The Bounce Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s daily NBA newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Bounce directly in your inbox.
Steph Curry made five 3-pointers last night. He now has 3,998 regular-season 3s for his career. Thursday night, the Warriors host the Kings. I’m going to go out on a limb and say Steph creates the 4,000 3-pointers club that night. Including the playoffs, he’s made 4,616. He should keep shooting them.
Five years later
Remembering when COVID shut down league
Five years ago today, the NBA world shut down in Oklahoma City. While we were aware of the COVID-19 virus, it hadn’t taken hold of society yet. We were supposed to see a showdown between the Utah Jazz and OKC Thunder that night.
I still remember the moment in OKC pretty vividly. I was at home watching League Pass. And we all kept waiting. You could hear the pre-tip hype music blaring in the arena. You saw the players and coaches standing around. There were guys in suits discussing things with the referees, and the local broadcasts did not know what was being said. They were just preparing us for the game, filling time on air.
Suddenly, the teams went back to the locker room.
The PA announcer told the crowd they were waiting for league confirmation to begin the game.
The in-arena hype man could be heard saying, “Just because the game hasn’t started doesn’t mean the fun has to stop!”
The referees left the floor, and then the PA announcer said: “The game tonight has been postponed. You are all safe, and take your time in leaving the arena tonight and do so in an orderly fashion.”
Later that night, Shams Charania reported for us that Rudy Gobert had tested positive for the coronavirus. It felt like the tipping point toward society getting shut down shortly after.
Sports leagues had been preparing to limit locker room access for media, and the NBA had even started preparing teams to play without fans in the arena. But it seemed preposterous on some level, maybe even unfathomable. Not long after, the NBA would shut down the season for 30 days and then reevaluate the situation. We ended up having 141 days between NBA games, as the league restarted the 2019-20 season at Disney World in “the bubble” on July 30.
On March 11 (and for a while after), Gobert became public enemy No. 1 in the NBA. People blamed him for the league having a COVID outbreak, which was absurd in retrospect. We didn’t know what any of it meant, and what we learned seemed to change on an hourly basis.
A couple days earlier, though, Gobert had tried to show solidarity with the local Utah media in a somewhat socially distanced setup by touching all the microphones. It was supposed to show he wasn’t worried about being around them, but became twisted into a sign of recklessness regarding the virus.
Our own Tony Jones was on the ground covering the game. He turned out to be one of the most important journalists and league voices for this life-changing and league-changing event. I asked him what his experience was like that night:
“I was trying to balance doing my job as a journalist and assuring my family that I was OK. It was a surreal night, from the eerie silence, to taking a COVID test in the Jazz locker room with the players, to trying to figure out what was going on. It is a night that I will never forget, being on ground zero in the sporting world for such a historic event.”
Thankfully, Tony was fine, but everything else felt chaotic, to say the least. He also answered my question about how he’s feeling five years later:
“It certainly feels different. It seems like a lifetime has passed, not just five years, but the remnants are obviously still there. I mean, Hunter Dickinson is still in college, playing for the Kansas Jayhawks. The world has changed so much, and yet we seem to be sitting here waiting for the next shoe to drop.”
The Last 24
🏀 Burden and gift. Marcus Thompson wrote about what Draymond Green is bringing to the Warriors, winners of five in a row. The center of attention.
🗣️ Sorry, Chuck. I disagree with what Charles Barkley recently said. We should talk about the Lakers.
👋 Hi, OG! A fantastic profile on Knicks forward OG Anunoby. He loves the show “Prison Break”?
📚 Davidson executive. Steph Curry is the new assistant GM for his alma mater. He’s bringing NIL money.
🏀 On trash talk. “NBA Daily” wonders: Do players need to reach a certain level first? Listen. (And watch No Dunks.)
📺 Don’t miss this game tonight. Milwaukee Bucks at Indiana Pacers, 7:30 p.m. ET on TNT. This is key for fourth-seed positioning in the East.
Offense
Boom happened post-shutdown
One of the things I’ve been saying for years is that the offensive boom happened as a result of the league shutdown. Now I’ll fully admit, I had never checked statistically to see if this is actually true. I just remember watching teams play in empty arenas for a season and how the shot-making seemed to go to another level. With this being the fifth anniversary of the COVID shutdown, I’ve decided to finally test out my theory.
