Thinking Basketball is one of my favorite resources for basketball analysis. He recently made a video debunking myths about the modern game [1]. While yes, there’s far more analytics and knowledge in the game, it hasn’t lead to monotony or poor quality. It’s instead resulted in a Cambrian explosion of tactics, counter tactics, and really diverse team strategies. But the commentary and analysis in mainstream basketball hasn’t caught up, so your average viewer is watching a chess match but not even understanding the basic moves. Which leads to frustration and confusion.
> your average viewer is watching a chess match but not even understanding the basic moves
Your average viewer isn't tuning in to watch a chess match. You'll notice that professional chess doesn't have the same viewership as basketball.
Regardless of the mathematical strategies, it sucks to watch a bunch of three pointers getting missed. The NBA team average is 36% on 38 attempts per game. Thus, in an average game, there are 76 three-point attempts and 49 misses.
The worst is when they take and miss a three-pointer early in the shot clock, maybe even from the logo. Shoot, clunk, possession over, yawn.
> Green talked about a recent Warriors game against the Los Angeles Lakers and how it was "refreshing" to go against a thinker like LeBron James, who is notorious for finding weaknesses and exploiting them.
> "Every possession is some type of chess move," Green said. "You don't get that today in the NBA, often. ... You don't just get that on a regular basis. It's just who can run faster, who can hit more 3s. It's no substance. I think it's very boring."
So I agree that more complexity is not better and there’s a real risk of alienating fans with complicated schemes. But chess has made real inroads by providing good commentators and analysis. You can’t make teams play dumber but you can teach fans to be smarter.
As for missing, the video I linked debunks that. 3 pointers are replacing long 2 pointers which also had a low percentage. And in turn, the game has become less crowded and more spread out, leading to a higher percentage on dunks and layups. The pace has also dramatically increased, leading to more swings in scoring, which is pretty exciting.
Thinking Basketball is great. The people who complain about the 3s in basketball probably didn’t watch the NBA in the older days. Horrible defense and far less skill — and that’s the era I grew up and loved.
I have two major complaints about the game nowadays: (1) intentional fouling to get an advantage. It’s the only major sport where fouling can often work to your advantage.
(2) The block call is so inconsistent it might as well be a coin flip.
The end of a basketball game feels almost completely unwatchable for me when they devolve into constant fouling, stopping the game every couple of seconds.
There are possessions where the defense has the sole objective of ignoring everything other than fouling as fast as possible, which feels boring and can stretch 30 seconds of in game clock time to 5+ minutes of back to back stoppage. I get that it might be the mathematical best play because it forces the winning team to take free throws and then turn the ball over without taking any clock time, but they could architect the rules to avoid it.
I totally agree with the block call being a coin flip.... I'd extend it to almost every other call. NBA reffing seems like it absolutely sucks for such a large scale professional league. Basketball is a fast paced game so I know they can't catch everything, but when you're watching on TV you see so many things that are so inconsistently called. Those calls end up changing the outcome of the game when one team has 20 more ft chances than the other.
> (1) intentional fouling to get an advantage. It’s the only major sport where fouling can often work to your advantage.
nitpick: This happens in soccer as well. Oftentimes it's late in the game and you see the opponent has a counterattack that has a high probability of scoring. In that case, it's better for you to tactically foul them by taking them down before they reach your box and take the yellow card.
Came here to say this. It doesn’t have to be late in the game. The whole time tactical fouls is a valuable tool for defense. You try to make it non-violent enough and, when it’s a counterattack, early enough so the referee might not interpret as a foul to prevent a counterattack, so you don’t get a yellow card.
Also, exchanging a certain goal for a penalty+red card is a very common defense tactic. Check Uruguay vs Ghana, World Cup 2010.
The defense was much more on point back in the ‘90s because the defenders were allowed to be more physical without fouls getting called left and right. Nowadays it’s all a travesty, you’ve got scoresheets like 145-135 and nobody blinks an eye about it.
Horrible defense? You're kidding, right? Check out the mid-80's - 90's - early 2000's Bulls, Knicks, Celtics, 76'ers, and Pistons, or basically any team east of the Mississippi. The 95-96 Bulls were the best defensive team in NBA history. No one's played defense in the NBA for 20 years at least. And yeah, the 3 has completely changed the game into something more resembling NBA 2K1, which is exactly what the league wants.
