It's time to have a discussion about the state of scoring in the NBA, and let me tell you, I'm very happy that someone as astute and thoughtful as CJ McCollum was one of the first to weigh in during a week when we've seen four 60-point performances, including two of the ten 70-point performances in NBA history, including Luka Doncic's 73-point explosion earlier in the night. McCollum touched on not only why so many individual players are popping off for career highs in scoring, but also why across the league, team scoring is up as well:

Let's touch on a few of the things that CJ McCollum said:

I. “You look at Dallas, they got four shooters and a rolling big who dunks.” 

Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks are a great example of this, but they certainly aren't the only team in the league that is following this offensive formula. It's a rarity at this point when a team plays a lineup that doesn't feature at least four passable three-point shooters, plus two or three guys who are lights out from deep. Even a team like Minnesota, who plays bigger than most with a front court of Rudy Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns, benefits from the fact that their power forward, Towns, is one of the greatest shooting big men in NBA history — who also happened to score 60+ points earlier in the week. Milwaukee, another team that likes to play big, makes it work on offense because their center, Brook Lopez, turned himself into a 35% shooter from three-point range.

With offenses using so much more space on the floor than they ever have, it's not that team or individual defense has gotten worse at a league level… it's that playing defense is so much more difficult than it ever has been. Defenders don't have the ability to hand check anymore, and because they have so much more ground to cover than they have at any other point in league history, it makes playing defense a difficult proposition.

II. “The pace is faster than it's ever been before. Points per game is up, free throws are slightly up.” 

This is almost true, but it requires a deeper dive than just looking at pace, points, and free throw attempts. Below I've taken a look at the state of the NBA at ten-year checkpoints. I started in 1963-64, and worked my way forward to the 2023-24 season we're in right now.

1963-64 – League-wide offensive rating (94.6), points per game (111.0), pace (116.8), field goal percentage (.433), free throw percentage (.722), free throw attempts (35.0)

1973-74 – League-wide offensive rating (97.7), points per game (105.7), pace (107.8), field goal percentage (.459), free throw percentage (.771), free throw attempts (25.4)

1983-84 – League-wide offensive rating (107.6), points per game (110.1), pace (101.4), field goal percentage (.492), free throw percentage (.760), free throw attempts (29.7), three point percentage (.250)

1993-94 – League-wide offensive rating (106.3), points per game (101.5), pace (95.1), field goal percentage (.466), free throw percentage (.734), free throw attempts (26.6), three point percentage (.333)

2003-04 – League-wide offensive rating (102.9), points per game (93.4), pace (90.1), field goal percentage (.439), free throw percentage (.752), free throw attempts (24.2), three point percentage (.347)

2013-14 – League-wide offensive rating (106.7), points per game (101.0), pace (93.9), field goal percentage (.454), free throw percentage (.756), free throw attempts per game (23.6), three point percentage (.360)

2023-24 – League-wide offensive rating (115.8), points per game (115.6), pace (99.2), field goal percentage (.475), free throw percentage (.785), free throw attempts per game (23.0), three point percentage (.367)

Both points per game and offensive rating are at their highest at any of the checkpoints by a pretty considerable margin, but pace was higher in the 60's, 70's and 80's, and free throws attempts are lower than at any of the other checkpoints listed. So how do we explain why scoring is up?

The easy answer is three-point attempts, which I didn't include because it's well-known that three-point attempts are through the roof. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that three-point shooting doesn't play an extraordinarily large part in why scoring is up. But it's not the whole story.

Look at the shooting percentages. Across the board, shooting is up: highest field goal percentage since the 1983-84 checkpoint, highest free throw percentage at any point, and higher three-point shooting percentage than in the 90's, 00's, or 10's.

III. “Guys are really good.” 

This is, in my humble opinion, the biggest reason for the offensive boom across the league. We're in an all-time Golden Age of talent in the NBA. The best players in the league are operating at a ridiculously high level, and up and down rosters, teams are stacked with talent.

Of course, there will be curmudgeonly old-school basketball “fans” who will go out of their way to nitpick and cut down the product, but that only exposes their ignorance.