When the NBA announced referees would no longer be instructed to call fouls on plays involving unnatural shooting motions this season, Brooklyn Nets guard James Harden was an obvious player who might be impacted. Harden has excelled at seeking out and creating contact as a way to get to the free throw line.
Lo and behold, Harden was off to a surprisingly poor start to the 2021-22 NBA regular season, averaging 16.6 points over his first five games and shooting 36% from the field before breaking out Friday night for 29 points while draining 16 of 19 free throws. Harden told reporters earlier this week that he's "slowly getting back" to where he was before dealing with a series of hamstring injuries last season, including one he played through during the Nets' seven-game conference semifinals loss to the Milwaukee Bucks.
Does that explanation hold up? This week's mailbag investigates along with considering the eras of NBA history. Throughout the NBA season, I answer your questions about the latest, most interesting topics in basketball. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
"How much of Harden's slow start can be traced to the NBA cracking down on unnatural shooting motions and other ways to draw fouls?"
-- Marcus
Despite some of the ugly-looking plays we've seen from Harden hoping in vain for a whistle early this season, I'm a little skeptical of officiating as an explanation for a couple of reasons.
As noted by Todd Whitehead of Synergy Sports earlier this week, Harden didn't benefit from nearly as many shooting fouls after joining the Nets last season. His free throw rate had already declined dramatically from 11.8 per game in 2019-20 with the Houston Rockets to 7.3 after the trade in virtually identical minutes, in part because of a shift from looking to score in isolations to more frequently looking to set up teammates (Harden's assists simultaneously went up from 7.5 to 10.9).
Even the most extreme possible magnitude of change doesn't explain how poorly Harden has shot thus far. According to PBPstats.com, Harden drew shooting fouls on missed shots 99 times in 2020-21, or about 12% of his total attempts to shoot, including those shooting fouls (which aren't recorded as field-goal attempts). If Harden had drawn shooting fouls at the same rate this season through Thursday, he'd have 10 or 11 on missed shots instead of his actual four.
If we reimagine seven Harden misses as shooting fouls and no longer shot attempts, his field-goal percentage would improve only to 39% -- still the worst mark of his career and a far cry from last season's 47% accuracy.
Second Spectrum tracking data also allows us to consider all Harden attempts to score, both actual shot attempts and shooting fouls on misses. According to their quantified shot quality measure (qSQ, which factors location and type of shots and distance to nearby defenders), Harden's shots have gotten a little more difficult than last season, when an average player would have been expected to post an effective field-goal percentage (eFG%) of 46.9% on the same shots. That's down to 46% this season entering Friday's games.
In terms of his actual shooting, Harden's eFG%, which counts 3s as 1.5 field goals, was down from 48% to 42%. So Harden's shot-making -- without considering refereeing -- has declined much more (from two percentage points better than league average to four points worse) than his quality of shots. That's surely good news for Harden and Brooklyn going forward, since shot-making tends to be much more variable from game to game than the type of shots players attempt.
There's no doubt Harden has suffered a bit because of the NBA's crackdown on foul seeking. When filtering out plays with shooting fouls, there's a slightly bigger decline in Harden's shot quality, which makes sense because those unnatural shot attempts were surely low-percentage ones if no foul had been called. Still, the evidence doesn't suggest either that's the biggest culprit. Neither does it appear to be a decline in athleticism preventing Harden from getting as good of looks.
Instead, in a make-or-miss league, Harden isn't hitting his shots nearly as often. And that's something he might work his way back into (see Friday night's game) as he gets his rhythm and timing back after being limited by his hamstring injuries.
"In looking at the NBA's 75 greatest players list, I wonder if there is a better way to compose the list and not exclude important years of the NBA's history. My first thought was to break the NBA up by decades, but that seemed problematic as many great players played across multiple decades and started at different points in those decades. Then I thought if the NBA could be divided into eras, then each era could be assigned a number of players of the 75. I think it would be fun to have a defined list of eras, (e.g. early, ABA/NBA, hand-check, 3-point) to discuss regardless of the list of 75 players."