Completely agree, but I would add the incessant need for counting, 3 seconds, 8 seconds, 24 seconds. But the current fouling situation really needs to be fixed urgently.
besides 7-footers chucking 3’s what “skills” do these new nba players have? there are maybe 10 that have any skills, the rest can shoot and that’s about fucking it.
90% of today’s players would play in D league two decades ago
Are you thinking the salary cap hasn't changed from the 90s? The MLE is 12.3m this year, and that is a high-end role player. If one plays at that level for 8 years, they make that amount you're complaining about. And the cap is expected to go up significantly over the next few years (would have gone up more drastically, but the KD to Warriors situation convinced teams to adopt smoothing).
It is true that in general, super stars are underpaid, and role players are overpaid.
> As for missing, the video I linked debunks that. 3 pointers are replacing long 2 pointers which also had a low percentage.
I'd much rather watch NBA players miss 3's than watch a 23 minute YouTube video of someone talking about missing 3's. ;-) But the NBA FG% in 2025 is 46.5%, while it was 49.1% in 1985, so I'm skeptical that 3 pointers are simply replacing long 2 pointers with equal percentages. Obviously the % would go down the farther you get from the basket.
> And in turn, the game has become less crowded and more spread out, leading to a higher percentage on dunks and layups
Crowding is not necessarily bad. A contested shot is interesting; an uncontested shot, not so much. Even uncontested dunks are less interesting than contested dunks.
That's not a huge difference. 3% is like an average of 3 extra misses, which is probably not even that noticeable with variance. 3 pointers are not replacing 2 pointers with equal percentages, but they are creating opportunities for higher percentage 2 pointers.
> Crowding is not necessarily bad. A contested shot is interesting; an uncontested shot, not so much. Even uncontested dunks are less interesting than contested dunks.
That's because you're thinking of a really cool dunk, not a big man backing down his man for like 20 seconds and throwing up a clanker that gets rebounded into another 20 second post possession. Realistically that's what a lot of offense was like back in the day. There's just selective nostalgia for the really cool plays.
> That's not a huge difference. 3% is like an average of 3 extra misses
More like 5 extra misses per game.
And we're getting more uncontested misses today.
> a big man backing down his man for like 20 seconds and throwing up a clanker that gets rebounded into another 20 second post possession. Realistically that's what a lot of offense was like back in the day.
But this clearly wasn't happening 64% of the time.
The irony is that contemporary players are better shooters. Yet their overall shooting % is lower, because they're consistently taking longer, harder shots.
If shooting and defense got better simultaneously, then all other things equal, overall shooting % should have stayed about the same, not gone down.
Also, as hardwaregeek mentioned: "And in turn, the game has become less crowded and more spread out, leading to a higher percentage on dunks and layups."
The 3’s are not replacing 2’s at the same shot percentage. The 3’s are slightly lower percentage, but they are high enough that the overall value is higher than the long 2’s they replaced. They came to the conclusion that the long 2 was a high risk play so they replaced it with a comparable play with a higher reward. It’s common sense. Frankly, it’s the long 2 that’s a stupid play.
The video is worth watching and I’m not even a basketball fan. It shows parts of 3 games from 3 eras back to back and it’s really interesting. Personally, I find the modern game to be the most engaging.
The skill level of the guys who aren’t superstars is clearly much higher than the old days. Outside of the stars, you had guys with certain body types that were pretty much one dimensional. It was neat seeing a big guy like Jokic in the video making ridiculous passes and hitting 3’s. Twenty years ago, all he would have done is hang out 4 feet from the basket.
I remember seeing part of a game in about 1985. IIRC, it was the Jazz against the Knicks. Utah won, something like 86-82. The Knicks offense was laughably bad. They came down the floor, wound up standing around the perimeter of the key, all five of them, each with a defensive player in front of them. They passed the ball around that perimeter. Nobody moved; they just stood there. Eventually somebody shot.
I know it was late in the game and people were tired. The shooting percentage may have been reasonably high. I don't care. That's terrible offense. And horrifically boring.
Draymond Green is the Joe Rogan of the NBA. He's just optimizing for engagement and controversy.
If it were truly as you say, those players would get pulled. Logo 3s are rare. And when someone heats up and hits multiple consecutive, it's anything but boring.
I personally dislike Green because of his on-the-court antics, but I don't think that comparison is fair. Rogan is a know-nothing meathead unqualified to challenge his guests, whereas Green is a veteran, elite, champion NBA player. His opinions, however controversial, have some basis in experience, expertise, and reality.
> If it were truly as you say, those players would get pulled.
