Is it easy to score 40 or 50 points in today's NBA or are the players incredibly talented?

[dhsilv2]

I mean we have a direct comparison to declining superstars: We still have guys like KD, Curry, LeBron, Harden etc. in the league. And we know that the current crop of players who get these 50 point games are not on the same level as the previous generation of superstars, with the exception of the top 4 players who are all international. Especially the group of the best american players is the worst its been in decades. Yet, the current crop of players have a far easier time scoring 50 points than the superstars I mentioned above had a decade ago. So its mostly a testament to how easier it has become to get those numbers. Due to spacing, ruleset etc. But not because the players are better

I mean look at the potential Olympic 2028 roster for the US. It looks like the worst olympic roster since the 80s. So it obviously can not be because the players are getting better. Its the opposite

It definitely is because the players are better. The bulls had Kerr, Longley, Jud Buechler, Ron Harper on their championship roster. Role players today way more skilled than them. They can shoot 3 pointers in a more variety of ways. They played against more complex defenses, and they are more athletic.

The USA may not have the best crop of stars right now, but certainly the talent overall has risen.

3 point shooting is of course important to this. And so is ball handling but I know people like to talk about how the rules and whatnot work there. But the biggest change is there are vastly more players who can make on the fly QUICK decisions with the ball through passing. We have threads about how so many teams "don't have a point guard" but the reality is we have so many guys who can make point like decisions today as well. Offenses simply move faster, not just in terms of pace, but in terms of total ball movement. You just didn't have guys in the past who could do this as 2nd and 3rd play making on a team.

[dhsilv2]

The league removed physicality from the game. That has changed the culture and player attitudes about how to play defense. It used to be considered risky and even dangerous for small guys to go into the paint. You were expected to lay out anyone who keeps coming into the paint. That was just baked into the culture. Everyone knew it, everyone accepted it as the way it was.

You would knock them on their ass to send a message and let them take 2 free throws for a common foul and at least one new bruise. If they did it again then you knock them down a little harder. This was why we respected guys like AI and Isaiah Thomas who seemed to keep coming back for more without any fear. It was a big-man's game back then and scoring inside was the top priority, not the 3-ball.

Now days I see guys dribbling into the paint uncontested and even a light tap on the wrist sends them to the line. It's just a different culture. A much softer game.

This rose-tinted nostalgia needs to go. I grew up in the 90s, and I see Stockton and Hornacek routinely cut to the plaint and score without being lay out.

The game is definitely more fast pace now, and the rules relax a bit, but the exaggeration of the physicality preventing scoring needs to stop.

2025 pace - 98.8

990-91 97.8
1991-92 96.6
1992-93 96.8
1993-94 95.1

So yes a bit faster but not that much until the second half of the 90's.

[Myth]

Probably related, but the free throws are out of control. 12-16 free throws seem regular for star players now. Shai had a 26 free throw game. I can't believe the league made it even easier to be sent to the foul line when there were already concerns about the league being soft and games being slowed down. You think people are sick of how many 3s are shot in games? This free throw thing is going to be a bigger issue eventually. It seems the league wants to draw people in with stats, but they will be turned away by the whistles and stoppage in play for free throws. I have never understood why the league thinks 100 and less points in a game is a problem when people are fully willing to watch sports like soccer and hockey that end with scores like 3-1.

I mean 90% of NBA history had teams averaging over 100. But that aside, free throws? 1992 teams averaged 26.7. They're at 28.2 this year. Teams scored 105.3 in 1992 vs 118.5.

Free throws are adding 1.5 points a game from 1992 while scoring is up 13.2. it isn't the line where in general free throw rates have been declining.

Maybe it is more disproportional to the stars though. 26 from Shai the other night is insane. I’m admittedly going mostly by feel, but the fouls called are soft. The light touch of an arm after the shot being a foul this year when not in the past feels especially weak, and it is sending players to the line for 3 free throws when it didn’t directly effect the shot. That should be play on.

[Cavsfansince84]

More guys today are capable of going 10-13 from 3 though or getting to the line a bunch which makes 40-50 pt games easier to happen. Back in the 90's guys weren't even attempting 10 3's so the chances of making 7-8 of them was extremely small.

[dballislife]

you breathe on someone and its a foul so

[sisibilio]

The "players are more skilled" argument really only applies to one skill: 3 point shooting. I reject the ball handling arguments since the rules are applied so differently now for them that it might as well be a different sport compared to pre-2000.

The homogenization of skill sets and playing styles really hasn't made the game more appealing. The league basically has just emphasized one skill over all others to the point where they are verging on being obsolete.

I'd agree if you were talking about comparing to the 70s. Carrying has been an epidemic since the late 80s.

