It's a 3 ball league now boys and girls.
This is really what it amounts to, up and down, faster pace. Pretty soon it will be 6'4" to 6'8 guys streaking up and down then shooting. The big man and half court game will slowly disappear from the court. Very little strategy, just athleticism on display.
Ok maybe thats an exaggeration but thats how it feels.
Soon there will no longer be a need for power forwards and especially centers. Just have a bunch of 6'4 - 6'8 guys playing PG-SG-SF, rebound, and just shoot 3's all day long. The objective is to score the most points in order to win the game, after all.
This would be an absolute nightmare to me.
And I'd take Embiid and Davis and dominate that league. The league isn't getting smaller. Big guys are extending their shooting range and becoming better skilled overall. Start ranking the best players under 25 and you'll see a lot of 6'10 or bigger players.
I think that the league
has gotten smaller - but size is still an advantage; it's just that the priorities are weighted toward skill and athleticism and away from brute strength ("three yards and a cloud of dust", as Pat Riley said). The rules changes in the last generation were designed to do exactly what they've in fact done, to make the game more fluid, to showcase skill and athleticism. It's not just a change in style, and a 1980's/1990's style team wouldn't mop up in today's rules environment, because they couldn't cover all that ground, couldn't exploit whatever post-up mismatches they had, couldn't stretch out the defense.
With all the push in the NBA for smaller, faster guys now the norm instead of a trend, and with nobody looking back, I would love to see a team go fully the other way, sign a bunch of big guys and old school guards and just try to pound the ball inside all year, and fast break off of all the rebounds they will grab.
I don't think it would work too well. Teams shoot the three far too well and the old school big guys are not able to guard the three point line well enough.
I agree.
The NBA has opened up the game, giving more value to skills. It isn't so much the 3-pt Era as it is the Pace and Space Era. Teams aren't standing around outside the arc; they are using the threat of the distance shot to open up the lane,
and vice versa. Long 2's are not efficient shots in general, but there are a few rare players - like Kyrie Irving! - who are efficient shooters of long 2's. So teams that have multiple guys who can create off the dribble, who can find the open spot-up shooters with the pass, and who can shoot with range, have the advantage.
I'm very enthusiastic about the way the game is played now; I think it's exciting to see everyone touch the ball, to see multiple actions on one play. Frankly, I find the old-style dump it down into the post while the guy does his thing for half the shot clock while two guys on the weak side are doing nothing at all to be an inferior brand of ball. The NBA made it more of a team game. In the 1990's and before it was possible to hide a player on defense (and offense, for that matter). This is much harder to do now.