Adam Silver on NBA’s 3-point shooting fixation: ‘We will correct those issues’

This 2024-25 campaign will definitely go down in history as the year in which the three-point shooting frenzy finally became a real issue and needed to be addressed somehow by the organization. At the end of the day, fans know what they want, and they’re made themselves heard.

This season, 41.4% of all NBA shots are coming from behind the arc, and the dynamic of basketball we used to know, is slowly changing forever. What better example than to analyse the current-reigning champions, who last year attempts more threes than twos over their entire campaign.

We can understand why fans were initially impressed by the three-point revolution started with future Hall of Famers like Stephen Curry, but now most have grown worried that this dominance has now taken the league by storm, and won’t ever return it as it was. I guess all basketball fans want is a little bit a balance in the game.

Adam Silver says the NBA made adjustments last year to limit players from hunting for fouls

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— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) January 15, 2025

Even though Adam Silver has already addressed this issue in the past months, he took things further this week when he appeared on Colin Cowherd’s The Herd on Wednesday and made it clear that the league is considering fundamental changes to keep things in check.

“What do we do to change it?” he started out. “I agree to the extent that you start to see very similar offenses around the league. Teams have brands, teams have identities, Joe Dumars is a colleague now at the league office, the Bad Boys, etc… the Showtime Lakers. So, I recognize that to the extent that offenses start to look very similar, we lose that.”

The NBA Commissioner is convinced that these so-called “revolutions” were bound to happen, as the modern basketball player is more versatile than before. “At the same time, the league is going through a transformation,” Silver said. “Just as you said, players like Victor Wembanyama, players like [Nikola] Jokic, are doing things that big men never did historically.”

“So I think we’ve just gotta be careful,” he acknowledged. “The one thing we don’t want to do is, I don’t want to just kneejerk move the 3-point line. We’re sort of going through a process now, seeing how these players are adapting to the new rules, and figuring out what changes we should make. To be honest, I wish it was as simple as just moving the 3-point line back, because then we would just do it.”