Will there be basketball rule changes in the future?

[superjohn]

There's a lot of talk on this board all season about playing 2 bigs or you can't play 2 bigs anymore because of 5 out and offenses being dominated by small ball three point shooting...

Curry and the Warriors were incredibly exciting to watch and Steph and the team changed the game but we seem to be at a breaking point. More and more talk about the game now being totally out of whack with the over reliance on three pointer. I think it's gotten to the point that the game is losing fans, it no longer looks like the game anyone grew up with and the game has totally lost it's balance.

I would imagine the NBA is currently having meetings on what they can do to bring the game back to the way it was intended instead of the three point contest it's become. The question is what do you do and how drastic do you make the changes? Should you still get a full extra point more for a three than any other basket? Do you move the line back? Don't think that changes much because people already pull up from so far out. Do you get rid of corner threes where teams now just camp out a guy on each wing the entire game?

 

[Rocktheworld]

Yeah the first thing is eliminate corner 3s. Have the arc so straight to the sideline and you’ll see the shots go down dramatically.

 

[superjohn]

Yeah the first thing is eliminate corner 3s. Have the arc so straight to the sideline and you’ll see the shots go down dramatically.

That's what makes the most sense to me too.

 

[tzznandrew]

I'd push the line back a foot or so and hav it disappear naturally into the OOB so there are no more corner 3s.

I think, by and large, the game is in okay shape. But the league has to act. Analytics destroyed baseball and it will destroy every sport. We like to see conflicts of strategy in addition to conflicts of talent. Mathematics are boring to watch play out in real life.

Definitely don't do the 4-point thing.

 

[Rocktheworld]

That's what makes the most sense to me too.

And then your 3 point shooters will be more collected along the line and defending the 3 will be much easier. You won’t see more than 3 players behind the arc at any given moment.

 

[aburks41]

I think teams are becoming over-reliant on analytics and they're losing the feel for the game. It's the same thing in baseball right now. Even if a pitcher is unhittable, if the numbers say a bad matchup is due up, front office nerds are making managers go with the numbers rather than their eyes. Basic analytics are okay, but numbers don't account for the fact that humans are imperfect.

 

[superjohn]

I'd push the line back a foot or so and hav it disappear naturally into the OOB so there are no more corner 3s.

I think, by and large, the game is in okay shape. But the league has to act. Analytics destroyed baseball and it will destroy every sport. We like to see conflicts of strategy in addition to conflicts of talent. Mathematics are boring to watch play out in real life.

Definitely don't do the 4-point thing.

I'm convinced it will change but IMO it needs to be drastic. Silver is a smart commissioner and everyone running the league knows they have a major problem on their hands that needs to be dealt with. College will follow the NBA's lead.

 

[Drame]

A Proposition for new rules for Fouls in the NBA.

A goal for the new rules is to accomplish several things that would improve the competitiveness, fairness and balance in the NBA.

FOULING OUT:

-The best players on the court should not be disqualified for receiving 6 fouls. We want the best players on the court at the most important time of the game. This is especially so when many fouls are tricky tack, incorrectly called and the result of flopping or 50/50 calls.

-The only way a player would foul out would be from technical fouls.

DISINCENTIVIZING PLAYERS FROM FOULING:

-So an obvious problem with elimination disqualification from removing the 6 foul rule is that players would endlessly be fouling. So a few more adjustments are to be made.

-Every defensive foul would result in one foul shot, while maintaining possession of the ball after the shot. No team fouls or 1 and 1, or 2 shots. We want to see play on the floor, not 2 free throws. A team has a chance for 2 or 3 points in the normal run of play. Why should a defensive foul only give the offensive team either a FLOW destroying side out or 1-2 point opportunity.

-Offensive fouls should stay the same. A loss of possession. Loss of possession is a serious enough penalty.

-Treating fouls this way would also eliminate the dreaded hack a shack.

TECHNICAL FOULS:

-The same 1 and 2 technical rules should exist, but an added technical should be added for flopping. Its time to up the ante.

-Im a big soccer fan and what soccer does right is keep the flow of the game going, keep the best players on the field and attack the course of diving. If you dive in soccer that is a yellow card. The problem is largely gone in soccer now.

 

[HuskyHawk]

Yeah the first thing is eliminate corner 3s. Have the arc so straight to the sideline and you’ll see the shots go down dramatically.

I like this, but also think they need to consider how fouls are called and how traveling is called. Never liked the continuation. Don’t like the extra step either. Can the 3 second call become a 5 second?

 

[HuskyHawk]

And then your 3 point shooters will be more collected along the line and defending the 3 will be much easier. You won’t see more than 3 players behind the arc at any given moment.