Why? The mathematics are still on their side, due to the percentages and the value of the 3. I never claimed that jacking up 3's is irrational; I'm just claiming that it's ugly.
If I were commissioner, I'd abolish the 3. Then they can shoot logo 2's if they want. ;-)
Is there some magic percentage that must be passed to justify your aesthetic demands? I think the fact that guys like Dame hit 1/3, and seem to hit even more in the clutch, is wildly entertaining.
"The regular season is too long" and "the first quarter doesn't matter" (make that anything before the last 5 minutes, really) are practically ancient complaints at this point. Decades long.
"Too many threes" is a more novel complaint but one that should self-correct in a couple of ways:
* the passing/screens/movement that leads to a good look at a three is often pretty fun
* taking bad threes has a lot less mathematical advantage and as defenses get better at shutting down the schemes for the good ones, the best teams will adjust what other looks they try to generate
I would also be fine with moving the line back, or getting rid of the corner three entirely. The fixed-distance shot is an easier skill than being able to hit jumpers from various distances so as long as its easy-enough then you're never gonna see players who don't otherwise have much offensive game train themselves to be 3pt specialists.
1. <- I think this is a good thing to focus on, and even lightly touched on in the video. The idea should be that you don't _need_ to be sophisticated to enjoy the sport. The NFL does well in this regard because it's pretty easy to understand that moving the ball forward is good, losing the ball is bad.
Where basketball misses there is that the "get the ball in the hoop" portion of that is _really_ boring now. I'd wager that people don't want to be concerned with some 3rd man setting a screen on the other side of the court allowing some 2nd man to set up behind a pick from a 4th man to get passed the ball from the 1st man to shoot a three... and then clank it off the rim. Then, rinse and repeat on both ends. The end result is that the "get the ball in the hoop" part just feels like a back-and-forth 3-point shootaround, even though the actual sequence is far more complex.
I love the modern game. I just think the pendulum has swung a tiny bit too far toward 3s in the past 3-4 years, that's all. Just a nudge in the other direction.
My ideal would be to try changing 2s and 3s to 3s and 4s. But that will never happen.
I think it would be enough to simply move the 3 point line back a couple feet AND have it follow its natural arc out of bounds, thus eliminating the shorter and easier corner 3 shot.
I’d rather defenses covered it better to give up more 2s in the paint. If we make it too far out it no longer spaces the floor and then we’re back to a game in the paint.
This is my preferred answer. Bring back physicality into the sport, especially on defense. There are moving screens on every play, and yet a defender can stand and get jumped into resulting in free throws.
couple of feet is not enough. the line needs to move far enough such that vast majority of the players (more than 95%) shoot less than 30% from there. so probably 8 to 10 feet back. absolutely should happen but they will likely do something awesome like shortening quarters to 10 minutes
curry and bol bol are two good candidates. in today’s nba you can’t tell difference between them on the court except for several feet of height difference. but practically same player as they shoot about the same shots
I don't watch basketball, so I am speculating, but isn't this a case where defence hasn't yet adapted to the new attacking strategies? Wouldn't you expect that in a few years teams will be better at defending against 3s, reducing their expected value and therefore swinging the pendulum back towards more 2s?
The Nash equilibrium should be that the expected values of 2s and 3s are equal. If you're off, you would expect a trend toward that equilibrium, possibly with some overcorrection.
Ironically Steve Nash didn't shoot enough 3s, so his Nash equilibrium was pretty off.
In all seriousness, yes, there's a lot more to modern basketball than just "take more 3s". It's more like "try to get dunks and layups, but if that doesn't work get 3s, but also mid range is still valuable if it softens up defense". And defenses have learned to scramble and switch to cover a lot of 3 pointers, but that can still be exploited with cross court passing and switch hunting. Check out some cool plays here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo-V_ujmMFo
If the answer is “they have to make less money”, it’s just very unlikely to happen. Most sports, but especially the global behemoths that are basketball and football (soccer), have made more money over time just because of population.
I love thinking basketball but think he completely missed the point here. An apt quote is when he's talking about how much strategy the game has and says "its like high speed chess." The problem is that people dont want to watch high speed chess. The NBAs job is to be as entertaining as possible, not just as strategic as possible. Like it or not iso plays are entertaining even if theyre "bad basketball" in terms of winning. He says the only thing thats changed is that people take less mid range shots and more 3s as if thats a good thing but the league has replaced entertaining sets where you have to actually beat your defender with shooting contests(even if you have to run around a lot or step back to get the shot off) and the product has suffered because of it.
