We are generally dunces in love with the nostalgia of weird counting stats that were never that important (seriously batting average where walks don't count as an at bat). We are unfortunately addicted to deciles (triple double meaningless a 10 is just a number between 9 and 11). But the NBA issue is simple - 3 pointer is not 50% harder than a 2. And corner 3 is too close. Easy enough to eliminate the corner 3 by cutting the line.
You realize though you're doing exactly what the article says though, right? You're stripping a fun stat (batting average) because it's not mathematically optimal
Agreed with all. Seems like the NBA is right now where baseball was before the implementation of the pitch clock and the shift ban.
Ever read Andrew Sharp's stuff? His newest suggestion is provocative but I love it: impose an age limit of three years after high school just like the NFL. After all, players can get paid in college now, so it's not like you're forcing them to stay poor.
This will allow the NBA and NCAA to develop stars in tandem.
“once you chase ruthless optimization above all else, the enjoyment dissolves. What emerges is technically correct, maximally efficient, and utterly joyless.”
The NFL got lucky in a way. The things the nerds discovered (go for it on fourth down more! Try more two point conversions!) tend to make the game MORE interesting. In the NBA and MLB the analytics made the game less interesting.
More convoluted but not impossible, NBA JAM rule three don’t count as threes until you as a team, or maybe even a single player, make three baskets in a row. (Pipe dreams)
Getting rid of the three would fuck up basketball as a whole. Not to mention we shouldn't forget there are places other than the NBA this game is played....
Lower the value of the 3 point shot to more accurately reflect its relative difficulty to a normal FG. Adjust it every few years depending on the change in the relative percentages. Totally solves the issue. Who cares if you have games ending in scores of 101.7 - 98.4 or whatever.
Regarding fouling at the end of a game, a team being fouled should be able to decline a foul, and take X seconds off the clock with a free inbounds play.
You mentioned competitive video games at the top, and one thing to note is that developers of long-life competitive video games *regularly* tweak the rules of the game - not just to remove the most extreme anti-fun strategies, but to fight “meta fatigue” and keep the game fresh
I’m most familiar with League of Legends, which was released in 2009 and still has a massive player base, healthy e-sports scene, etc. Could write essays on it - and I’m sure some people have - but from a continuous development perspective, it’s pretty fascinating. The developers have a challenge that imo is pretty unique in video games - because the e-sports teams play on the same version of the game that all of us plebs, they need to keep the game fun for dads, but with a level enough playing field to support actual professional play.
Takes a ton of work because even minor changes can result in unintended consequences - so they tweak it every two weeks, with lengthy patch noted documenting and explaining every single change (even like “attack damage for character 161 reduce by 2 points at level 1”)
Usually it’s minor stuff, sometimes a really anti-fun strategy emerges (usually from professional play, trickling int casual) - there are bunch of examples over the years, but one last year players started deliberately ignoring the pre-set “positions” to create 2v1s at the start of the game.
It was interesting for about a week, but awful to play even on a team that was winning with it, because you don’t really get to play the game. Two of your teammates are winning 2v1 (not challenging), and one of your teammates is getting destroyed 1v2 (miserable). The rest are forced for the first 10 min to pray that their 2v1 wins harder than their 1v2 loses. Usually that was game deciding in the first 10 min.
Game developers saw this and patched it out in about a month.
The idea that you’d just leave it in because the rules permit it and we need to tolerate any emergent strategy - no matter how tedious or even actively frustrating to watch or play - would be insane
I can give a million other examples, some involving pretty fundamental changes to near core gameplay
Loving the idea of Adam Silver issuing quarterly season patches. In NBA 2025-2026 season v.1.3.11, every Thunder basket is reduced by half and every Wizard basket gets a 2x multiplier.
"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."
Oh, boy, wait until you hear about speedrunning, the weird non-competitive variant of that. (Yes, the same speedrunning that faux-philosophical right wing nerds tried to pigeonhole as being a form of queer expression a while back, even though it remains overwhelmingly straight dudes who speedrun.) Speedrunning used to be very interesting as a concept, especially as an offshoot of sequence breaking (i.e. finding something that allows you cut through a portion of the game) older games. There were a lot of cool milestones back in the day that seemed legitimately interesting and often fun: Bypassing the barrier to Ganon's Castle in Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, Iceless in Mega Man X, among others. There also seemed like fun things to do for older games that only mostly had their coding together, whether it was going out of bounds, zipping through stages, leveraging odd timing and such. Tool-assisted speedruns performed exploits otherwise impossible by humans to make things go even faster.