[KGtabake]

If you exclude Giannis, everyone else who are getting 40s are shooting the 3 ball quite often and quite good.
So, it's the 3 ball that makes it look easy. Giannis is just an anomaly at this era.

[DaddyCool19]

How much would the scoring go down, if they called the blatant carries/travels/moving screens and allowed slightly more physical defense at the perimeter?

[f4p]

of course it's easier. Just as it was in the early 60s.

There are more points available with more possessions, more 3s, more rules that limit the offense. This shouldn't even be a question.

Teams regularly put up 140 point games like it's nothing.

To that point, the 1961-2 season when wilt averaged 50 ppg has long basically been considered a joke to compare modern numbers to because the scoring was so crazy. In that season, teams averaged 118.8 ppg. This year, they are averaging 118.5 ppg. Basically, if you aren't averaging 50, you aren't doing anything special.

[JellosJigglin]

The league removed physicality from the game. That has changed the culture and player attitudes about how to play defense. It used to be considered risky and even dangerous for small guys to go into the paint. You were expected to lay out anyone who keeps coming into the paint. That was just baked into the culture. Everyone knew it, everyone accepted it as the way it was.

You would knock them on their ass to send a message and let them take 2 free throws for a common foul and at least one new bruise. If they did it again then you knock them down a little harder. This was why we respected guys like AI and Isaiah Thomas who seemed to keep coming back for more without any fear. It was a big-man's game back then and scoring inside was the top priority, not the 3-ball.

Now days I see guys dribbling into the paint uncontested and even a light tap on the wrist sends them to the line. It's just a different culture. A much softer game.

This rose-tinted nostalgia needs to go. I grew up in the 90s, and I see Stockton and Hornacek routinely cut to the plaint and score without being lay out.

The game is definitely more fast pace now, and the rules relax a bit, but the exaggeration of the physicality preventing scoring needs to stop.

There's a reason I spoke about culture. Stats tend to level off as players adjust to the style of game that the league allows. Fouls momentarily went up when they banned hand checking until defenders realized they really couldn't touch their man. So they adjusted their style of play and the fouls returned to the mean, but it was a different game and culture after that. That's just one example.

I started watching in the 80's. Everyone from coaches, to players, to commentators knew that a guard coming into the paint over and over was going to get knocked on his ass to send a message. It was widely accepted and one of those unspoken rules. It doesn't mean it happened every single game but it wasn't surprising when it did happen and everyone would just sort of laugh and shrug and say "he had it coming".

Like when you throw at a player in baseball, you expect the other team to tag one of your guys back. The NFL has changed rules to protect against head injuries, but when I grew up people loved seeing those nasty hits against defenseless receivers. Now the game is very different and the culture has changed as a result.

Rule changes and the proliferation of analytics has changed the NBA game drastically from what it was. The culture in the NBA style of play has completely been flipped inside out. There was a balance between the physicality and finesse. There was always that element of finesse in this game. But the slider has gone more towards finesse and away from physicality.

You point out the finesse of the past NBA but that's just a strawman argument. Basketball has always been a free flowing game, so no one is arguing that the game didn't have any finesse. It's just a sliding scale and it's moved much further in that direction than it ever was in previous generations. It's baked into the culture. Physical teams were rewarded, but that doesn't mean every team in the past could play that way.

You simply may not have noticed at the time. Maybe you didn't follow the league as closely, maybe you were too young when it started to change. Whatever the case, just because you didn't notice doesn't mean it didn't happen. The league has changed a LOT.

[f4p]

The "players are more skilled" argument really only applies to one skill: 3 point shooting. I reject the ball handling arguments since the rules are applied so differently now for them that it might as well be a different sport compared to pre-2000.

The homogenization of skill sets and playing styles really hasn't made the game more appealing. The league basically has just emphasized one skill over all others to the point where they are verging on being obsolete.

How fun would the NFL be if they made an even further gigantic reduction in the amount of defensive physicality allowed and the rules were also changed to allow teams to have as many eligible receivers as they wanted? So now it's essentially just one QB with 10 wide receivers going against some glorified traffic cones on defense. Positionless football with every team strategy feeling the exact same and the personnel feeling weirdly redundant? Would make for a super crappy product.

That kind of feels like where the NBA has been headed.

And yet you'd somehow have people saying "they used to let offensive lineman play who couldn't catch at all, players today are so much more skilled".

[Effigy]

We've always had outlier guys like Brandon Jennings and Tracy Murray put up games like that. Sometimes everything just comes together. It's not easy at all to do it consistently.

[Lalouie]

it's easy

THE BELL CURVE NEVER CHANGES. it can be applied to any era because it's a relative graph

when you see %changes like in triple double and 3pt shooting it's because the bar is lower

life is a bell curve

[f4p]

The "players are more skilled" argument really only applies to one skill: 3 point shooting. I reject the ball handling arguments since the rules are applied so differently now for them that it might as well be a different sport compared to pre-2000.