I think defense is a lot more interesting now and the media has done a horrible job capitalizing on that but end of the day people care more about offense.
I am about as crazy of an nba fan as they come - or at least I used to be. I was averaging 80-90 games per year before, now I watch maybe 20 max, mostly in the playoffs. Surely there are people that prefer today's nba, I am not one of them. I think chucking 3's is the least interesting part of the game and it is so overwhelming in today's game that I lost interest in watching
When? We’ve been talking about wasm for years. When are we actually getting this future? It’s been 8 years since wasm 1.0, and still we don’t have a stable, easy to use toolchain. Rust has maybe the best support and I still can’t get a basic async application with tokio to work on wasm.
To put it into context, Rust was released in 2012. 8 years later it was stable, had a solid toolchain and plenty of people using it in production. Wasm still feels like a toy compared to that
Lots of people use wasm in production right now, and toolchain support is in a good place across several languages. In that sense we are already there.
You likely visited a website using wasm today without realizing it, and major apps like Photoshop have been ported to wasm, which was the original dream behind it all. That has all succeeded.
But if you want to replace containers specifically, as this article wants, then you need more than wasm 1.0 or even 2.0. I don't know when that future will arrive.
There's a difference between a handful of sites that use wasm and it being the mainstream way in which we write web applications and run hosted software. It's still a very very niche platform that has not fulfilled its promise of either being a first party web tool or a universal runtime.
Like, how easy is it to write a web application in Wasm? Or how easy is it to compile your average program written for a native platform to Wasm without hand picking your dependencies to work on the platform?
You're right, but wasm's goals were never to be a mainstream way to write web applications. It was designed very specifically to allow things like Photoshop, Unity, and other high-end applications to run on the Web, things that just didn't run at all, and were really important. But despite their importance, those applications are a small fraction of total websites.
Wasm succeeded at its initial goals, and has been expanding into more use cases like compiling GC languages. Perhaps some day it will be common to write websites in wasm, but personally I doubt it - JavaScript/TypeScript are excellent.
WASM is another VM and it reminds me of the difficulty that the JVM has faced. You can write-once-run-once a lot of languages like Ruby or JavaScript on the JVM and some of the runtimes are pretty good.
But the rest of the community prefers using the original implementation. If some library that you want to use doesn’t work, no one is going to help you. You’re using the second class implementation.
I tried out WASM for a very small project once. This was built from a freestanding C source file (no libraries at all, not even the standard library). Zig was the C compiler used to build the program.
And I was able to get things working with an understanding of the whole system. You could instantiate the WASM from either a file, or from a byte array, pass in the byte array that held 'system memory' for the WASM program, call the WASM functions from the JavaScript code, and see results of making the function calls. The WASM binary was under 3KB in size.
Now once you want to use libraries, everything light and small about WASM goes out the window. You're at the mercy of how efficiently the library code was implemented, and how many dependencies they used while doing so.
If you skip the async stuff, Rust in WASM works quite well. I also found that Go has quite good WASM support.
I think the "WASM as containers" and "WASM as .jar" approaches are rather silly, but language support is good enough to use the technology if you think it's a match. I don't think it will be for most, but there are use cases where pluggable modules with very limited API access are necessary, and for those use cases WASM works.
Plus, if you want to run any kind of game engine in the browser, you're going to need WASM. While I'm not replacing my Steam install with a browser any time soon, I have found that WASM inside itch.io runs a lot faster and more stable than Winlator when I'm on my Android tablet.
Blazor is a great developer experience but when you put it side by side with the other technology solutions (react, angular, anything really) its so slow that you will quickly be told to use something else...
As long as, people use their computers as PC towers from 2000, without hardware video decoding, sleep states, modern UEFI features.
There is naturally the version that works, keeping the Linux kernel, and replacing the userland with managed language frameworks, I have heard they are making a huge success in mobile devices and throwaway laptops.
Hardware video decoding has worked perfectly for decades.
Sleep worked perfectly until Microsoft decided that device manufacturers should replace sleep with overheating in your bag (a much better sleep mode than, y'know, actual SLEEP).
Not sure what "modern UEFI features" means. Whenever something is described as "modern" that screams to me that someone is trying to conflate recentness with quality which is a red flag. UEFI itself has worked fine for as long as it has existed as far as I know?
Why you would replace the userland with "managed language frameworks" is quite beyond me.
