A true story:
Before the 2018-19 season, the league launched new rules to pursue “freedom of movement”. Simply speaking, in order to ensure the fluency of attack, strike hard on the defensive side to destroy the pulling and pulling of the opponent’s fluency during the defensive process and reduce physical contact.
At the beginning of the season, Dante Corning, who played for Spurs at that time, left six criminals in less than 30 minutes in the first world war with the Lakers. After the game, Corning Ham, who has always been famous for being tough and excellent in defense, complained that the league was going to “kill all the defenders”. When the reporter asked connenham if he was adapting to the new rules, connenham said, “No, didn’t you see my six criminals left?”
In this season, the number of fouls per 36 minutes of Corning is higher than that of the past two seasons. When he was present, the defensive efficiency of the team was the second worst in his career.
Then during the off-season, Corning was really unemployed in NBA and switched to CBA team Fujian.
For more than ten years, with the continuous changes of rules, no matter in which version, the defensive gate is no longer God, and their living space is continuously compressed. This season, data explosion, exaggerated records one by one, a single game with 40 points may not be able to make the headlines, the average score of 20 points can barely raise his head to greet his peers, the NBA official website calls this season “attack prosperity”.
However, is the attack prosperity created at the expense of confrontation and defense really called “attack prosperity?
In recent years, ESPN data analysis expert Kevin Pelton and other industries have studied the causes of data explosion for more than mogul times. They often start from the aspects of fast pace, the proportion of three-point shots, and the evolution of players’ abilities. Are there any problems with these angles? No problem. But did you touch the root? It seems not. The essence of the data explosion is that the alliance is not simply encouraging attack. In the words of Warrior star de Raymond Green, the alliance is not allowed to defend at all.
To be exact, the beginning of the league’s encouragement of attack was the 2001-02 season. Before the start of the season, the league launched a number of new rules: canceling the illegal defense rules and launching the three-second defense rules, the time for the attacker to pass the half time was reduced from 10 seconds to 8 seconds.
The alliance’s original intention is to encourage attack, but Pat Riley, who pursues defense, is very unhappy. He believes that this kind of rule change is no different from pushing NBA to a dead end. In the 2000-01 season, the league scored an average of 94.8 points. In the 2001-02 season, in the first year of the new regulations, the league scored an average of 95.5 points, and then fell back to 95.1 points and 93.4 points in the two seasons. It seems that the results after the launch of the new regulations run counter to the “faster pace, more dynamic and better looking” pursued by Stern, then president of the alliance.
In the 2004-05 season, the league canceled handcheck, and the sun that introduced Nash became reformers. They brought the league into the era of attack with fierce running. The wave of three points surged and the era of small balls came. The result is:
The value of the traditional center has been seriously weakened. In the past, they were often the axis of the defensive end, but now it is difficult to play, especially the end of the game.
The space is completely opened, the defensive area that defenders need to cover is far beyond the past, and the defensive difficulty increases. Each team makes more and more extreme use of space, not only pursuing plane space, but also developing vertical space (various empty joint coordination). Warrior coach Cole believes that because of this, it is more difficult to defend in today’s era than in the past.
If the defensive gate with single function does not have the ability of one-hand three-point projection, it is difficult to be reused. The gate like Tony Allen before can hardly be put into the field in today’s era.
Since 2004, the rules are no longer friendly to the defensive gate. They can’t touch the players with their hands as they used to do, and they can’t fight fiercely against their opponents as in the past. When the league revised the rules again and again to encourage attack, the defensive gate became more and more difficult to survive.
“The League no longer advocates defense,” said a team president. “after handcheck is canceled, the game will be over.”
The 76-man defender Tucker said: “The league is constantly changing the rules, not letting the attacking players touch, not letting the attacking players pull, but this kind of action is very common in basketball games.”
Green saw through everything as early as 2018. He said, “We have been told that this league no longer emphasizes defense, so now you can see all kinds of high scores.”
In this era of paying attention to space, the blue-collar center should give way to the space-type Center and the small ball Center swinging from the fourth or even the third position, defend the strong and weak defensive gates to make way for the strong and weak space shooters. The most typical examples are Seble and Danuel-House of 76 people. As a defensive gate that has entered the best defensive squad twice, Sabre has only got 11.7 minutes in this season, while house has 17.4 minutes. Of course, House’s three-point hit rate this season is not as good as Sabre, which is another story.
Under the background of this era, some defensive gates pursuing confrontation are weakened due to the restriction of rules, such as Beverly. It is difficult to get a big contract without a defensive gate with strong ball attack power. Previously, smart signed $76 million for 4 years and Dort signed $82.5 million for 5 years. The annual salary of both of them did not exceed $20 million. Mikar bridges signed $90 million for 4 years, with an annual salary slightly exceeding $20 million. For example, Cameron Johnson, Sabre and Grant Williams had not negotiated a new contract before and wanted a contract team with an annual salary of 15 million dollars.
“These days, players with poor defense but good attack get more contracts than players with good defense but poor attack,” said Timberwolves executive vice president Gupta.
Last season, the league fought against non-shooting actions to make fouls and relaxed the penalty scale during physical confrontation. The effect was good and many favorable comments were received. But this season, everything is back to the past, and the body hair whistle keeps on. In the words of Pelican President David Griffin before: “I don’t know if the goal of the league is to let us watch the game with a score of 211-185.”
Take the Celtics playing the lone ranger today as an example. After 8 minutes in the first game, Tatum, Derek White and Jay Brown all fouled twice, tatum was also fouled by blowing technology for throwing the ball after receiving the air foul.
Is this the match that fans and players want? This issue depends on the position.
“The answer to this question depends on who you ask,” Green said. “Those who like defense will not like this kind of game. But those who like attacking will like this kind of game.”
According to the official data released by NBA today, on December 25-31, 2022, the number of NBA videos watched this week exceeded 1.1 billion, setting an NBA weekly record.
So it seems that there are still more fans who like attacking, and NBA officials still take the mentality of the fans.
This prosperity is as expected by NBA.