There Are Too Many Threes

I am not an analytics hater, quite the opposite, and I am (almost) always in favor of innovation in sports. I grew up playing baseball and I always found a lot of so-called conventional wisdom to be anything but (bunting is for cowards and it’s stupid!). The Moneyball revolution was a huge victory for basic logic. A lot of people hate on analytics because they think it’s too complex, when most of it just boils down to “do what has long proven to be effective.”

But I must admit I have now found my breaking point, and it is 23 feet and 9 inches from the NBA basket. Steph Curry sparked a genuine revolution in basketball, and watching him rip team’s souls from their bodies with a barrage of three pointers is one of the greatest spectacles you will see in sports. That said, part of me hates Steph for showing the NBA the most efficient way to win, which is now destroying the sport.

It all boils down to expected value. If you shoot 33 percent from three and 50 percent from two, both yield an expected value of one point every time you attempt a shot (0.33 x 3 and 0.5 x 2 both equal 1). The problem is that per Basketball Reference, 102 players shot 50 percent or better from two-point range this year, while 155 players shot at least 33 percent from behind the arc. Generally speaking, it is easier for most players to get one expected point out of a three-point shot than it is a two-point shot. The math is clear: if you want to win, chuck up a bunch of threes.

Last year’s NBA Champion Boston Celtics are the poster children for this unimpeachable fact, and they more than anyone else are making me fall out of love with this sport. Look at this madness from their Game 1 loss against the New York Knicks. This is deranged. It is not basketball.

celtics 3rd quarter shot chart is insane

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— devin mcintyre (@devinmcintyre.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 8:53 PM

I’m not even a Boston hater (fuck the Patriots though). I lived there for nearly ten years and consider it my second home. I even like the Celtics and every time I attended a game at TDGarden I was in awe of what great basketball fans they have. Humility is admittedly not the city’s strong suit, but I always cheered on the Celtics because there are few fanbases in all of sports that I have been around who exhibit the passion and knowledge many Celtics fans do (WEEI callers exempted).

But no more. Watching Boston go down 2-0 to New York while clanging shot after shot off the rim has been music to my ears. This is what you get for turning the NBA Playoffs into three-point pop-a-shot night at White Horse Tavern (RIP). Boston still can win this series and even if they go down 3-0 tomorrow afternoon in what is likely to be the most raucous Madison Square Garden crowd this century, they still could be the first NBA team ever to come back from that deficit and win because as their head coach Joe Mazzulla said in 2022, “I love three-pointers. I like math.”

And I hate math now. Sure, some of this is my own sports bias coming into play, watching my beautiful Nikola Jokic-driven offense from the top of the key get turned into a relic by math nerds almost as soon as he lifted the NBA Finals MVP trophy, but aesthetically, chucking up a bunch of three pointers is just not fun to watch. Not to mention, it makes Steph Curry’s brilliance less resonant when Jayson Tatum and Derrick White are attempting almost as many three pointers and shooting a lower percentage while having greater success than Curry’s Warriors.

As the great basketball writer and data analyst Kirk Goldsberry notes, “An average 48-minute game now includes 75 shots from beyond the arc, up from 70 last season—that uptick is one of the biggest year-over-year increases in history.” For the first time ever this year, the NBA missed more three-point shots than two-point shots, and Goldsberry writes that the “rise of the 3 has caused a profound transformation in the way pro basketball looks and feels. In dozens of possessions per game, the ball doesn’t even touch the inside of the arc before the offense heaves it from deep.” Penetrating the heart of the defense in the paint is no longer one of the most important things a point guard can do, as defenses are now designed to chase people off the three-point line more than collapsing in towards players taking the highest percentage shot in basketball. Goldsberry is right when he writes that “the numbers don’t lie. It’s half basketball, half portfolio theory.”

The Celtics and Oklahoma City Thunder faced off earlier this year in a highly anticipated matchup between the NBA’s two best teams, and they shat all over the carpet, missing a combined 67 three-point attempts in 48 minutes, making fans like me wonder whether I was even watching a basketball game. If this is the future of the sport, I genuinely wonder how much of a future it has.

The league has become so extreme in its bid to please the math gods over the basketball gods that Daryl Morey, one of the “godfathers of the three-point revolution” said at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that “we have hit the point where [the three-pointer is] turning toward making the game worse.” These complaints are reaching the highest levels of the league, as NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said back in December that “the answer is yes, [we are having] many discussions about the style of basketball [being played].”

There is some good math news for us old men yelling at clouds though, as the actual expected value math is not as crude and simplistic as I detailed above. A recent study by Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics found that the expected value of three pointers has decreased relative to two pointers since the 2017-18 season, and now the expected value of a three-point shot (1.083) is actually worth less than a two-point shot (1.096). During the 2023-24 season, teams that shot more threes won just 48 percent of the time. There is something of a skill issue to this dynamic, as the Boston Celtics can hack it because they have so many good three-point shooters.

But they must be stopped for the good of the NBA. We must demonstrate that even for the best three-point shooting teams, there is a huge risk when they don’t fall and a team actually playing basketball will win. The New York Knicks must save the sport and sweep the Celtics, and force Joe Mazzulla to accept that two pointers exist. Maybe then we can get back to treating the three pointer as a special moment in a game instead of the logical outcome of every other possession.