But then it just became an optimization thing like everything else, which ruined the weirdness that made it interesting. A lot of the old games have been optimized to fucking hell and back, and what new optimizations exist seem to shave at most a minute off the total time. People now pore into the game's code for clues on how to optimize, which is kind of stupid and feels like a weird form of cheating? Newer games, devs are often well aware of what speedrunners can do and either pander to them (often to the detriment of the game's design and/or casual gamers) or fight them (and as we all know, nerds can fucking bitchy as fuck whenever their thing is *ruined*). That's to say nothing of games that seem explicitly designed for speedrunning themselves.
And then there's arbitrary code execution (ACE), which really ruined a lot of older speedruns: Basically doing an arbitrary set of movements and button presses on specific frames so that you can *hack* the game, typically to end it (or do some weird BS). People who defend ACE say it's a a super cool way to cut a lot of time, but that's only the first time you pull it off. And the thing is, it really cuts away from the viewing experience: You watch someone do something weird for a few moments, then suddenly credits! And often the ACE occurs so early on, what makes these speedruns so compelling to watch in the first place is completely lost. For example: ACE in Super Mario World allows you to reach "The End" (not even credits) in less than 60 seconds, occurring entirely in the first level.
Speedrunning has become so dull now because the optimizations became all that matter. Many of the runners I used to watch barely speedrun anymore, either doing modded forms of games they play or just quitting the scene all together because of it.
I greatly enjoy going to basketball games in person at my local Uni but cannot stand the NBA at all. Star players do so much grandstanding that I can't take it seriously as an athletic contest. Back when I was in high school and college it seemed to me that the difference between better players and worse players at my level and a step up was that they knew how to foul people without the ref calling it and I can't help but see that dynamic at work in basketball.
I agree with a lot of you are critique and changes and I would be happy to see them them implemented. I think the problem might be larger than that, though. Your changes certainly would result in less statistical anomalies, but I'm not sure it would make the game any less homogenous. Because of the moneyball mindset at most coaches and general managers they would just figure out what the optimal way to play is under the new rules and then because this is a copycat league everybody would just emulate that.
I hate scrolling down to the very bottom of the comments, thinking I’ve got a point no one else has made, and then at the very bottom BAM it gets bogarted.
Basketball is simply too easy to optimize. Baseball even more so. Football is too complex, soccer too hard to execute well, I don’t understand hockey enough to have an opinion.
Best you can do is optimize for an appealing-looking playstyle. Today’s isn’t terrible in some ways, lots of good passing. I’d rather crack down on fouls than the three-point line or whatever.
What's really jarring is these days I can watch a ~40 point game and quite frankly barely notice it. It's not hard to figure out why--these days they're often the result of hitting 8+ threes and/or getting to the line 15+ times. I'm aware these are efficient shots, but they generally do not leave much of a mark on the viewer (with obvious exceptions for the kind of Steph explosion where he hits 10 3s and they all seem to be from outer space).
These performances are still impressive in a narrow sense, but they just aren't as aesthetically dazzling as the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink performance a guy used to have to put on to get 40.
I'm a Knicks fan, and while Mikal Bridges' contact-averse, relatively low 3PA game irks the hell out of me because I know how suboptimal it is, I think back a lot to his 41 point performance on Christmas of 2024.
It was tied for *86th* in terms of single-game points scored in the 2024-2025 season, but I'll be damned if it wasn't a much better viewing experience than most of the ones ahead of it. He hit 17 of his 25 FGAs, 6 of his 9 threes, and...he was ONE FOR ONE from the free throw line. It was a virtuoso performance in genuinely contested shot making. I'll take it any day over that Bam Adebayo monstrosity.
I don't watch a lot of NBA games, but I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that it seems like a "traveling" violation isn't really a thing anymore. I saw a clip of a guy moving roughly two thirds of the court to the basket while making one dribble, a few days ago.
It ain't just basketball. Some 1930s auto designer pointed out that cars designed in a wind tunnel all end up looking about the same.
We are generally dunces in love with the nostalgia of weird counting stats that were never that important (seriously batting average where walks don't count as an at bat). We are unfortunately addicted to deciles (triple double meaningless a 10 is just a number between 9 and 11). But the NBA issue is simple - 3 pointer is not 50% harder than a 2. And corner 3 is too close. Easy enough to eliminate the corner 3 by cutting the line.
