Why did pace grind to a halt in the 2000s?

[Goudelock]

I've never seen a good explanation as to why teams stopped running in transition during the mid to late-1990s. With all of the discourse going on about the era, one thing that stands out to me is that almost every team wanted to slow the pace down and grind out games.

I certainly think the game was more physical in 2003 than, say, 1983. But the game still was plenty rough back then, and those teams wanted to run in transition.

But by the 2000s, it seemed like most teams assumed that grinding out the win by triumphing 80-75 was the ideal way to play the game, and it just makes no sense to me.

In an era where scoring in the halfcourt was so tough, it seemed like more teams would try to take advantage of fastbreaks to manufacture points. And those players grew up watching the Showtime Lakers and fast-paced 1980s teams, so wouldn't they want to emulate that?

Why did the running game go out of fashion?

Also sorry if this is disjointed. The question just popped into my head and wanted to get your thoughts.

[Doctor MJ]

I've never seen a good explanation as to why teams stopped running in transition during the mid to late-1990s. With all of the discourse going on about the era, one thing that stands out to me is that almost every team wanted to slow the pace down and grind out games.

I certainly think the game was more physical in 2003 than, say, 1983. But the game still was plenty rough back then, and those teams wanted to run in transition.

But by the 2000s, it seemed like most teams assumed that grinding out the win by triumphing 80-75 was the ideal way to play the game, and it just makes no sense to me.

In an era where scoring in the halfcourt was so tough, it seemed like more teams would try to take advantage of fastbreaks to manufacture points. And those players grew up watching the Showtime Lakers and fast-paced 1980s teams, so wouldn't they want to emulate that?

Why did the running game go out of fashion?

Also sorry if this is disjointed. The question just popped into my head and wanted to get your thoughts.

The 2000s were the end of that trend, not the start.

Pace increased from the beginning of the league up through the early 60s, and then for roughly the next 40 years pace was decreasing, only to begin rising again in the '00s.

So that leaves us with the following questions:

1. Why was pace rising in the earliest NBA?

2. Why did it then fall?

3. Why did it then rise?

Speaking with these in mind:

The trend I think really began in the 1930s Pacific 10 conference which was the origin of the rule change where teams stopped doing a jump ball after every basket. This made the transition attack a more valuable, and also forced the players to be in better cardiovascular shape.

From that point on we get a set of other rule changes that culminates in the NBA with the widening of the key (eventually to the point it no longer even looks like an actual key) and the introduction of the shot clock, that further push pace, along with new young players who are groomed to thrive with their superior fitness.

But eventually the importance of big men causes the game to slow down. Once both you and your opponent are convinced that a big man posting up is your best offense, then you don't even have to worry about your opponent trying to hard to attack in transition.

And I think the really crazy thing here is this was arguably NEVER the right strategic direction in the era from the '60s to the '00s, and I think it objectively the wrong strategy with the arrival of the 3 in the '80s.

And so in the '00s what you get is a combination of a critical rule changes that make teams plausibly start thinking that they should attack in transition, and you also get a particular team light the world on fire with pace & space. Note that the guy both responsible for spearheading the former also spearheaded the latter: Jerry Colangelo. But while I think Colangelo saw this was a strategic path that NBA teams were wrongly reticent to embrace, I think it surprised him along with everyone else (including D'Antoni) just how success the approach he pushed would be.

Back to the Slow paradigm that steered the league from the '60s to the '00s: If it's possible it was never a wise strategy, then how could it possibly take hold?

Some factors:

1. Basketball is a sport where talented outliers have extreme effects that tend to cause poor-man versions of outliers to spread across the league both as attempted counters and would-be outliers, and from the '40s to the '70s, the basketball world was blessed repeatedly with big men who dominated the game profoundly.

I truly believe that part of the reason why we began moving away from the big-man paradigm is simply that Kareem got old, and the best big of the next generation (Hakeem) was close to half a foot shorter than him. (And similarly, once Shaq got old, the league got smaller.)

2. Big men tend to slow down the game.

3. Traditionally, there is no higher FG% shot than a big man close to the rim, and for decades much of the basketball world seemed to think in terms of FG% whether they realized it or not. (This also means that the rise of computers and the internet brings a new level of data that lets the basketball world realize otherwise.)

4. The slower the game, the more control the coach can exercise. Also, the more a coach attempts to exercise control, the more the game tends to slow down. This then to say, I think the NBA fell into a pit of micromanager coaches that it's graduated from. (Meanwhile the world of college basketball I think has tended to stay partly in the pit.)

[Colbinii]

I like to think of the NBA before the SSOL Suns as the beginning of the Movie 'Free Guy'. The overall strategy was fairly mundane, their was limited innovation to a degree where all the knobs coaches twisted were in a relatively small box. Then boom, we get more evolution in 15 years than we had since the 50 years from 1960-2010.

Don Nelson tended to push the envelope and while the answer was right in front of everyone [Spacing is king, which is why a Fast Break is so effective--the amount of space a player has is magnitudes larger than a normal half-court set], coaches simply didn't want to innovate, because trying something different and failing has always been much worse than doing what everyone else is doing and failing.

The 2000's marks the end of this long, 50 year "era", where there really wasn't anything different teams tried or did or could do, until they starting getting the actual data and could correlate spacing with efficiency.

[tsherkin]

Riley's Knicks were a major part of this in that specific time frame (and then later, his Heat and JVG on the legacy Knicks), slowing things down to undercut transition baskets and otherwise aid defense. Utah's halfcourt execution was another one, they didn't need transition as much and were smashing contemporary-level offensive efficiency on a team level because they were basically the first team to really kill it with variations on the PnR and spacing appropriate to the 3pt line. Doc's remarks about bigs and what-not are highly relevant, as well.