Which means your Center and rim protector can stay in the paint area, which changes defense quite a lot as we’ve seen with the Huskies. You wouldn’t have 5 out.

 

[StllH8L8ner]

Yeah the first thing is eliminate corner 3s. Have the arc so straight to the sideline and you’ll see the shots go down dramatically.

This was my first thought that isn't TOO drastic and is pretty easy to implement.

 

[tzznandrew]

The game is pretty good. You don't want to go crazy with changes otherwise you're artificially doing to the game what has organically happened with analytics. You want very slow gradual change.

 

[UConn990411]

I'm convinced it will change but IMO it needs to be drastic. Silver is a smart commissioner and everyone running the league knows they have a major problem on their hands that needs to be dealt with. College will follow the NBA's lead.

I’m not so sure they will because the NCAA rules committee is made up of some of the dumbest human beings on the planet.

They haven’t even switched from halves to quarters yet, which is the biggest no-brainer there is. If they’re serious about improving college hoops, that should be one of the first changes they make.

 

[Kenny11]

The reason for so many 3’s is the realization that 3 is a lot more than 2. If there were 4’s and 5’s instead there wouldn’t be as many long shots. But nobody wants to count by 4s and 5s lol

 

[the Q]

There's a lot of talk on this board all season about playing 2 bigs or you can't play 2 bigs anymore because of 5 out and offenses being dominated by small ball three point shooting...

Curry and the Warriors were incredibly exciting to watch and Steph and the team changed the game but we seem to be at a breaking point. More and more talk about the game now being totally out of whack with the over reliance on three pointer. I think it's gotten to the point that the game is losing fans, it no longer looks like the game anyone grew up with and the game has totally lost it's balance.

I would imagine the NBA is currently having meetings on what they can do to bring the game back to the way it was intended instead of the three point contest it's become. The question is what do you do and how drastic do you make the changes? Should you still get a full extra point more for a three than any other basket? Do you move the line back? Don't think that changes much because people already pull up from so far out. Do you get rid of corner threes where teams now just camp out a guy on each wing the entire game?

Extend the 3pt line further back to the point where there’s no corner 3, and narrow the lane.

And for the NBA, call hack a player what it actually is (and stop blatantly lying about there being no solution when high school basketball has had it forever):

An intentional foul with a penalty of 2 shots and the ball.

 

[the Q]

I agree that flipping should be a technical.

And call carries and travels by the book.

 

[bballgrda]

As long as the three is worth 1.5x as much as a two while not being nearly 1.5x as difficult, the game will be out of whack. Forget where I read it, but pretty sure Morey talked about this recently. As covered in this thread, sports and competition are best when there are a variety of viable strategies. Dunno what the fix is, do like the idea of extending the line and having it go oob in the corner.

 

[bendm]

Yeah the first thing is eliminate corner 3s. Have the arc so straight to the sideline and you’ll see the shots go down dramatically.

or just widen the court so the arc doesnt straighten out in the corners. start with that and see how much it helps.

 

[tzznandrew]

As long as the three is worth 1.5x as much as a two while not being nearly 1.5x as difficult, the game will be out of whack. Forget where I read it, but pretty sure Morey talked about this recently. As covered in this thread, sports and competition are best when there are a variety of viable strategies. Dunno, what the fix is, do like the idea of extending the line and having it go oob in the corner.

You just need to calibrate the 3pt line distance to a reasonable expected points per shot. Further back and eliminating the corner 3s will do that.

There's still magic to Steph and Dame pulling up that far out. We want to take early Warriors and 2013-14 Spurs as a platonic ideal of ball movement and try to tinker slightly. How do we make tall guys making post-moves a viable strategy even if you don't have Shaq, for instance? We want diversities of style. The problem with analytics is that it creates a single "best" style.

 

[freescooter]

A Proposition for new rules for Fouls in the NBA.

A goal for the new rules is to accomplish several things that would improve the competitiveness, fairness and balance in the NBA.

FOULING OUT:

-The best players on the court should not be disqualified for receiving 6 fouls. We want the best players on the court at the most important time of the game. This is especially so when many fouls are tricky tack, incorrectly called and the result of flopping or 50/50 calls.

-The only way a player would foul out would be from technical fouls.

DISINCENTIVIZING PLAYERS FROM FOULING:

-So an obvious problem with elimination disqualification from removing the 6 foul rule is that players would endlessly be fouling. So a few more adjustments are to be made.

-Every defensive foul would result in one foul shot, while maintaining possession of the ball after the shot. No team fouls or 1 and 1, or 2 shots. We want to see play on the floor, not 2 free throws. A team has a chance for 2 or 3 points in the normal run of play. Why should a defensive foul only give the offensive team either a FLOW destroying side out or 1-2 point opportunity.

