes “the metagame,” meaning the dominant strategy that emerges when players optimize hard enough for long enough. The meta is, in concept, the most efficient path to winning; it’s also almost always the thing that kills the fun. The pattern is always the same: someone figures out the most efficient way to win, everyone copies it, diversity collapses, and spectators - who want to watch creativity, improvisation, and drama - find themselves watching the same solution executed over and over. The NBA has arrived at that exact destination. The analytics departments figured out the meta (“pace & space,” shunning the midrange, so-called called heliocentrism), every team copied it, and now the sport that once contained multitudes has been solved into a parade of pick-and-roll actions terminating in a corner three. This is undoubtedly the technically correct thing for teams to do. It’s maximally efficient basketball. And the games are unwatchable.

Complaints about the NBA have come so constantly for the past half-decade or so that dedicated fans and media members openly roll their eyes at them. Unfortunately, the problems are actually problems. Franchises openly tank for draft picks, fielding rosters designed to lose while fans pay full price for tickets. Healthy superstars sit out games under the euphemism of “load management,” treating the regular season as an inconvenience to be rationed. The foul line has been turned into a sport-ruining weapon, with players regularly contorting their bodies into defenders to draw whistles rather than actually shoot and score. The floor itself has been reduced to a crude layup or three binary, with the entire geography of the midrange (once the site of some of the most beautiful shooting in the sport’s history) cordoned off like a crime scene by analytics departments. Meanwhile, Luka Doncic and too many other stars like him don’t play defense and spend the entire game bitching at the officials. I find it brutal to watch.

But of all these ailments, the pace problem may be the most corrosive, because it operates invisibly, inflating every number on the stat sheet until those numbers mean nothing at all. Repetition is the enemy of wonder; the more you see a statistical accomplishment happen, the more it’s made routine, the less it means, to either casuals or diehards alike. The first time you see a player score 50 points, you remember it. The hundredth time, it’s box score filler you scroll past on your phone. A triple double was once a feat that felt remarkable. Now there seems to be a triple double every night of the season, and they happen more and more often in games where that accomplishment has limited effect on the outcome - which makes sense, given that there are so many more possessions now. That’s what the NBA is now, a league that has manufactured so many remarkable statistical accomplishments lately that they don’t feel like accomplishments at all.

Consider what it meant to score 40 points in an NBA game fifteen years ago. In the 2010-11 season, only 46 individual 40-point performances occurred across the entire league. Kevin Durant, who led the league in scoring at 27.7 points a game, tallied the most 40+ games with just five. Look, I get it: fans like scoring. Scoring is fun. And I don’t disagree with that simple way of thinking. But I certainly do think that we’ve passed a threshold where the game’s scoring feats have lost any luster thanks to endless scoring inflation. When a player crossed 40 back in the 2010s, you knew they were playing a great game and likely hitting their scoring peak for that season. When a player scored 50, it was a genuine event; the accomplishment led Sportscenter, you talked about it at work the next morning, it meant something. Here’s what’s happened in the decade and a half since.

data via Land of Basketball; orange years are shortened seasons

That leap that you see in the late 2010s corresponds with an incredible increase in the pace of play, that is to say, the number of possessions per game. There’s tons of useful graphs here documenting the phenomenon. (That piece is great in general and deserves your attention.) The bottom line of that piece:

the hand-check penalty implementation in 2004 dramatically sped up the game, diminished the size advantage of the biggest players, and ushered in the modern era, where smaller, faster guards rule the roost. Consequently, the game has become faster, not necessarily because teams believe speed alone leads to victory, but because the modern player's skill set and the strategic emphasis on 3-point shooting have reshaped the game's tempo. The rapid increase in 3-point attempts contributes to more rebounds, more possessions, and thus a quicker pace of play