Batting Average isn't a counting stat, it's a rate stat
That's my bad. Mixing my frustration on old school stats that should never have been in play.
You realize though you're doing exactly what the article says though, right? You're stripping a fun stat (batting average) because it's not mathematically optimal
Agreed with all. Seems like the NBA is right now where baseball was before the implementation of the pitch clock and the shift ban.
Ever read Andrew Sharp's stuff? His newest suggestion is provocative but I love it: impose an age limit of three years after high school just like the NFL. After all, players can get paid in college now, so it's not like you're forcing them to stay poor.
This will allow the NBA and NCAA to develop stars in tandem.
https://sharptext.net/2026/what-the-nba-could-be-getting-from-college-basketball/
“once you chase ruthless optimization above all else, the enjoyment dissolves. What emerges is technically correct, maximally efficient, and utterly joyless.”
Modern life in a nutshell.
The NFL got lucky in a way. The things the nerds discovered (go for it on fourth down more! Try more two point conversions!) tend to make the game MORE interesting. In the NBA and MLB the analytics made the game less interesting.
Simple: get rid of the 3
More convoluted but not impossible, NBA JAM rule three don’t count as threes until you as a team, or maybe even a single player, make three baskets in a row. (Pipe dreams)
Interesting thought, basically making strategy a series of prop bets.
Getting rid of the three would fuck up basketball as a whole. Not to mention we shouldn't forget there are places other than the NBA this game is played....
Lower the value of the 3 point shot to more accurately reflect its relative difficulty to a normal FG. Adjust it every few years depending on the change in the relative percentages. Totally solves the issue. Who cares if you have games ending in scores of 101.7 - 98.4 or whatever.
Regarding fouling at the end of a game, a team being fouled should be able to decline a foul, and take X seconds off the clock with a free inbounds play.
Piece of cake.
You mentioned competitive video games at the top, and one thing to note is that developers of long-life competitive video games *regularly* tweak the rules of the game - not just to remove the most extreme anti-fun strategies, but to fight “meta fatigue” and keep the game fresh
I’m most familiar with League of Legends, which was released in 2009 and still has a massive player base, healthy e-sports scene, etc. Could write essays on it - and I’m sure some people have - but from a continuous development perspective, it’s pretty fascinating. The developers have a challenge that imo is pretty unique in video games - because the e-sports teams play on the same version of the game that all of us plebs, they need to keep the game fun for dads, but with a level enough playing field to support actual professional play.
Takes a ton of work because even minor changes can result in unintended consequences - so they tweak it every two weeks, with lengthy patch noted documenting and explaining every single change (even like “attack damage for character 161 reduce by 2 points at level 1”)
Usually it’s minor stuff, sometimes a really anti-fun strategy emerges (usually from professional play, trickling int casual) - there are bunch of examples over the years, but one last year players started deliberately ignoring the pre-set “positions” to create 2v1s at the start of the game.
It was interesting for about a week, but awful to play even on a team that was winning with it, because you don’t really get to play the game. Two of your teammates are winning 2v1 (not challenging), and one of your teammates is getting destroyed 1v2 (miserable). The rest are forced for the first 10 min to pray that their 2v1 wins harder than their 1v2 loses. Usually that was game deciding in the first 10 min.
Game developers saw this and patched it out in about a month.
The idea that you’d just leave it in because the rules permit it and we need to tolerate any emergent strategy - no matter how tedious or even actively frustrating to watch or play - would be insane
I can give a million other examples, some involving pretty fundamental changes to near core gameplay
I understand that NASCAR does something similar, regularly tweaking the rules mid-season to keep races competitive.
Loving the idea of Adam Silver issuing quarterly season patches. In NBA 2025-2026 season v.1.3.11, every Thunder basket is reduced by half and every Wizard basket gets a 2x multiplier.
"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."
Oh, boy, wait until you hear about speedrunning, the weird non-competitive variant of that. (Yes, the same speedrunning that faux-philosophical right wing nerds tried to pigeonhole as being a form of queer expression a while back, even though it remains overwhelmingly straight dudes who speedrun.) Speedrunning used to be very interesting as a concept, especially as an offshoot of sequence breaking (i.e. finding something that allows you cut through a portion of the game) older games. There were a lot of cool milestones back in the day that seemed legitimately interesting and often fun: Bypassing the barrier to Ganon's Castle in Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, Iceless in Mega Man X, among others. There also seemed like fun things to do for older games that only mostly had their coding together, whether it was going out of bounds, zipping through stages, leveraging odd timing and such. Tool-assisted speedruns performed exploits otherwise impossible by humans to make things go even faster.
