Why the NBA 3-point boom is still booming

Getting good shots, but we can get better shots. Don't settle for the setback three unless it's a late shot clock. That'll go for all of us, myself. Every time we drive, we'll get a wide-open three. Stop me if you've heard this. NBA teams are taking more threes than ever before. After leveling off in the last few seasons, the league is once again firing a record-setting number of triples. And this isn't happening because teams are just arbitrarily chucking threes because, you know, threes are great. It's happening because teams are developing strategies that make offenses harder to stop, and so players are developing entirely new shots as a result. You probably know this story by now. When the NBA adopted the three-point line in 1980, teams didn't embrace it. So, they shortened the line in the mid-90s to increase usage, but it went back to its old trajectory, appearing to level off at the end of the 2000s. But then Chris Bosh started playing center, and Daryl Morey mathematically proved the three is mightier than the two, or something like that. And so the three-point revolution was here. Over the course of the decade, league-average three-point attempts basically doubled until they appeared to reach an equilibrium in the last few seasons, even declining slightly in 2023, only to hop back up again in 2025. Right now, the Celtics are taking 50 threes a game. So, we're again left asking, when does this end? I don't think you can win the championship beating good teams shooting jumpers. Now, the goal of a possession is not to shoot threes. The goal is basically to get an uncontested layup. After that, you might want free throws. Teams often foul to stop layups or high-percentage shots near the basket. And only then, when option A and 1A are taken away, do teams look for high-percentage threes. Because, you know, 40% from three is like 60% from two. So, the three is never really the primary attack. It's just a response to teams taking away the primary attack. And that's where modern X's and O's come into play. Offenses needed a way to remove defenders from the basket area to improve layup efficiency. That was impossible with big men who couldn't shoot. Why would defenses come out and guard them? So, either big men needed to improve their three-point shooting, or more skilled big wings who could shoot took their spot on the floor, ushering in more small-ball lineups. Well, I don't think the NBA, all of a sudden, is gonna have a bunch of three-point shooters and a bunch of small lineups. Look at this possession from 1988. The Bulls try to post Michael Jordan, but the play's so cramped, Larry Bird can deny the pass. So, they try to set up a pick-and-roll instead, only there are two Celtics walling off the paint against Jordan. So, he's actually trapped around the screen. And the price the defense pays for that is a long two. So, the Bulls' two non-shooting big men hanging out near the basket here allowed the Celtics to clog the paint, and then they ended up with an open 30-something percent jumper. Skip ahead to 2004, where three-point attempts had nearly tripled around the league. And on this play, the Lakers have two non-spacing big men on the floor, and the camera has to zoom out a little bit more Still, LA isn't really looking for this cross-court cut to turn into a three for Derrick Fisher. So, Chauncey Billups can hang around and wall off the basket, and Ben Wallace is lurking nearby because his man, Carl Malone, also isn't a three-point shooting threat. And so, even when Kobe gets it, there are a wall of Pistons in front of him. They have to work to get this entry pass into Shaq, and then again, these shooters spot up for maybe 40% two-pointers. Now, let's skip ahead another 20 years, where the attempts have increased two-and-a-half-fold again, and it's common to see possessions with five shooters spaced beyond the three-point line like this, so there are zero help defenders protecting the basket. In this sense, the goal of the three-point shot is, more than anything, really to open up the layup. It's to force defenses to make a choice between protecting the area around the hoop or stretching out to the three-point line to defend outside shooters. Compare this to those older possessions. There's a screen near half-court, no one is in the paint, and when the ball changes sides, two defenders go to the shooter, so a third hawk has to help at the rim, a fourth hawk takes away the layup on the other side, so the ball goes back out to the perimeter, and because everyone can shoot, the defense picks the three-point poison over the two. All good offense forces defense into this pickle. Is this a layup pass for Chet Holmgren? Maybe. So, now there are two defenders helping at the hoop, and that leaves a shooter open. But, even here, this defender could help on the three, but he chooses to stay with a potential layup cut, and the penalty is an open Chet Gilgis-Alexander. These little decisions, these dueling pressure points, are at the heart of every great modern set. Instead of a spread pick and roll, there's an off-ball screen to slow down the primary defender, then a middle pick from the big, and right here, this defender is