The homogenization of skill sets and playing styles really hasn't made the game more appealing. The league basically has just emphasized one skill over all others to the point where they are verging on being obsolete.

I'd agree if you were talking about comparing to the 70s. Carrying has been an epidemic since the late 80s.

Absolutely not compared to what we see today. Same with traveling. People used to laugh at what was allowed in the nba but now we are seeing it taken to crazy levels. You have to go so far on carries and travels to have it called now.

[f4p]

We've always had outlier guys like Brandon Jennings and Tracy Murray put up games like that. Sometimes everything just comes together. It's not easy at all to do it consistently.

Well by definition, when you start consistently having outliers, they aren't outliers any more.

[bovice]

I don't know, what do you think

[tsherkin]

Spacing and individual 3pt shooting open up higher-scoring individual performances, sure. A lot of this was available in earlier eras if they had that much shooting ability. They just... didn't. IT wasn't nearly the same kind of emphasis as it is now.

[Mephariel]

The league removed physicality from the game. That has changed the culture and player attitudes about how to play defense. It used to be considered risky and even dangerous for small guys to go into the paint. You were expected to lay out anyone who keeps coming into the paint. That was just baked into the culture. Everyone knew it, everyone accepted it as the way it was.

You would knock them on their ass to send a message and let them take 2 free throws for a common foul and at least one new bruise. If they did it again then you knock them down a little harder. This was why we respected guys like AI and Isaiah Thomas who seemed to keep coming back for more without any fear. It was a big-man's game back then and scoring inside was the top priority, not the 3-ball.

Now days I see guys dribbling into the paint uncontested and even a light tap on the wrist sends them to the line. It's just a different culture. A much softer game.

This rose-tinted nostalgia needs to go. I grew up in the 90s, and I see Stockton and Hornacek routinely cut to the plaint and score without being lay out.

The game is definitely more fast pace now, and the rules relax a bit, but the exaggeration of the physicality preventing scoring needs to stop.

There's a reason I spoke about culture. Stats tend to level off as players adjust to the style of game that the league allows. Fouls momentarily went up when they banned hand checking until defenders realized they really couldn't touch their man. So they adjusted their style of play and the fouls returned to the mean, but it was a different game and culture after that. That's just one example.

I started watching in the 80's. Everyone from coaches, to players, to commentators knew that a guard coming into the paint over and over was going to get knocked on his ass to send a message. It was widely accepted and one of those unspoken rules. It doesn't mean it happened every single game but it wasn't surprising when it did happen and everyone would just sort of laugh and shrug and say "he had it coming".

Like when you throw at a player in baseball, you expect the other team to tag one of your guys back. The NFL has changed rules to protect against head injuries, but when I grew up people loved seeing those nasty hits against defenseless receivers. Now the game is very different and the culture has changed as a result.

Rule changes and the proliferation of analytics has changed the NBA game drastically from what it was. The culture in the NBA style of play has completely been flipped inside out. There was a balance between the physicality and finesse. There was always that element of finesse in this game. But the slider has gone more towards finesse and away from physicality.

You point out the finesse of the past NBA but that's just a strawman argument. Basketball has always been a free flowing game, so no one is arguing that the game didn't have any finesse. It's just a sliding scale and it's moved much further in that direction than it ever was in previous generations. It's baked into the culture. Physical teams were rewarded, but that doesn't mean every team in the past could play that way.

You simply may not have noticed at the time. Maybe you didn't follow the league as closely, maybe you were too young when it started to change. Whatever the case, just because you didn't notice doesn't mean it didn't happen. The league has changed a LOT.

Nobody is arguing the game hasn't change. Just he ridiculous hyperbole of, in the past, guards get "lay out." It is simply not true. It is an excuse to deny the fact that modern day perimeter players are much more skilled than players back then. Just the proliferation of the step back 3 pointers itself added another dimension to the game. Yeah, culture has changed. But skills also got better. Also, even if you are right, "laying someone out" is not a basketball skill. Doesn't that proved that the 80s and 90s are less skilled because they need to resort to those tactics?

[SomeBunghole]

And right on cue, Lauri Markkanen scores 51. I love the kid like a son and it was on OT game, but he's the first Jazz man since Karl Malone 27 years ago to score 50. That seems a little crazy.

[jbk1234]

Pace and space matter. As does usage, but are these players scoring that much against good defensive teams? Off the top of my head, the Celtics, Pacers, Hornets, Suns, Lakers, and Pelicans are starting centers who shouldn'tbe starting. Like Ben Simmons on a vet minimum would likely be an upgrade. Poeltl looks like he's playing injured and Embiid is unlikely to be right again. The sample size is pretty small here.