YESSSSS didn’t think I would get to see some hoops on the forum, thanks.
But I would be remiss to not give credit to 2 other dudes who should get some love from EA, Morey and Harden! To be fair trying to assign exact credit for who spurred the 3 pt revolution is hard and I don’t claim to be confident, and also it is definitely true that curry helped accelerate the revolution, though I would probably put the curry warriors as the 2nd or 3rd most important group in doing so.
I think the Morey/Harden/rockets (and possibly seven seconds suns but will ignore for now) probably deserve more credit, although definitely curry/warriors if you mean who made the public think 3>2. (and I’m not claiming that the point of your post was to give curry all or the most credit, I just can’t help myself in filling in some more basketball history for those interested).
The thing about curry is he is the greatest to ever shoot it. You simply can’t acquire a curry. Also, my read of Steve Kerr is that he is honestly not that analytic pilled as a coach. Like he is certainly on the more forward thinking side but he’s not a math demon the way Morey was. He did have them running an incredible offensive scheme though don’t get me wrong, but it was highly artistic and free flowing.
Morey was kinda the one to realize that you really shouldn’t take midrange at all. This was the first domino in the revolution (although looking at the midrange chart above, seems like league had been slowly realizing that before him). You should never ever ever take a step in, which players often did. In fact, you should often take a step back even if you are open from the midrange (although the step back didn’t explode in popularity till later). And you should put your role players on the three point line in the corners/wings, not in the midrange (and similarly, you should acquire players who can hit those shotes).
I also think while on first glance, it’s easy to think of the 3 pt revolution as completely analogous to something like the shift in baseball—basically pure math that would have been true at any point in the league—I think it’s probably at least a little less of a brain fart (though still mostly a brain fart) than it might initially seem. I think there was actually a series of (relatively simple) innovations that had to occur.
Just because league 3pt TS% > 2 pt TS% (in the halfcourt), this doesn’t mean that the marginal 3 pt is higher EV / TS than the marginal 2 pt. Now I happen to think that it still probably was (i.e. like a good shooter jacking up some contested 3 still better than replacement 2 from that team), but you have to figure out exactly how to generate those extra 3s. At first I think it’s obvious, just replace the middies with the threes. But then you have done picked all of this fruit, and now you have to figure out some more complicated ways to generate more.
Some (haters like myself) might argue this is where the warriors really came into play. The warriors abused moving screens harder than had ever been done in the history of the league, and in doing so, they were able to generate a few more clean looks a game. This definitely was very influential and you can see the proliferation today, with almost every screen set in the nba today being technically illegal (I hate to call this an innovation but...).
After everyone started abusing the moving screens, we needed even more innovations to generate new threes. Again I think here Harden and Morey shine, with the step back 3 revolution occuring around 2017-2018 by Harden.
Anyway I’m super pedantic and I don’t think this changes the implications of your post at all, just excited to write about basketball on the forum and wanted to add my 2 cents.
Thanks for reading, and especially for commenting! I’m not sure we disagree much, but I think the emphasis matters.
For sure you’re right, there were many, many forces at play in the revolution. It’s a book-length story (tempting), and it wouldn’t be able to contain itself to hoops: there’s no Daryl Morey without Billy Beane (and there’s no Beane without Jonah Hill, and there’s no Jonah Hill without Bill James…). Morey says the Rockets owner pitched him they were looking for a Moneyball type, and the owner says it was reading the Lewis book that made him overhaul his organization by injecting analytics (they tried to hire Beane before Morey). Curry is no less a product of his environment than anyone else, and that environment was shaped by these guys from the inside, and by Nate Silver and Benjamin Morris and the rest of the blogosphere from the outside.
And I still want to defend the position that Curry was singularly responsible for inflecting the curve in the mid-2010s.
By the time of Steph’s breakout in 2014⁄15, Morey had been in post long enough to become the face of the nerds (it was his name Barkley was yelling, right before the bit about not getting any girls in high school), and not long enough to have won anything (which isn’t necessarily shade: it takes time to build things, especially when you’re the insurgency and you don’t have a cheat code). Despite eschewing the midrange and shooting more and more threes, his Rockets’ offense topped out at 4th and their net rating at 7th. They shot more threes than anyone else for the first time in 2014, and their offense was 7th. They’d won one playoff series in seven seasons. The reason Barkley could punch down at him was because he hadn’t succeeded rising up.
Steph is different. He could stand out while fitting in: far from being a self-consciously nerd-coded outsider pointing at spreadsheets and telling OGs they don’t know their own business, he’s the son of an NBA shooter out there shimmying the shimmy. And he proved the doubters wrong in terms they couldn’t fail to comprehend: not if you know where to look our offense overperforms its underlying talent level, but you can torch everyone in your path shooting threes and look irresistibly cool doing it.