Let’s take a look at the five years before the shutdown, dating back to the 2015-16 season. We’ll look at the league average progression in offensive rating, true shooting percentage (factors in field goals, 3-pointers and free throws), effective field goal percentage (true shooting without free throws) and 3-point rate (percentage of shots that are 3-pointers).
Pre-2020 shutdown:
2015-16: 106.4 offensive rating | 54.1 TS% | 50.5 eFG | 28.5% 3-point rate
2016-17: 108.8 offensive rating | 55.2 TS% | 51.4 eFG | 31.6% 3-point rate
2017-18: 108.6 offensive rating | 55.6 TS% | 52.1 eFG | 33.7% 3-point rate
2018-19: 110.4 offensive rating | 56.0 TS% | 52.4 eFG | 35.9% 3-point rate
2019-20: 110.6 offensive rating | 56.5 TS% | 52.9 eFG | 38.4% 3-point rate
Clearly, the league was headed toward more efficient offense, as we can see solid upticks across the board. The 3-point rate was the biggest riser, going up 9.9 percentage points in those five seasons. That’s also when the Golden State Warriors established themselves as the standard for the NBA and teams started trying to copy them.
Now let’s look at the five seasons since, which include this season:
Post-bubble ball:
2020-21: 112.3 offensive rating | 57.2 TS% | 53.8 eFG | 39.2% 3-point rate
2021-22: 112.0 offensive rating | 56.6 TS% | 53.2 eFG | 39.9% 3-point rate
2022-23: 114.8 offensive rating | 58.1 TS% | 54.5 eFG | 38.7% 3-point rate
2023-24: 115.3 offensive rating | 58.0 TS% | 54.7 eFG | 39.5% 3-point rate
2024-25: 114.2 offensive rating | 57.5 TS% | 54.1 eFG | 42.0% 3-point rate
We’ve since seen a little bit of a league correction in the rising offensive rating. That mostly happened after Adam Silver and the league were disgusted with the performance during the 2024 All-Star Game. We saw the games officiated differently and physicality allowed back into the game … somewhat. There still could be a lot more, but I feel pretty confident that the rises in so many offensive categories across the board were greatly helped by this sort of offensive league reset that started in 2020-21.
Maybe it was always going to rise that way, but shot-making has never been better, and 3-pointers have never flown more. I think I stand by my assessment, because I want to be right, and it’s close enough!
About Last Night
The league’s MVP front-runners squared off twice in the past two days. (Alonzo Adams / Imagn Images)
Thunder-Nuggets is fun to say and watch
With a little over a month left in the season, the NBA calendar gave us two straight days of the two leading MVP candidates going head-to-head.
On Sunday afternoon, you may remember, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander led the Thunder to a 127-103 victory over the Nuggets. SGA, the odds-on favorite to win the MVP award, had 40 points, eight rebounds and three blocks. Nine of his 40 came in a 41-20 fourth quarter that turned this into a laugher. Nikola Jokić finished with 24 points, 13 rebounds, nine assists and three blocks, but he struggled to shoot after the first quarter due to an elbow injury.
Last night, they played again on a back-to-back in OKC. Jokić’s elbow seemed just fine, and the Nuggets did what almost no team ever does. They lit up the Thunder’s defense. Denver won 140-127 behind 35 points, 18 rebounds and eight assists from Big Honey. The Nuggets used their own dominant fourth quarter (39-28) to take control of the game with Jokić scoring 10 points in the period. SGA only had 25 points and took fewer shots (14) than Isaiah Hartenstein and Lu Dort (16 for both).
This MVP race needed the split in these two games for two reasons: 1) The discourse would’ve been too dismissive if the Thunder beat the Nuggets again, and 2) These two have now split their season series against each other. In their 2-2 series:
SGA averaged 30.3 points, 6.5 assists, 5.0 rebounds, 2.3 blocks and a steal. He shot 49.4 percent from the field, 25.9 percent from 3 and 89.7 percent from the line. The Thunder were plus-four with him on the court.
Jokić averaged 25.4 points, 15.8 rebounds, 11.5 assists, 1.5 steals and 1.8 blocks. He shot 52.6 percent from the field, 27.8 percent from 3 and 61.9 percent from the line. The Nuggets were minus-six with him on the court.
We’ve got five more weeks of an awesome MVP race.
📫 Love The Bounce? Check out The Athletic’s other newsletters.
(Top photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
