Illustration by Tuesday Hadden | Student Life

Any way you put it, the Detroit Pistons are a dreadful basketball team. After getting off to a (relatively) hot start with two wins and a one-point loss in their first three games, the Pistons lost their next 28 games, setting an NBA record for the longest losing streak in a single season. They are now among the league’s bottom dwellers in nearly all team statistics, and their current .079 winning percentage is on pace to be the lowest of all time.

The Pistons rank 26th in scoring, just a few points ahead of Charlotte, Chicago, Memphis, and Portland. However, five seasons ago, the 2023-24 Pistons’ 111.3 points per game would be above the league average. Go back just nine years, and the 2023-24 Pistons would be the highest-scoring team in the NBA. 

So how does a hapless, nearly winless Pistons team score significantly more than the 67-win Golden State Warriors, Lob City Los Angeles Clippers, or the Durant/Westbrook Oklahoma City Thunder?

The league changes. And arguably, not for the better.

NBA teams are scoring more than ever, and this scoring has begun to take its toll on the quality of games. While past influxes of scoring have made games more exciting to watch, there’s a point where the scoring becomes too much. In a league where defense is a lost art, triple-digit finishes have become commonplace with high-scoring games regularly finishing in the 120s and 130s. 

As fun as it can be to watch a high-scoring game, turn on any NBA game today and you’ll find a handful of defensive plays that would make most high-school coaches cringe. Missed assignments, lack of communication, and an overall decrease in effort have caused fewer contested shots and more easy baskets, leading to a decrease in the quality of games.

When teams score more, games also tend to be less close. Take a recent example: last week, on a night with just five games, the Thunder beat the Trail Blazers by 62, the Bucks demolished the first-place Celtics by 33, and the Suns pulled off a wire-to-wire win against the Lakers — by a mere 18 points. More scoring leads to more blowouts, which are less exciting for fans. 

When games aren’t close, TV viewership also goes down, causing the league to lose revenue. 

It’s not that front offices don’t value defense. There’s a reason defensive stalwarts like Rudy Gobert and OG Anunoby have fetched higher values on the trade market than scorers like James Harden. But in today’s NBA, there are far more elite scorers on rosters than gifted defenders.

Increased scoring has also begun to inflate individual stats. In 2024, just because your favorite player scores more doesn’t mean they are having a historic season. 

A remarkable 50 players (minimum 20 games) are averaging at least 20 points a game. If that seems like a lot, it’s because it is — it’s on pace to be a league record. Because teams score so much, when accounting for a percentage of a team’s points, scoring 20 points per game today is roughly equivalent to 17.5 just ten years ago and a little over 16 two decades ago. 

So how can this offensive explosion be mitigated? Unfortunately, there aren’t many easy fixes. 

As 15-year NBA veteran JJ Reddick recently explained on his podcast ​​The Old Man and the Three, numerous rule changes have already been instituted to help defenses thrive. The league now penalizes offensive players for flopping and calls fewer fouls on contact-baiting moves that  players like Trae Young drew on seemingly every play in years prior. Despite media narratives or what you read on Twitter, teams are fouling less than in any era in NBA history.

One change the league could institute would be bringing back some version of the hand-check rule. Up until the 2004-5 season, players were allowed to place their arm or hand on a player to stop them from driving to the basket, limiting scoring and making it easier to defend. In 2004-5, after hand-checking was eliminated from the game, scoring increased by nearly four points per game. Calling fewer fouls on hand checks would encourage physical defense and improve teams’ abilities to stop elite scorers from getting to the basket at will. 

Other rule changes, like extending the defensive three-second violation to five seconds, would help big men stay in the paint for longer and decrease scoring at the rim. Calling more offensive fouls on drives to the basket would also decrease scoring.

A more radical move that could disrupt the scoring boom would be a league expansion. Of all of the big four American sports leagues, the NBA is best positioned to add teams. The league has remained with 30 teams for the last two decades. However, with the increasing global popularity of the sport and the financial strength of the NBA brand, the league could easily add two or even four teams in the coming years. Las Vegas and Seattle would almost certainly be the first cities to get teams, while cities like Louisville, San Diego, Montreal, and Mexico City could be prime targets to support new franchises.

More teams mean more minutes for more players, many of whom will be less efficient offensively than the stars of today’s NBA. And while it’s by no means a guarantee that offense would go down after an expansion, in three of the last five years of expansion, scoring decreased, including the period from 1987-88 to 1989-90, where four teams were added and scoring dropped to decade lows. 

Regardless of what adjustments the league decides to make, it is time for change. Even Steve Kerr, one of the greatest offensive minds in basketball history, agrees: “I think maybe there’s been an overcorrection to what was happening 20 years ago…I think we’ve just gone a little too far. I think that the rules have really been geared towards giving the offensive player the advantage. It’s become much more difficult to play defense in the NBA now.”