-- Zachary
Discussing history in terms of eras definitely helps us understand it, so I agree it's a useful exercise outside of the top 75 list. Considering style of play, expansion and narrative factors, here's how I would break up the 75 NBA seasons into eras (including a few key statistics to help see the changes across different eras):
The pre-shot clock era is pretty self-explanatory. The 24-second clock was introduced for the 1954-55 season, and scoring immediately jumped by 13.6 PPG. Two seasons later, the Boston Celtics drafted Bill Russell and won the first of their 11 championships in a 13-year span, making the Celtics dynasty the defining feature of this era.
There's some overlap between the end of the Russell era and the start of the expansion/ABA era. The NBA started adding teams in 1966-67, going from nine to 17 in a five-year span in response to the threat posed by the rival ABA, which began play in 1967-68. Adding in the ABA, the number of fully professional basketball teams tripled, diluting talent.
The ABA-NBA merger in 1976 set up the brief, post-merger parity period during which no team won 60 games and we saw two champions win fewer than 50 regular-season games. That stood in stark contrast to the Celtics/Los Angeles Lakers battle of the 1980s, which saw the two teams combine to win all but one title in a nine-year span.
Surely, Pistons fans will be disappointed their championships are lumped in with the Jordan Bulls era, but 1988-89 is a useful dividing line because it marked the start of another round of rapid expansion that took the NBA from 23 to 29 teams by 1995-96. After Jordan's retirement from the Chicago Bulls and the extended 1998 lockout, the NBA game slowed down, and scoring averages fell to points not seen since the arrival of the shot clock. The post-Jordan era, like his two-season comeback with the Washington Wizards, wasn't nearly as fun as the 1990s.
That changed with a rules reinterpretation in 2004, creating the post-handcheck era marked by increased pace and scoring. Because of the second lockout in 2011 followed by LeBron James' first title with the Miami Heat in 2011-12, that feels like a natural starting point for the LeBron era, which has also been marked by rapidly rising 3-point rates (encouraged by increasing emphasis on statistical analysis) and scoring returning to levels not seen since before the merger.
To your original question, let's look at where the 76 players (due to a tie) on the 75th anniversary team fit by era. I placed them by weighting their seasons played by win shares and taking the average, or weighted midpoint.
Pre-shot clock (1 for 8 seasons): George Mikan
Celtics dynasty (12 for 15 seasons): Paul Arizin, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, Bob Cousy, Hal Greer, Sam Jones, Bob Pettit, Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Dolph Schayes, Bill Sharman, Jerry West
Expansion/ABA (16 for 7 seasons): Tiny Archibald, Rick Barry, Dave Bing, Dave Cowens, Billy Cunningham, Dave DeBusschere, Walt Frazier, John Havlicek, Elvin Hayes, Jerry Lucas, Pete Maravich, Earl Monroe, Willis Reed, Nate Thurmond, Wes Unseld, Lenny Wilkens
Post-merger parity (5 for 3 seasons): Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving, George Gervin, Bob McAdoo, Bill Walton
Celtics/Lakers (7 for 9 seasons): Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Kevin McHale, Moses Malone, Robert Parish, Isiah Thomas, James Worthy
Jordan Bulls (12 for 10 seasons): Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, Patrick Ewing, Michael Jordan, Karl Malone, Reggie Miller, Hakeem Olajuwon, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Dennis Rodman, John Stockton, Dominique Wilkins
Post-Jordan (4 for 6 seasons): Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd, Shaquille O'Neal, Gary Payton
Post-handcheck (9 for 7 seasons): Ray Allen, Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Steve Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, Paul Pierce, Dwyane Wade
LeBron (10 for 10 seasons): Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, Anthony Davis, Kevin Durant, James Harden, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, Damian Lillard, Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook
From this standpoint, the expansion era feels overrepresented. I'm surprised to see the era with the strongest case for more representation turns out to be the 1980s.