The Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks made the 2024 NBA Finals as very different teams connected by one strategic goal: shooting away from downtown. They ranked first and second in the NBA last season in 3-point scoring, and other teams are now lining up to emulate them.
The NBA’s 3-point revolution isn’t over yet. The average team took 44% of their shots from behind the arc in the 2024 exhibition games, which is the highest rate ever in the preseason. For context, the league-wide rate has never exceeded 40% in any regular season.
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After gradually increasing for decades, the frequency of 3-pointers in the NBA began to take off in the 2012-13 season, when 24.4% of shots were 3s, and continued until around the 2019-20 season, when that number increased all the time. way to 38.4%. The past four seasons have seen a plateau in that trend, but 2024-25 may prove different.
Under the encouragement of analytically inclined head coach Joe Mazzulla, the defending champion Celtics hope to rise even further.–range shots than last year. In the preseason, 55.4% of the team’s shots were 3s, which would not only blow last season’s league-leading rate of 47.1% out of the water, but also shatter the all-time record set by James Harden’s Houston Rockets in 2019. .
So what? It’s only pre-season, right? According to research by Owen Phillips, 3-point attempt percentage has the second-strongest correlation between the preseason and regular season of 25 team metrics he’s tracked since 2019.
When teams decide to take more threes, they usually practice that concept in the preseason. Last year, for example, the teams that finished first through fifth in the regular season 3-point field goal percentage all ranked in the top 10 during the preseason as well. The Celtics took the most threes in both settings.
“I love 3-pointers,” Mazzulla said in a press conference during his first season at the helm in 2022. “I like math.”
The Golden State Warriors, who won the championship in 2022 after finishing second in the league in regular season 3-point field goal percentage, are looking to reinvest in that area of the court. They took nearly half (49%) of their shots from 3-point range during the preseason, up from 42.5% last year, which was sixth.
In one exhibition contest in October, the Dubs shot 28 for 52 from downtown, much to the delight of head coach Steve Kerr. “The math just doesn’t add up [if you don’t shoot threes],” Kerr said, according to The Athletics. “Especially for us. We’re not a team that gets to the free throw line a lot. It’s going to be hard for us to win a lot of games unless we shoot a high volume of threes.”
After losing mid-range specialist DeMar DeRozan in the offseason, the Chicago Bulls look poised to change their shooting diet more than any other team. They attempted 47.2% of their shots from 3-point range during the preseason, a massive jump from 35.8% in the 2024 regular season.
Similarly, 47.5% of the Phoenix Suns’ shots in the preseason were 3s, up from 37.8% last year. New head coach Mike Budenholzer coached 10 NBA seasons and finished in the top half of the league in 3-point attempt rate in all 10. He won Coach of the Year twice, in 2015 and 2019, when his teams ranked fourth and third. , respectively.
His players accept his approach. “The volume should be up,” Suns guard Devin Booker told the media. “Attempting the 3-point shot, not even making it, stretches defenses and opens up better looks throughout the game.”
Booker’s explanation answers an interesting mathematical question posed by NBA shooting data. A decade ago, the average 2-pointer yielded 0.98 points while the average 3-pointer yielded 1.08, revealing significant inefficiency. In the 10 years since, however, teams have eliminated suboptimal long 2s and improved court spacing for drives to the rim. Now, 3s and 2s produce almost the same exact points per attempt, but teams are still eager to shoot more 3s because it makes life difficult for defenses.
It’s now a consensus around the league that shooting 3s is a non-negotiable strategy, even if you’re not great at making them. This led to a homogenization of shot profiles. Last year, the highest and lowest 3-point attempts were separated by 11.9 percentage points, which is the smallest spread of the century so far.
Don’t expect the league’s 3-point attempt rate to rise to 44% this season—in the past five years, teams have consistently made slightly fewer 3s when the games count than in exhibition—but an all-time NBA high seems likely . . Just as the Rockets’ “Moreyball,” named after general manager Daryl Morey, pushed league strategy in the late 2010s, “Mazzulla Ball” may do the same in the 2020s.
“I would say it’s a good thing. I would say our sport is in a good place,” Budenholzer told the media. “The range and the ability and how these kids play – I think it creates more space to be more athletic and dynamic going to the basket .”
Teams can focus all they want to try 3s, but making them is ultimately more important. Last season, each of the 16 teams that shot at least the NBA-average percentage from behind the line finished with a record of 46-36 or better. Almost every other team missed the playoffs.
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