thinking, which layup threat do I take away? The ball driving toward me, or my own man? And that leaves door number three open. And he was forced into that choice because the two remaining Chicago defenders on the court chose to guard the three instead of helping out at the rim. So, the graph you might not have seen is the change in scoring close to the hoop. In 2004, teams shot 58% at the rim, before efficiency crept up to about 60% in the following seasons. But, as the three-point revolution started, rim efficiency spiked, hitting nearly 67% in 2023. Similarly, short mid-range shots from 4 to 10 feet climbed from 37 or 38% up to 43 or 44% on nearly the same number of attempts at or near the basket. And this is because teams are putting more shooters on the court than ever before. If a big man can't shoot, he's often involved in the pick and roll as a layup threat, or, now, pulled out to the perimeter as an offensive hub instead of parking himself in the post. It's become trendy to turn a big man into a point guard, so defenses have to worry about him because he has the ball, even though he can't shoot himself. This hack improves the spacing even more, and teams like the Golden State Warriors have taken advantage of it for years, using Draymond Green as a de facto point guard to dime up teammates for threes or for easier layups. We've seen a rise in guards sprinting into screens at the three-point line because he can then either roll to the basket and apply rim pressure, or, out of that same action, the guard can set the screen and then pop behind the line for a high percentage three. Defenses are trying everything to keep up, like switching prolifically and inventing all sorts of hybrid zone concepts, but offenses keep pushing the envelope, like this popular switch counter, where a shooter acts like he's the screener, only for his teammate to turn and set the screen, often on his own man, because they know the defense wants to switch and jump out to the shooter. Defenses are practically begging teams to shoot mid-range shots these days by extending out to the line with an attempt to slow down all this shooting. Only individual players have countered this with their own creativity by basically inventing brand new shots. I need to think about this without being disturbed. I need my new active noise cancellation earbuds from Raycon to enter my own private thought temple. Most earbuds won't stay in my unusually shaped left ear, but these babies lock in for ergonomic comfort, and I'm ready for the ideas to flow. No one thinks about the twos. How many threes is the most threes you could take in a game? Could they get 100 threes in a game? This latest model has 32 hours of battery life, so I can talk to myself like this for over a day without charging, and they even come with a protective case that I can slam against things, and my buds are safe and snuggly. The case also holds a charge, which means fast wireless charging, so I get noise cancellation modes, long battery life, and earbuds that don't fall out of my ears for half the price of other major brands, which is pretty amazing to me as a person from the 1900s. Obviously, we have a discount for you. Go to buyraycon.com slash great day and get up to 15% off site-wide. That's right. You'll get up to 15% off everything on Raycon's website when you go to buyraycon.com slash great day. Now back to the basketball. Let's go back to that chart on league-wide three-point shooting. Notice how the league leader is never too far from the average. Rick Pitino loved the three, but his unorthodox Knicks team only took about 15 per game. The 2003 Celtics were coached by Pitino disciple Jim O'Brien, and they lapped the league with only 26 threes per contest. Even the Mike D'Antoni Rockets launched just over 40 threes a game, which would rank eighth this season. In other words, no matter how many threes a team wants to shoot, they're limited by the number of threes the players are comfortable shooting. We discussed this concept a few years ago, but it's more than just young players practicing threes or even big men extending their range. This is about players all over the league adding shots to their arsenals that simply didn't exist in the past. The most notable example is James Harden's step-back. Other players in the past had a step-back, and Manu Ginobili was probably the first player to shoot step-back threes with any sort of volume, but Harden's version wouldn't even have been legal before the codification of the gather step. So the Harden-style step-back three allowed driving pressure to set up three-point shooting inside the line, where defenses weren't just giving up a long two anymore, but a much more valuable three. The next innovation in three-point shooting was the deep three, where players used even more of the real estate on the floor to fire from anywhere. Steph Curry ushered in this era in the mid-2010s, but a number of players have followed suit. And again, this is an offensive counter at the player level designed to expose defenses reacting to the high-pressure points on the floor. The more players that practice this, the harder it is for defenses to take away the shot, and thus the more three-pointers attempted. And the