Spacing, beyond the most rudimentary aspect, was undergoing a fairly significant revolution in the 90s. The Triangle and Utah's offense were both example of offensive systems and passing which were considerably more complex than what most of the rest of the league was using. You could see the difference, and so they had an advantage in the half court. And if they slowed the game down, it again allowed them to get their own set defense in place ahead of the offense, further exacerbating their advantage.

[OriAr]

Another important factor is simply the distribution of talent across the league.
In the 80s and 90s, the league was expanding rapidly and eventually, with hardly any international players it got to a level where talent was simply spread thin throughout the league, leaving coaches in need of coming up with ways to hide it and the best way to do it was to slow the pace down and keep it relatively simple.
However, as skills training in early years got better in the US, and the emergence of international players in the NBA, the talent pool grew dramatically and coaches began to feel more comfortable cranking up the tempo and running increasingly more complex schemes, feeling confident their players are talented enough to play them well.
The transition of basketball in the early 2010s was rapid and the league seemed to change dramatically every single year as each draft class contained more players who were simply more skillful than the players they replaced, players who were perfectly good starters would be out of the league not even two years later, it certainly felt a bit weird to see that happen in real time.

[SHAQ32]

Transition defense

[Doctor MJ]

Another important factor is simply the distribution of talent across the league.
In the 80s and 90s, the league was expanding rapidly and eventually, with hardly any international players it got to a level where talent was simply spread thin throughout the league, leaving coaches in need of coming up with ways to hide it and the best way to do it was to slow the pace down and keep it relatively simple.
However, as skills training in early years got better in the US, and the emergence of international players in the NBA, the talent pool grew dramatically and coaches began to feel more comfortable cranking up the tempo and running increasingly more complex schemes, feeling confident their players are talented enough to play them well.
The transition of basketball in the early 2010s was rapid and the league seemed to change dramatically every single year as each draft class contained more players who were simply more skillful than the players they replaced, players who were perfectly good starters would be out of the league not even two years later, it certainly felt a bit weird to see that happen in real time.

Interesting. Your point makes sense. It's predictable that an influx of less capable and less experienced players would be wise to play a more conservative style, but I never made the connection.

I can't say the scale of this effect, but it seems likely non-zero.

[Dr Positivity]

It seems like increase in size/athleticism compared to the 80s led to more physical defense. I have no idea why it would start going down around 97 instead of early 90s when the Bad Boys and Riley Knicks would have been most relevant.

[One_and_Done]

The touch rule changes being fully implemented in 05 were massive too.

[zimpy27]

Pace dipped because teams realised the most efficient scoring was post moves and interior scoring. Teams would take time to get it inside to high % scoring position.

The push up to higher pace came from teams recognizing that speeding up court could catch teams out of their defense. Transition scoring was even more high %.

Introducing defensive 3 seconds, enabling zone defense, roving hand-checking.. this all led to speeding up the game.

Pace is really a mix of strategy trends built around popularity in the league and it is macro impacted by rule changes

[Red Robot]

1. Basketball is a sport where talented outliers have extreme effects that tend to cause poor-man versions of outliers to spread across the league both as attempted counters and would-be outliers, and from the '40s to the '70s, the basketball world was blessed repeatedly with big men who dominated the game profoundly.

I truly believe that part of the reason why we began moving away from the big-man paradigm is simply that Kareem got old, and the best big of the next generation (Hakeem) was close to half a foot shorter than him. (And similarly, once Shaq got old, the league got smaller.)

I think this is all spot on.

Usually I feel that we tend to overemphasize the contributions of individuals when looking at broader changes. Not just in basketball, but in trying to explain all kinds of history. But I really do think this is the best explanation here. The league is a small and limited system where a few influential players and a few successful teams make a big difference.

So you have teams very successful with star big men, imitators trying to follow that blueprint to varying degrees of success, and teams trying to counter this prominent strategy using big defenders (the classic example might be teams filling out their rosters with bigs for spot duty against Shaq).

Players were consistently getting heavier throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, even while height wasn't changing much. It wasn't all bigs either, you started to see more "power" versions of guards and wings. I do feel like it's a little tough to sort out what's causing what, because to some extent a trend toward heavier players was probably also enabled by a slowing of pace.

[tsherkin]

Pace dipped because teams realised the most efficient scoring was post moves and interior scoring. Teams would take time to get it inside to high % scoring position.

Teams thought the most efficient scoring was post moves and interior scoring. That turned out to be not quite true. A bucket in the RA, absolutely, even without factoring in the draw rate, but what was happening is that a lot of those post moves ended up being those low-draw, 40-45% FG shots we used to see. This is why Al Jefferson (even with his epic possession control) was never a particularly good offensive player despite a fantastic mid-post game, for example. Or part of why, coupled to his bleh passing, anyway.

Once teams realized they could attack the post quite effectively on D, you needed an extremely good system of off-ball movement in order to make that much worthwhile, and it started to become more of a decoy or an exploitation of mismatches than anything else. Like, yeah, if you have Adrian Dantley sealing a guy, that's a high-efficiency look. If it's Zach Randolph? Probably not as much unless it's a really, really deep seal set up by off-ball movement and not post isolation.

There's that separation between post iso and post off-ball which gets fed from the perimeter. And then you factor in playmaking ability from the big, and we remember that the bigs of old ran box to box pretty well in transition. They supplemented with offensive rebounding, which is somewhat less useful today given the volume of 3pt shooting and how those come off the rim (though still quite valuable when it happens) and then off-ball cuts. We're actually seeing a lot of pretty good off-ball movement and stuff with all the DHO sets in many contemporary offenses, which is nice.

But straight-up backdown post isolation for "post moves" is actually fairly inefficient, which is something that did hinder earlier eras in terms of offensive efficiency. With a couple obvious exceptions, of course.