This increase of number of possessions, and thus the amount of all counting stats, can clearly be seen in the way 40-point nights have become routine. In 2022-23, 57 different players scored 40 or more points in a game at least once, combining for 203 such performances over the course of the season. In 2024-25, the total was 139, turning what was once special into an almost-every-night phenomenon. (If you’re looking for data, start here with the 2000-2001 season.) The math isn’t complicated; no one questions the reality of the dramatically faster game. What gets far less attention is the way that this has all made once-striking accomplishments routine, the way that the whole enterprise is devalued. When everything is extraordinary, nothing is. A 40-point game now barely generates a shrug on social media. The widespread backlash to the Bam Adebayo 83 point game reflects a broad sense that something has gone wrong with the NBA, that the meaning inherent to gaudy scoring totals has disappeared. Here you had not a Hall of Fame player but a Hall of Pretty Good player riding a hot hand and the many absurdities of modern basketball, including endless foul shots (43 FTAs!) to the second-best scoring output in league history, and the reaction from many fans was a sense of boredom and unhappiness. That should tell you something.

Triple-doubles, those rare, multi-dimensional performances that once signaled transcendent greatness, have suffered the same fate.

The triple-double chart tells a very similar story. From 2000 to 2015, the league averaged roughly 35 triple doubles per season. By 2024-25, that number had ballooned to 149; Nikola Jokic averaged a triple-double for the entire season. The stat that was treated as a hallowed artifact of Oscar Robertson’s greatness, the feat Russell Westbrook chased with such exhausting single-mindedness, has become a routine Tuesday afternoon. Who cares about triple doubles in a league where there was an average of six a week last year?

This statistical inflation isn’t accidental; it’s the direct consequence of structural changes to how the game is played. In 2024-25, teams attempted 42.4% of their shots from beyond the arc, a rate that has never exceeded 40% in any full season prior. This has led to the league-leading Golden State Warriors attempting 45 three pointers per game. Compare that to 2004, when the Oklahoma City Thunder led the league by attempting 23.8 threes a game. And, again, there’s a vicious cycle at play, where more chucked three pointers leads to more misses and more long rebounds which lead to more quick transition attempts…. The league now averages approximately 101.9 possessions per team per 48 minutes, which would be the highest rate in 30 years of play-by-play tracking data. More shots, more possessions, fewer obstructions from defense. Of course the numbers look bigger! In 2003-04, teams averaged only 93.4 points per game; in 2024-25 so far, that figure has reached 115.3, which is only behind seasons from the 1960s, when the game was unrecognizable. A point scored today is simply worth less than one scored twenty years ago. You’ll note that, while field goal percentages are down relative to the high point in the 1980s, they aren’t appreciable worse now than they were a decade ago, even though threes are inherently lower-percentage shots. Why? Because the league has essentially criminalized defense with its ridiculously pro-offense whistle, which enables zero-rizz players like Shai “FTA” Gilgeous-Alexander to spasm their bodies and draw calls for it.

The deeper problem is what the three-point revolution has done to the texture of the game itself. Shaquille O’Neal has put the problem with the modern NBA plainly many times (here’s a good example) - stars driving towards helpless defenders who are afraid to play real D for fear of getting a foul, then kickouts to role players who jack a ton of long shots even with 30% career three-point FG%. There are no bad boy Detroit Pistons, whether of the 1989 or 2004 variety, because physical defense has been outlawed. There are no Grit & Grind Memphis Grizzlies because their slow pace and reliance on inefficient two-point shots have been steadily eliminated from modern basketball. The diversity of offensive action that made the sport compelling (post play, midrange craftsmanship, isolation creativity) has been replaced by a monoculture of corner threes, pull-up threes, and off-screen threes. Yes, the pick and roll is an essential part of basketball, but watching every team run the same sets over… and over… and over again became maddening. The league has trended away from the pick and roll recently, but only to an extent, and the fact remains that every team plays the same exact way, as emblemized by Kirk Goldsberry’s famous shot chart.