But then it just became an optimization thing like everything else, which ruined the weirdness that made it interesting. A lot of the old games have been optimized to fucking hell and back, and what new optimizations exist seem to shave at most a minute off the total time. People now pore into the game's code for clues on how to optimize, which is kind of stupid and feels like a weird form of cheating? Newer games, devs are often well aware of what speedrunners can do and either pander to them (often to the detriment of the game's design and/or casual gamers) or fight them (and as we all know, nerds can fucking bitchy as fuck whenever their thing is *ruined*). That's to say nothing of games that seem explicitly designed for speedrunning themselves.
And then there's arbitrary code execution (ACE), which really ruined a lot of older speedruns: Basically doing an arbitrary set of movements and button presses on specific frames so that you can *hack* the game, typically to end it (or do some weird BS). People who defend ACE say it's a a super cool way to cut a lot of time, but that's only the first time you pull it off. And the thing is, it really cuts away from the viewing experience: You watch someone do something weird for a few moments, then suddenly credits! And often the ACE occurs so early on, what makes these speedruns so compelling to watch in the first place is completely lost. For example: ACE in Super Mario World allows you to reach "The End" (not even credits) in less than 60 seconds, occurring entirely in the first level.
Speedrunning has become so dull now because the optimizations became all that matter. Many of the runners I used to watch barely speedrun anymore, either doing modded forms of games they play or just quitting the scene all together because of it.
as long as SGA is considered a star in this league I will not be watching. what an obnoxious playstyle, what an unlikeable team
I greatly enjoy going to basketball games in person at my local Uni but cannot stand the NBA at all. Star players do so much grandstanding that I can't take it seriously as an athletic contest. Back when I was in high school and college it seemed to me that the difference between better players and worse players at my level and a step up was that they knew how to foul people without the ref calling it and I can't help but see that dynamic at work in basketball.
I agree with a lot of you are critique and changes and I would be happy to see them them implemented. I think the problem might be larger than that, though. Your changes certainly would result in less statistical anomalies, but I'm not sure it would make the game any less homogenous. Because of the moneyball mindset at most coaches and general managers they would just figure out what the optimal way to play is under the new rules and then because this is a copycat league everybody would just emulate that.
I hate scrolling down to the very bottom of the comments, thinking I’ve got a point no one else has made, and then at the very bottom BAM it gets bogarted.
Basketball is simply too easy to optimize. Baseball even more so. Football is too complex, soccer too hard to execute well, I don’t understand hockey enough to have an opinion.
Best you can do is optimize for an appealing-looking playstyle. Today’s isn’t terrible in some ways, lots of good passing. I’d rather crack down on fouls than the three-point line or whatever.
Please go on Ethan Strauss's pod to talk about this.
What's really jarring is these days I can watch a ~40 point game and quite frankly barely notice it. It's not hard to figure out why--these days they're often the result of hitting 8+ threes and/or getting to the line 15+ times. I'm aware these are efficient shots, but they generally do not leave much of a mark on the viewer (with obvious exceptions for the kind of Steph explosion where he hits 10 3s and they all seem to be from outer space).
These performances are still impressive in a narrow sense, but they just aren't as aesthetically dazzling as the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink performance a guy used to have to put on to get 40.
I'm a Knicks fan, and while Mikal Bridges' contact-averse, relatively low 3PA game irks the hell out of me because I know how suboptimal it is, I think back a lot to his 41 point performance on Christmas of 2024.
It was tied for *86th* in terms of single-game points scored in the 2024-2025 season, but I'll be damned if it wasn't a much better viewing experience than most of the ones ahead of it. He hit 17 of his 25 FGAs, 6 of his 9 threes, and...he was ONE FOR ONE from the free throw line. It was a virtuoso performance in genuinely contested shot making. I'll take it any day over that Bam Adebayo monstrosity.
I don't watch a lot of NBA games, but I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that it seems like a "traveling" violation isn't really a thing anymore. I saw a clip of a guy moving roughly two thirds of the court to the basket while making one dribble, a few days ago.
Lawn vacated, cloud insulted.