The Paw Print

By Kieran Blake, Sports Staff Writer

Michael Jordan gets hammered by the “Bad Boy” Pistons on his way to the rim.

Image Courtesy of Andrew Bernstein/Getty Images

The date is October 12, 1979. The Boston Celtics are playing their season opener against the Houston Rockets. With a little under four minutes left in the first quarter, Celtics guard Chris Ford makes a three pointer. Little did he know that this shot would change the course of the NBA forever.

Fast forward to the present day. The three pointer has evolved into a common occurrence. During the 1979-80 season, the NBA as a whole attempted 5,003 three pointers. The Golden State Warriors and the Boston Celtics have attempted a combined 7,032 three pointers this season. The NBA as a whole made just 1,403 three pointers during the 1979-80 season. This season, 13 NBA teams have made more than 1,000 three pointers. This three-point boom has led to a scoring explosion that has not been seen since 1970. But along with it, post play has become a lost art form, defense has become almost nonexistent, and the NBA has lost almost all of the physicality that it once had.

The golden age of basketball was during the 1980s and ‘90s. The duels between Magic Johnson’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Celtics. The Detroit Pistons versus everyone else. The Jordan ‘90s, with some Hakeem Olajuwon sprinkled in between. Those games were physical. Teams fought and battled in the paint for both points and rebounds. Kevin McHale and Hakeem Olajuwon were masters of the paint. Dennis Rodman was a rebounding king. Basketball became one of America’s most popular sports.

Back then, basketball was basketball. Today, it’s just one big market. Superstars leave their teams every three years or so, blockbuster trades happen this way and that, and contracts are obscenely expensive compared to what they once were. Superstars are starting to care less about winning and more about money and personal statistics. Games are becoming a shootout every night. The three pointer has led to the rise of basketball’s competitiveness, but it could very well be the fall of it as well.

Today’s big men are much different than they were in the 80s and 90s. In Game 7 of the Conference Semifinals this year, Joel Embiid, the league MVP, was just standing by the three point line, waiting to shoot a three. Did you see Patrick Ewing, David Robinson, and Hakeem Olajuwon chucking up threes in the playoffs? No, you saw them driving to the basket and bodying people down in the post. And it worked! All three of them went on to have hall of fame careers; Hakeem won two titles and an MVP, Robinson won an MVP, and Ewing went down in history as the greatest Knick of all time. And the three of them could have won more titles if they had not been added to Michael Jordan’s list of victims. Nikola Jokic, the two-time MVP leader of the Denver Nuggets, the top team in the Western Conference, has been successful and led his team by being unselfish and playing down in the post.

Unfortunately, Jokic is one of the only ones who does that these days. You don’t see the traditional Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal style big men who push it in the post anymore. You see the Karl Anthony-Towns and Nikola Vucevic style big men who stand on the wing and shoot the three. I find myself enraged at how little people drive into the paint nowadays. Joel Embiid is a seven-foot tall moving truck who, if he wanted to, could absolutely crush opposing centers, but instead he shoots jump shots because I guess that’s what centers do.

Another problem with today’s NBA is the lack of defense. You rarely find players who will play close, on-ball defense effectively in today’s games. Players like Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Joe Dumars made a living off of that close, perimeter defense. Jordan and Pippen won six titles together, and Dumars won two of his own. In today’s NBA, teams are just trying to outscore each other. The scores of these games are ridiculous compared to what they were 20 years ago. During the 2003 NBA season, the league average was 95.1 PPG. During the 2023 NBA season, the league average is 114.7 PPG. That’s an almost 20-point difference between just 20 years.

The defense played in the NBA today is lazier than me on a Saturday morning. The Boston Celtics and the Milwaukee Bucks are virtually the only teams I can think of who play actual tough, aggressive defense anymore. Sure, there’s some players here and there who do still play tough defense like Jaren Jackson Jr. and Draymond Green, but those players are scarce. If teams don’t start playing physical, hard-nosed defense soon, these high scoring numbers won’t be going away anytime soon.

Players like Stephen Curry have made a living from the three-point line, and those players should continue doing that. But I don’t want Nikola Vucevic to go out there and shoot five threes a game! The great Hakeem Olajuwon, perhaps the greatest post player the NBA has ever seen, stated in an interview with Sports Illustrated that Joel Embiid has “all the moves” but just isn’t good enough at “leveraging” those moves. The center went on to remark, “Why would he be shooting threes? He has the advantage every night, and if I have the advantage, I’m going to wear you out.”

In just a few sentences, Olajuwon encapsulated exactly how the three-pointer has taken away the game’s physicality. It has taken away the importance of post play and the mid-range game, and as a result, it has practically limited how much teams utilize those shots anymore. Driving to the paint results in two things: drawing fouls and getting the easy layup. But teams nowadays simply disregard those two vital elements of basketball. And scoring is only one half of a basketball game. As the legendary football coach Bear Bryant said, “Defense wins championships.” But it seems that teams these days just try to outscore each other.
As Al Pacino put it in 1999’s Any Given Sunday, “Life’s this game of inches.” You gain those inches by playing physically, by getting the ball down in the paint, and by playing hard-nosed defense. “On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the difference between winning and losing!” Maybe what every NBA player needs is a little bit of that fire in them. Because at the end of the day, how physical you play will dictate the pace of the game, and that’s what’s going to determine the outcome of the game. History has proven time and time again that physical play and defense is what makes champions. The Celtics, Lakers, 76ers, Pistons, Bulls, Rockets, and Spurs all had that physical play and defense. And they have the rings to prove it.