For the record: we all owe Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson an apology. For decades, their statistical achievements were met with a dismissive wave of the hand; those numbers don’t count the same way!, the argument went, because the pace of play was so fast in the early 1960s. Chamberlain’s 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds per game in 1961-62, Robertson’s triple-double average across an entire season, all of it came with an asterisk (or so critics said) because teams were running up and down the floor at a frantic clip, generating more possessions and thus inflating individual counting stats beyond what later, slower eras would produce. That is a fair and analytically defensible point. What is not defensible is the near total silence from those same corners of basketball discourse when it comes to the modern game. Today’s NBA is played at the fastest pace in roughly thirty years. Teams generate more possessions per game than at any point in the modern era, and players launch three point attempts at a volume that would have been considered science fiction fifteen years ago. By every metric those critics applied to Wilt and Oscar, today’s 40-point games and triple-doubles should be drowning in caveats and asterisks. All of those 50+ point games, the half-dozen weekly triple doubles… if we applied the exact same reasoning that was applied to the stars of yesteryear, those accomplishments would be similarly devalued. Surprise surprise, they’re not! The same analysts who spent years “well, actually”-ing away the accomplishments of some of the greatest players in the sport’s history have largely greeted the statistical explosion of the 2020s with silence or celebration. If pace of play was enough to discount a 50-point average in 1962, it’s enough to discount 203 forty-point games in 2023. You can’t have it both ways.

The NBA’s response to angst about the quality of play has been to look everywhere except in the mirror. When ratings have trended down, commissioner Adam Silver has cited cord cutting, election cycles, and streaming fragmentation. These are real forces, and they affecting all sports. But the NFL, with comparable structural challenges, is setting viewership records; major league baseball, meanwhile, has seen a renaissance of interest thanks to the introduction of the World Baseball Classic and a variety of rules changes that (prepare to be shocked) addressed the ways that analytics had made the game less entertaining. Silver seems utterly averse to ever really getting his hands dirty in that way. A core issue, as analysts have noted, is that the league and its players don’t value the regular season; there’s too many games, and the draft incentives firmly push middling teams to playing like genuinely bad ones, resulting in so many unwatchable contests. But even if you addressed that problem by lopping 10-16 regular season games from the schedule and perhaps through serious draft reform, both of which Bill Simmons has consistently fought for, without in-game rule changes you’re not addressing the core issue. You’re still facing the problem of a set of basketball best practices, developed through a hyper-optimization mindset, that produce the same rhythm of three-point heaves, weakly-contested drives, and foul-hunting star players in every game, giving casual fans no compelling reason to tune in.

The solutions do not require turning back the clock to the mid-2000s era of hand-checking, star-brutalizing, and 78-76 final scores. That game was too slow, too physical, and too punishing to stars. Nobody is asking for that. But there’s a vast and entirely navigable middle ground between the clutch-fest of 2004 and the pace-and-space slot machine of 2026. The league should consider seriously reforming foul calls to permit more physicality; eliminating or relaxing the defensive 3-second rule; returning to a 24-second shot clock reset after an offensive rebound; and most consequentially, they should examine whether the three-point line should be made into a natural arc, not to eliminate the three-point shot entirely but to make it genuinely difficult again by getting rid of exploitation of the corner three, which is a completely arbitrary artifact of the dimensions of an NBA court. Perhaps in doing so they’d restore the midrange game and create the kind of shot-selection diversity that once made the sport compelling. But for God’s sake, do something! Try something!

I have more proposed rules changes - severely penalizing intentional fouls as part of an effort to improve the terrible end-of-game playstyle would be near the top of my list - but none of those changes guarantee a healthier league by themselves. Everything I suggest is, however, a good faith attempt to address the fundamental problem: a league that has allowed itself to be optimized into statistical meaninglessness. When 40-point games happen hundreds of times in a season, they aren’t milestones anymore, they’re just the weather, in much the same way that baseball allowed home runs to become ho-hums in the late 1990s. Baseball changed the rules then by outlawing steroids, and twenty years or so later, they changed the rules again to encourage baserunning and improve pace of play. The NBA has the opposite problem, in terms of pace of play, with the game having evolved into this relentlessly frantic style where getting into sets and running plays seems to have less and less impact every year, right up until teams start fouling in the fourth quarter and play grinds to a halt. But if the NBA has many problems, the league also has strengths: a game built to produce stars, some of the best athletes on the planet, compelling personalities, and the potential for genuine athletic drama. What the NBA lacks, right now, is the basic scarcity that makes any achievement feel meaningful. Statistics without stakes are just numbers, and right now, the game is drowning in both.