As things are, all browser developers - including Firefox! - disable hardware acceleration on most video cards in their browsers on Linux because it is "too unstable". The result is a 20% difference in battery life between Linux and Windows if you mostly do browsing.
Never experienced this myself, and I have used discrete and integrated graphics cards from a variety of manufacturers.
Meanwhile on Windows I am not exaggerating when I say that every computer I have owned and every peripheral device I have ever used has had serious issues. Wireless headphones randomly disconnect, microphones require frequent unplug-replug cycles, rebooting is often required, reinstalling is common. Mice and keyboards have weird compatibility issues with software drivers. This experience is shared with most people I know that I have discussed it with. People are just used to it.
Maybe it isn't Linux that is the problem. Maybe the problem is that consumer hardware is designed and built on the cheap and is not designed to last, and they get away with it because most people (1) have no idea it could be so much better and (2) have no insight into these issues before buying because they are rarely covered in reviews.
For some reason when this happens on Windows, the hardware is to blame, but when it happens on Linux, Linux is to blame.
As noted above, I have experienced it myself on a freshly bought laptop (Thinkpad T14e AMD) that is specifically touted as Linux-friendly. I was genuinely curious as to how the battery life varies between Linux and Windows, and so I did a simple test that just did automated Reddit browsing, and left it running. When I saw the results, the disparity was so unexpectedly large that I went to investigate and found out about the hardware accelerated rendering being disabled by default on Linux in both Chrome and Firefox, and why.
Then, of course, I was also curious whether their reasoning was grounded, so I manually enabled acceleration and re-run the test - and found out that both Chrome and Firefox will inevitably crash in 2-3 hours of active browsing with it enabled, so they disable it for a reason.
As far as "maybe Linux isn't the problem" - you're broadly correct that it's really an issue of hardware quality and/or lack of good first party drivers. But from the end user perspective, if you can't reliably use Linux with popular off-the-shelf hardware, it's not really "ready for the desktop", regardless of where the blame lies. I've been a Linux user for 25 years now, with about a decade of using it as a primary desktop OS, and this exact excuse has been around for as long as I remember (I've used it myself plenty of times way back!). And yet, here we are.
Because on Windows, it is the OEMs that provide the support, while on Linux (sadly) even after 30 years, it is mostly reverse engineered unless we are talking about OEM custom distros with their own blobs, like Android, ChromeOS and WebOS.
Yeah there's your problem. Hiring a random person and giving them unlimited access to compute resources is a bold move to say the least. If you're gonna work on something like this, do it yourself or hire someone who you can really trust. That won't totally prevent it but it's better than rando Upwork contractor who will move on to the next gig
Stay in the land that was allotted in 1967 (or 1948), don’t create settlements, allow the Palestinians territories to self govern and have open borders. Obviously that won’t stop bad faith actors like Hamas but that’s not going to stop with a war either. Bibi majorly screwed up by ignoring Gaza and allocating troops to guard West Bank settlements. Not claiming this will be a panacea, but I don’t see how Israel’s current plan will accomplish anything more than perpetual conflict and an increasingly radicalized population on both sides. Oh and kick out Itamar Ben-Gvir and the rest of the ultra right wing.
These are debatable arguments but at least fair and in good faith. I'm not at all saying that Israel is without fault in the current conflict or the decades worth of conflict going back to the formation of the state in 1948. However, I do argue that it has a right to exist, and by virtue of the settlement and development its millions of residents have invested in across the decades, that right is further fortified into the present day. Anyone simply rejecting this seems to ignore explaining what would be done to the millions of Jews living there.
I also argue that the political organizations representing the Palestinians (Hamas definitely included here) and several neighboring governments that have supported these organizations also have their own fault in not only prolonging conflict with unreasonable demands of their own against Israel, but also have fault in mistreating their own people in brutally cynical ways.
Israel was accused when it build a wall towards Gaza, but in the end it protected from suicide attacks of brainwashed children that were instrumentalized by a fundamentalist genocidal cult.
A lot of Palestinians did work in Israel, given that is over for quite some time now for Gazans at least.
I can agree on Ben-Gvir being a moron, but Israel justifiably demands security guarantees.
No but speed of lookup is definitely a limiting factor. And with rust goto definition also goes to the doc comment so I can easily read the docs in my IDE
Wooshed might feel good but the whole thing reads as a wispy joke to me, and every page 404s. Maybe if there was more content than surface level general falsehoods it'd provide enough to chew on, instead of dismiss
[1]: https://youtu.be/fp4but75EjY?si=YdOqZZ5-sH6lQHd9
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