Is the three-point shot revolution ruining basketball?

There has been a lot of worrying about professional basketball lately—that the trend of three point shooting taking over is ruining the game. Most teams now basically only shoot threes or dunks/layups. The midrange game has all but vanished. This has caused some to proclaim that basketball is dead and so on. I agree to some extent that it’s not quite as fun to watch, but I think it’s wrong to say that it’s some kind of big problem. I grew up in the 90s watching some of the best basketball, in terms of the midrange game, and the best midrange player of all time was probably Hakeem Olajuwon. When people lament the death of the midrange game, what they’re really getting at is that nobody plays like Hakeem anymore. No one has ever had more moves 10 to 15 feet from the basket than him. Nobody made it look easier and better than him. His nickname was The Dream for a reason.

But he was a very unique case, he had a kind of athletic grace that never existed before him, or after him. There have been other players who had good mid range games, but nobody like him. And the history of basketball has always changed. It’s a simple game—just a court, two hoops, and you have to get the ball in the hoop as much as possible. There have always been a lot of different ways to do it. Even the most legendary player of all time, Bill Russell, was not a traditional basketball player. When he was coming out of college, people didn’t think he would be good at basketball because he was more of just a raw athlete and he didn’t have many basketball skills. But he ended up being the most successful player ever. And when he won his last championship in 1969 against a Lakers team that had more talent, he won by just using more athleticism. He said that the Lakers could beat his Celtics in basketball, but not in track and field, so he turned it into a track and field competition, and just outran them. Was that a betrayal of the essence of the game? No—that NBA Finals is viewed as among the greatest of all time, a paragon of the sport.

Basketball has always just been about doing whatever you can to score more points than the other team. To be able to be a good midrange player requires a kind of rare athleticism that just doesn’t exist that often. You have to be lucky to be able to thrive in the midrange. Now the game is all about the three-point shot, and anyone can do that—it’s just about putting enough hours in the gym to develop a lethal three-point shot. So this way it’s more democratic, you don’t have to be a gifted freak like Hakeem Olajuwon, you can just be basically anyone. I think there’s something good about that.

I wish I could watch someone like Hakeem Olajuwon doing insane moves in the low post and midrange again too. I wish basketball was still like that. But there just aren’t that many people who have those gifts—with the three point shot, anyone can do it, even a guy like Sam Hauser of the Boston Celtics, who has zero athletic ability and looks like he does not belong on a pro basketball court.

Hauser worked his ass off shooting threes and he is now a pro player. He would get eaten alive in the low post or midrange, but now that the game has moved beyond the arc, he can live his dream. I think that’s cool.