The NBA's Problem Is Economics, Not Basketball

It's just boring IMO. Run down the court, Chuck up threes, the game just isn't what it was years ago.

In 2019 the NBA's competition committee examined Kirk Goldsberry's proposal [1] to eliminate the shorter-range corner threes. Brad Stevens was on the committee and reportedly said, "You'll never see a slam dunk again" if we do that, because the guys who now have to defend the guys in the corners will go cut off the lanes to the basket.

When faced with prospects of two different kinds of boring, Goldsberry points out that the NBA could either make its courts several feet wider to at least diminish the statistical make-percentage advantage of those 3's -- but that this would mess up arena seating arrangements -- or could outright allow teams to draw their own 3-point lines like the local variation in baseball and soccer [2] fields.

Basketball requires control of space and pace, but as athleticism has increasingly been optimized, there's just not enough space there to force interesting trade-offs on every play. So it forces less interesting ones.

[1] https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/26633540/the-nba-obsesse...

[2] https://www.thisisamericansoccer.com/why-are-soccer-fields-d...