It’s not just that Steph won over fans. He won over everyone, including all the decision-makers not called Daryl who’d been resisting the revolution. He made it crystal clear that people in positions of power had been looking for edges in the wrong places. That, according to me at least, is why the league-wide curve shoots up from 2015, not from when Morey gets his gig in 2007 or when he trades for Harden in 2012.
I think this matters. EA already has lots of people running the Morey playbook, optimizing their own decisions within their own organizations. What we don’t have are many Stephs, getting out there and performing the new way of thinking so successfully and so joyfully that it changes everyone else’s behaviour.
A couple of things on the local level:
Placing as much emphasis as you do on illegal screens seems kinda wild to me. Not that it wasn’t a thing at all (I don’t really know), and they certainly set a trend in setting so many off-ball screens, but it seems unlikely to me that them moving a bit was more impactful than them being set in the first place, or that they were being set for—and by! - the Splash Brothers. Ben Taylor at Thinking Basketball is great on this.
I agree Steve Kerr is not an analytics guy, but it seems like he is an elite model builder in his own way, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence Steph breaks out in Kerr’s first season. Based on his map of the court, filled in with what he’d learned as a shooter in Phil Jackson’s Triangle, and from taking over as Suns GM towards the end of Seven Seconds or Less, he could see clearly enough to know the best bits of each to borrow and blend to get the most out of Steph, and that wasn’t asking him to be like Jordan or Nash. He knew the power of the open three, and of cutting and screening, and he could imagine an offense not being dependent on the midrange or the pick and roll, and that a superstar with Steph’s gravity could be more effective off the ball. He had the credentials (and the soft skills) to get people to go along with something new. And he was willing to stick his neck out to try it even though he’d look silly if it failed.
Morey and the Rockets contribute to the first league-wide uptick in threes from 2010-15, but Moreyball only takes its extreme final form post-Steph. Maybe they would have got to five-out spacing anyway, without the Death Lineup doing switchy small-ball first, and Harden would have found his way to all the iso stepbacks anyway, and they would have spent a Game 7 missing 27 straight threes anyway, who knows. Their counterfactual trajectory is lost to history because after 2016, every roster-building move and tactical tweak they made was geared towards beating the greatest team ever assembled at their own game.
YESSSSS didn’t think I would get to see some hoops on the forum, thanks.
But I would be remiss to not give credit to 2 other dudes who should get some love from EA, Morey and Harden! To be fair trying to assign exact credit for who spurred the 3 pt revolution is hard and I don’t claim to be confident, and also it is definitely true that curry helped accelerate the revolution, though I would probably put the curry warriors as the 2nd or 3rd most important group in doing so.
I think the Morey/Harden/rockets (and possibly seven seconds suns but will ignore for now) probably deserve more credit, although definitely curry/warriors if you mean who made the public think 3>2. (and I’m not claiming that the point of your post was to give curry all or the most credit, I just can’t help myself in filling in some more basketball history for those interested).
The thing about curry is he is the greatest to ever shoot it. You simply can’t acquire a curry. Also, my read of Steve Kerr is that he is honestly not that analytic pilled as a coach. Like he is certainly on the more forward thinking side but he’s not a math demon the way Morey was. He did have them running an incredible offensive scheme though don’t get me wrong, but it was highly artistic and free flowing.
Morey was kinda the one to realize that you really shouldn’t take midrange at all. This was the first domino in the revolution (although looking at the midrange chart above, seems like league had been slowly realizing that before him). You should never ever ever take a step in, which players often did. In fact, you should often take a step back even if you are open from the midrange (although the step back didn’t explode in popularity till later). And you should put your role players on the three point line in the corners/wings, not in the midrange (and similarly, you should acquire players who can hit those shotes).
I also think while on first glance, it’s easy to think of the 3 pt revolution as completely analogous to something like the shift in baseball—basically pure math that would have been true at any point in the league—I think it’s probably at least a little less of a brain fart (though still mostly a brain fart) than it might initially seem. I think there was actually a series of (relatively simple) innovations that had to occur.
Just because league 3pt TS% > 2 pt TS% (in the halfcourt), this doesn’t mean that the marginal 3 pt is higher EV / TS than the marginal 2 pt. Now I happen to think that it still probably was (i.e. like a good shooter jacking up some contested 3 still better than replacement 2 from that team), but you have to figure out exactly how to generate those extra 3s. At first I think it’s obvious, just replace the middies with the threes. But then you have done picked all of this fruit, and now you have to figure out some more complicated ways to generate more.
