If you watch NBA basketball then you know 3-pointers are up. You know because you’re seeing it, night after night, no matter the team you follow. Matter of fact, if you look at this season’s 3-point attempts there is going to be a deep-court shooter on your team. It doesn’t mean they are making those shots, but boy, are they chucking them.
You likely also know because we can’t stop talking about it. The royal “we” in this case of NBA media, and then onto fans, then back to media in a never-ending cycle. You may be sick of hearing about threes at this, the halfway point of the 2024-2025 season but I’m sorry say — tough luck.
At least half tough luck. Threes aren’t going away — we can pretty plainly see this to be true night after night — but the good news is their volume and habituality will make it so sooner or later our approach to them is less wide-eyed and speculative than accepting. They’ll become the new normal.
No other athlete embodies this normalization better than the greatest NBA player in the world at present: Nikola Jokic.
Last night, at the end of the third quarter with 1.7 seconds left go, Jokic asked for the inbound from Aaron Gordon and turned, somehow still unhurriedly, to launch the ball from the court’s opposite corner down, down, all the way down to the opposing basket. It was a 66-foot shot. The shot clock buzzed when the ball was somewhere at the 30-foot mark and the ball kept going. It was so high that like a ship leaving earth’s orbit, it escapes the arena feed cameras for a few split seconds.
When the ball connects, thunks into the net (thank goodness for rim microphones), there’s a split second of silence before the crowd erupts. The disbelief suspended by 21,000 souls had to be yanked back down to reality. Every player on the floor turned to watch the ball on its arc; Kings players walking tiredly toward their bench with their heads craned to see. Of course, no one says of half- or full-court shots at the buzzer they know they’re going in, but the mood of every person on the floor as Jokic sent the basketball like a thunderbolt over their heads was that yes, it was. Otherwise, why watch? And everyone was watching.
“This is going in, probably,” Jokic said of the shot, nonplussed, in his postgame presser. He acknowledge this season was the best basketball of his career in the same deadpan a few Q&As later.
Jokic’s impassive reactions to basketball and his skill for it have been touted as a competitive character flaw. Asked why he didn’t react after the game and Jokic shrugged, “I don’t know, I don’t know why I didn’t react a little bit better.” He went on to list reactions he sees his teammates do, eliciting chuckles from the room from his impersonations. What I’ve always thought of Jokic’s singular-seeming mode of playing basketball is that he’s processing it at a different level than the majority of his peers. His brain, on basketball, turns streamlined, problem-solving several steps ahead with every second of play. Crazy things happening as a result turn routine.
In relation to 3-point shooting specifically, you need only to look to the team institutionalizing the practice. When the Celtics take and make their many (many) threes each game, they are mechanical about it. Partially, this is the encompassing personality of the team, but the other side of it is the effect of routine. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander likes to keep a low, personality profile during games, certainly when taking telescopic shots and more generally as leader on a boisterous and personality-filled team. Cade Cunningham, Victor Wembanyama, young stars who lead their teams and also put up robust outside shooting numbers are doing the same.
None of this is to suggest that threes will eventually become joyless. Shots like Jokic made are worth freaking out about, as all those fans in the arena last night can attest to. But we have passed the threshold of conventionality in 3-point shooting for better or worse. We know they’re coming in every game and our reactions to watching them lessen, just a little, with each shot.
Framed this way and there’s even more reason to celebrate their novelty and skill while we still can.
A midseason report for seasons to come — Part one, part two, part three