-Offensive fouls should stay the same. A loss of possession. Loss of possession is a serious enough penalty.

-Treating fouls this way would also eliminate the dreaded hack a shack.

TECHNICAL FOULS:

-The same 1 and 2 technical rules should exist, but an added technical should be added for flopping. Its time to up the ante.

-Im a big soccer fan and what soccer does right is keep the flow of the game going, keep the best players on the field and attack the course of diving. If you dive in soccer that is a yellow card. The problem is largely gone in soccer now.

Your proposals would make the game a hackathon. That happened when the Original Big East experimented with 6 fouls. and giving a shot would just slow the game down to a crawl. I would suggest calling existing rules like travelling and related things like carrying as they were called traditionally. I forget what game I watched but every single guy either travelled or carried the ball in one stretch. You see guys talks two steps to hoist 3s. Some of these games, I swear would be scoreless if the actually called the what was happening. I’m also thinking that the 3 point shot has reached its limit and though it’s a radical thought, it might be time to eliminate it. It began as a gimmick in the old ABA, then went mainstream, but it may have outlived its usefulness. Go back to requiring guys to actually make plays. Having a guy who can shoot from anywhere will still be valuable. But it won’t be rewarded as much. 10 years ago the league average for 3s was around 34%. Now it’s almost 37%.

 

[superjohn]

You just need to calibrate the 3pt line distance to the expected points per shot. Further back and eliminating the corner 3s will do that.

There's still magic to Steph and Dame pulling up that far out. We want to take early Warriors and 2013-14 Spurs as a platonic ideal of ball movement and try to tinker slightly. How do we make tall guys making post-moves a viable strategy even if you don't have Shaq, for instance? We want diversities of style. The problem with analytics is that it creates a single "best" style.

Really well said.

 

[freshler40]

A Proposition for new rules for Fouls in the NBA.

A goal for the new rules is to accomplish several things that would improve the competitiveness, fairness and balance in the NBA.

FOULING OUT:

-The best players on the court should not be disqualified for receiving 6 fouls. We want the best players on the court at the most important time of the game. This is especially so when many fouls are tricky tack, incorrectly called and the result of flopping or 50/50 calls.

-The only way a player would foul out would be from technical fouls.

DISINCENTIVIZING PLAYERS FROM FOULING:

-So an obvious problem with elimination disqualification from removing the 6 foul rule is that players would endlessly be fouling. So a few more adjustments are to be made.

-Every defensive foul would result in one foul shot, while maintaining possession of the ball after the shot. No team fouls or 1 and 1, or 2 shots. We want to see play on the floor, not 2 free throws. A team has a chance for 2 or 3 points in the normal run of play. Why should a defensive foul only give the offensive team either a FLOW destroying side out or 1-2 point opportunity.

-Offensive fouls should stay the same. A loss of possession. Loss of possession is a serious enough penalty.

-Treating fouls this way would also eliminate the dreaded hack a shack.

TECHNICAL FOULS:

-The same 1 and 2 technical rules should exist, but an added technical should be added for flopping. Its time to up the ante.

-Im a big soccer fan and what soccer does right is keep the flow of the game going, keep the best players on the field and attack the course of diving. If you dive in soccer that is a yellow card. The problem is largely gone in soccer now.

Yes, flopping is a major problem, ugly to watch and taught by many programs. I did see a tech called this season for a flop and was amazed!

 

[UConn990411]

Yes, flopping is a major problem, ugly to watch and taught by many programs. I did see a tech called this season for a flop and was amazed!

Jalen Rose said it best - if you want to stop players from flopping, refs need to stop calling flops.

It’s really that simple.

 

[Hugo]

or just widen the court so the arc doesnt straighten out in the corners. start with that and see how much it helps.

Prefer this over straightening the arc. It would also cut down on the number of times a player in the corner is called for an of out of bounds.

 

[kemba]

I'd push the line back a foot or so and hav it disappear naturally into the OOB so there are no more corner 3s.

I think, by and large, the game is in okay shape. But the league has to act. Analytics destroyed baseball and it will destroy every sport. We like to see conflicts of strategy in addition to conflicts of talent. Mathematics are boring to watch play out in real life.

Definitely don't do the 4-point thing.

I agree the main "problem" is analytics, though I put it in quotes because overall I still very much like all the leagues I've always liked. But then I guess the question is, how to act? Ultimately if you change rules the analytics will adjust. I don't know if there's any rules that can be put in place in any league to make basically all strategies equally effective and give incentives to play other styles. I wish the NBA had some teams relying on the post game, and the NFL had some teams focused on running the ball and playing ball control, and MLB had some teams relying on small ball....but I also don't want them to be any teams I root for. I don't know how to get teams to play strategies that we know don't work as well.