Some (haters like myself) might argue this is where the warriors really came into play. The warriors abused moving screens harder than had ever been done in the history of the league, and in doing so, they were able to generate a few more clean looks a game. This definitely was very influential and you can see the proliferation today, with almost every screen set in the nba today being technically illegal (I hate to call this an innovation but...).
After everyone started abusing the moving screens, we needed even more innovations to generate new threes. Again I think here Harden and Morey shine, with the step back 3 revolution occuring around 2017-2018 by Harden.
Anyway I’m super pedantic and I don’t think this changes the implications of your post at all, just excited to write about basketball on the forum and wanted to add my 2 cents.
Thanks for reading, and especially for commenting! I’m not sure we disagree much, but I think the emphasis matters.
For sure you’re right, there were many, many forces at play in the revolution. It’s a book-length story (tempting), and it wouldn’t be able to contain itself to hoops: there’s no Daryl Morey without Billy Beane (and there’s no Beane without Jonah Hill, and there’s no Jonah Hill without Bill James…). Morey says the Rockets owner pitched him they were looking for a Moneyball type, and the owner says it was reading the Lewis book that made him overhaul his organization by injecting analytics (they tried to hire Beane before Morey). Curry is no less a product of his environment than anyone else, and that environment was shaped by these guys from the inside, and by Nate Silver and Benjamin Morris and the rest of the blogosphere from the outside.
And I still want to defend the position that Curry was singularly responsible for inflecting the curve in the mid-2010s.
By the time of Steph’s breakout in 2014⁄15, Morey had been in post long enough to become the face of the nerds (it was his name Barkley was yelling, right before the bit about not getting any girls in high school), and not long enough to have won anything (which isn’t necessarily shade: it takes time to build things, especially when you’re the insurgency and you don’t have a cheat code). Despite eschewing the midrange and shooting more and more threes, his Rockets’ offense topped out at 4th and their net rating at 7th. They shot more threes than anyone else for the first time in 2014, and their offense was 7th. They’d won one playoff series in seven seasons. The reason Barkley could punch down at him was because he hadn’t succeeded rising up.
Steph is different. He could stand out while fitting in: far from being a self-consciously nerd-coded outsider pointing at spreadsheets and telling OGs they don’t know their own business, he’s the son of an NBA shooter out there shimmying the shimmy. And he proved the doubters wrong in terms they couldn’t fail to comprehend: not if you know where to look our offense overperforms its underlying talent level, but you can torch everyone in your path shooting threes and look irresistibly cool doing it.
It’s not just that Steph won over fans. He won over everyone, including all the decision-makers not called Daryl who’d been resisting the revolution. He made it crystal clear that people in positions of power had been looking for edges in the wrong places. That, according to me at least, is why the league-wide curve shoots up from 2015, not from when Morey gets his gig in 2007 or when he trades for Harden in 2012.
I think this matters. EA already has lots of people running the Morey playbook, optimizing their own decisions within their own organizations. What we don’t have are many Stephs, getting out there and performing the new way of thinking so successfully and so joyfully that it changes everyone else’s behaviour.
A couple of things on the local level:
Placing as much emphasis as you do on illegal screens seems kinda wild to me. Not that it wasn’t a thing at all (I don’t really know), and they certainly set a trend in setting so many off-ball screens, but it seems unlikely to me that them moving a bit was more impactful than them being set in the first place, or that they were being set for—and by! - the Splash Brothers. Ben Taylor at Thinking Basketball is great on this.
I agree Steve Kerr is not an analytics guy, but it seems like he is an elite model builder in his own way, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence Steph breaks out in Kerr’s first season. Based on his map of the court, filled in with what he’d learned as a shooter in Phil Jackson’s Triangle, and from taking over as Suns GM towards the end of Seven Seconds or Less, he could see clearly enough to know the best bits of each to borrow and blend to get the most out of Steph, and that wasn’t asking him to be like Jordan or Nash. He knew the power of the open three, and of cutting and screening, and he could imagine an offense not being dependent on the midrange or the pick and roll, and that a superstar with Steph’s gravity could be more effective off the ball. He had the credentials (and the soft skills) to get people to go along with something new. And he was willing to stick his neck out to try it even though he’d look silly if it failed.
Morey and the Rockets contribute to the first league-wide uptick in threes from 2010-15, but Moreyball only takes its extreme final form post-Steph. Maybe they would have got to five-out spacing anyway, without the Death Lineup doing switchy small-ball first, and Harden would have found his way to all the iso stepbacks anyway, and they would have spent a Game 7 missing 27 straight threes anyway, who knows. Their counterfactual trajectory is lost to history because after 2016, every roster-building move and tactical tweak they made was geared towards beating the greatest team ever assembled at their own game.
What an insightful comment! Very well put I appreciate it.