Michael Sokolove has an interesting and provocative essay on what’s wrong with the NBA in the The New York Times Magazine. The whole article is worthy, but a couple of excerpts:
Many others over the years have seen basketball as jazz, an apt comparison when the game is played well — as an amalgam of creativity, individuality, collaboration, improvisation and structure. Much of what makes basketball interesting is the give and take, the constant tension, between individual expression and team concepts. On the best teams, players take their turns as soloists, but not at the expense of others in the quintet.
…But I do hope that college and high-school basketball will again ban dunking, so that players on the way up have some chance of acquiring something other than a repertory of slam dunks.
The three-point shot is another matter altogether. No reason it should not just disappear. ”The dagger!” announcers sometimes call it, as if it were the shock-and-awe of the hardwood, a weapon that brings opposing players to their knees. The three-pointer is a corruption of the sport, a perversion of a century of basketball wisdom that held that the whole point of the game was to advance the ball closer to the basket. If its intent was to increase scoring, the three-point shot definitely has not done that, and if it was to make the game more wide open and exciting, it hasn’t accomplished that either. The unintended consequence of the three-pointer has been to make the game more static as players ”spot up” outside the arc, waiting for the pass that will lead to the dagger.