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Scoring is up in the NBA. Perhaps too much.
According to a report from ESPN, the league’s competition committee is officially looking into whether or not the rules of the game too heavily favor the offense.
“Joe Dumars, the league’s executive vice president and head of basketball operations, told ESPN the league’s competition committee has officially begun reviewing whether the game has tilted too far toward offense and whether changes need to be implemented to achieve better balance.”
“It is a topic that we’re monitoring,” Dumars told ESPN earlier this month. “We’re diving in right now to make sure that we’re on the right side of this.”
In the month of January 2024, alone four different NBA players scored 60 points or more: Luka Doncic (73), Joel Embiid (70), Devin Booker (62), and Karl-Anthony Towns (62). Additionally, this year’s All-Star game featured a team scoring over 200 points for the first time.
The highest-scoring player in the NBA this season is Luka Doncic, who is putting up 34.3 points per game, which is 3 more points than Shai Gilgerous-Alexander in second place.
The highest-scoring team this year is the Indiana Pacers, who are averaging 123.9 points per game. The lowest-scoring team in the NBA, the Memphis Grizzlies, are averaging 106.5 points per game.
“This is what a lot of the [regular-season] games are starting to look like too,” LeBron James said after the All-Star game.
“We wanted to get more pace into the games. We wanted to get more shots. We wanted the game to be more free flowing… It’s a deeper dive into a conversation of how we can shore up this game.”
For comparison, 10 years ago during the 2013-14 season, the highest-scoring team in the league was the Los Angeles Clippers at 107.9 points per game, while the lowest was the Chicago Bulls at 93.7 points per game.
“The rules really favor offense, in general, right now,” three-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert told ESPN. “Keeping a team under a hundred is way more rare than it was a few years back.”