creativity doesn't end there. We're now seeing a number of players catch and shoot the ball without bringing it down first. This no-dip three is practiced by a number of shooters, and it epitomizes the entire three-point boom, because teams put more shooters on the court to take advantage of the three, especially the corner three, and players have responded by improving their release speed on catch and shoots. Some players use a kind of partial no-dip, where they keep the ball high with minimal drop to increase their release time, but there's a ton of pure no-dippers now, where before the ball arrives, a player basically starts his shooting motion and then finishes it without bringing it down. By the way, the earliest no-dip three I've seen is from 1996, when Jeff Hornacek beat the shot clock, and necessity is the mother of invention. But it took 25 more years before game strategy led players to start adopting this shot across the league. Speaking of inventions, we are now all the way through the looking glass. I'm curious about the floater three. When do you take one? Do you turn the corner on a ball screen and shoot one really quick when they're not ready for it? Do you take one in transition? That's right, players are now shooting one-legged running floater threes. The first question people ask when they see this shot is, why? Why not just stop and shoot a two-footed pull-up? And the simple answer is that it theoretically adds speed and makes the shot harder to defend, just like a no-dip would. But there's another dimension to the floater three that can stress defenses, which is to blend it into a jump pass. So the shot is most dangerous from a great passer, and this is why Trey Young is the king of the floater three right now. This shot is still in its infancy and rare, but Young naturally comes off a high screen like this and jump passes to a rim runner. So his floater three is adding pressure to defenses because he's attacking them with a three while actively pressuring them with better passing angles. Look at this one. He turns the corner on the screen for the floater three, and nope, that was a pass. And watch the cutter's defender here. He thinks it's a shot and has no chance when it's actually a lob. Here's Lomelo Ball coming off the pick with some sort of running one-legged floater thingy. And here's the exact same situation where the defense sells out to the three-pointer, so he jump passes it in for a layup instead. Lomelo is an innovator in his own right and has some sort of one-legged Dirk lean back thing on his three this season. He shot it like this when he was younger, and it somehow gives him a comfortable base to push the ball with enough power from long range and enough space to protect potential shot blockers despite a lowish release point. He's even used that one-leg technique as an up fake from three before letting it fire from the corner. And the man legit drifts sideways on triples like I've never seen before, where instead of stopping as he comes around the corner, he basically floats horizontally as he shoots. And all of this allows him to hit some of the craziest shots you will ever see where he's spinning and basically fading out of bounds. And if that wasn't enough, the coup de gras is the full-on running fadeaway three from the corner, and this is off a pass and relocate where he falls out of bounds and takes off inbounds only to land right on the Celtics bench here. This isn't the first time Celtics fans have seen a fadeaway three like that, but I do wonder how far players can take these innovative shots. Will we see stars turning their back to the basket and shooting fadeaway threes like some sort of futuristic Michael Jordan, or is a shot like that too difficult or too impractical to ever catch on? Perhaps the biggest reason the three-point boom hasn't ended yet is that star players have added the pull-up three to their arsenal in the way that stars from bygone eras added a mid-range jumper that was hard to defend. Kobe worked on a 16-foot fadeaway, while Jason Tatum keeps working on his pull-up three off the dribble. In 2014, there were less than 10 pull-up threes in an average NBA game, and that number doubled by 2019, and it's yet again where we're seeing a bump in 2025. More stars are working on ways to stretch out defenses And in that sense, the offense doesn't determine the theoretical perfect number of threes to take in a game, the defense does. Whatever answers defenses can find will either open up more of these innovative shots, or it will shift an emphasis towards shots closer to the basket. So, I don't know if we'll ever see a team take 60 threes in a game with the current rules. That would be more like two-thirds of their attempts from downtown, whereas most top teams today are closer to half of field goal attempts coming from three. But I do think there's a little more juice to squeeze out of this lemon, and until defenses come up with a good answer, we're still going to see the most effective basketball offense of all time. To support this channel, patreon.com slash thinkingbasketball. That's where we have proprietary stats on teams and players throughout the year. 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