The Celtics are attempting more threes (51.1) than twos (40.0) this season — a lopsided stat only registered once before in NBA history when the 2018-19 Rockets attempted 3.4 more threes than twos.
As such, Joe Mazzulla’s team — on pace to shatter the record for most threes in a season — is very much to blame for the NBA’s ongoing battle with the volume of deep shots.
Some analysts such as Shaquille O’Neal and Brian Windhorst have blamed the NBA’s excessive three-point shooting for the declining ratings. Shaq believes fans are “looking at the same thing” every night with teams running actions that involve dribble-handoffs to threes, and that the mundanity of the product has made the game less interesting.
On Wednesday Mazzulla had an interesting response when asked if the game had become “boring” due to the excessive three-point attempts.
“It’s an interesting perspective, because in the NFL, people aren’t like, ‘I want to see less scoring.’ They’re not going to make the end zones smaller,” Mazzulla said, via WEEI’s Justin Turpin. “They’re not going to make the field smaller. Scoring is up across other sports. I guess my question would be why in basketball would scoring being up be an issue as opposed to other sports? Does anybody want to watch a football game and see less touchdowns?”
