The Lowdown on NBA Scoring: DEFENSE! : 90-Point Games Are the Norm, and Tougher Defense Figures to Make a Bad Situation Even Worse

Here are a few words of advice for anyone dismayed by the dramatic drop in NBA scores:

Get used to it.

What coaches have joined together to accomplish, no administrator will soon put asunder and he might not be able to if he wanted to. Scores aren’t going back up, says Jack Ramsay, a Hall of Famer who earned his credentials as an attack-minded coach in the ‘70s, “not unless the defense goes to sleep.”

“The defenses are too good,” Ramsay says. “It’s hard to get fast-break opportunities because the opposing defenses don’t let offenses run at a quick pace. Even if your intention is to get down and get quick scores, you’re going against teams that are already set against you. Transition defense is better. The whole tenor of defense is stronger.”

And getting stronger every season, it would appear.

Last season, scoring, which had been more than 100 points a game per team since 1957-58, dropped back into double figures. This season, it’s down to 95.7. At this rate they’ll be in the low 80s by 2000.

The NBA office’s reaction to the scoring decline can be summed up in even fewer words: What, us worry?

At last week’s Competition Committee meeting in Cleveland, the general managers decided only to appoint a subcommittee. The one rule change members favored was to move the three-point line back to 23 feet 9 inches, where it was until 1995, when scoring had dropped for each of the preceding seven seasons.

Proposals by such respected coaches as Larry Brown and Pete Newell--throwing out the zone defense rules, using the CBA to experiment--are still considered radical. League officials counsel caution. If offenses are demonstrably broken, TV ratings are still healthy and Commissioner David Stern won’t worry about fixing anything until the audience suggests it cares.

At this point, people can’t even agree on what has gone wrong.It has been blamed on expansion (not likely; summer leagues are farmore diluted than the NBA and their teams pile up huge scores), onyoung players who can’t shoot.

Shooting has slipped after reaching its zenith(49.1%) in 1984-85, but it’s still 45%, compared to 42.6% in 1961-62 when scoring peaked at 118.8 points.

It isn’t expansion, kids or phases of the moon. The game hasjust slowed. Since 1961-62, scoring has fallen 19.5% and shots have fallen 25.5%.

DEE-FENSE

In what now seem like the good, old, high-scoring days, NBA coaches supposedly just “rolled the balls out,” a charge with some truth in it, though less as the decades went by and new ideas, primarily defensive ones, emerged.

Red Auerbach built a dynasty around Bill Russell, a shot-blocking demon passed up by two other teams that didn’t like his $22,000 asking price or his raw offensive game. With Russell’s limited but highly complementary offense, the Celtics won 11 titles in 13 seasons.

The Knicks’ heyday was built on coach Red Holzman’s decision to forget offensive rebounding, keep players back to take away fast breaks and play half-court games. The Knicks won titles in 1970 and 1973 as their fans chanted “Dee-fense!” and congratulated each other on their newly acquired sophistication.

Nevertheless, defensive doctrine was still rudimentary 20 years ago. In 1976-77, teams averaged 106.5 points and scoring was going back up. By 1986-87, it was 109.9.

Teams rarely double-teamed. The collegians’ technique of establishing position and drawing charges--or flopping--was sneered at.

The Celtics, who won two titles in the ‘70s, were vehement on the subject. Announcer Johnny Most used to call opponents like the Philadelphia 76ers’ Doug Collins, who was adept at taking charges, “a member of the Stanislavsky school of acting.” Other times it was the “ACC flop” or the “phony flop.”

Nor were Celtic players rational about it. Dave Cowens, the take-no-prisoners center, once became so infuriated when Houston’s Mike Newlin drew two charges on him, he lined Newlin up in his sights, charged across the floor and blasted him into the parquet with what the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan called “a double-forearm smash.”

Cowens then turned to referee Bill Jones and said, “Now that’s a foul.”

But there was no stopping progress. Drawing charges worked.

So did trapping, pressing and double-teaming. The 76ers’ Ramsay pressed full-court, in the manner of UCLA’s John Wooden. The Lakers’ Pat Riley began trapping in the half court to keep the pressure off their front lines and to open games up.

However, when a new, more structured version of zone defense rules came in during the 1980s, the game changed.

As Paul Westphal suggested when he was coaching the Phoenix Suns, it was now easy to throw the ball into the post, because defenders weren’t allowed to double-team a man who didn’t have the ball. Defenses couldn’t sag, either, because players had to stay near the men they were guarding.

Offenses “spaced the floor,” lining up players on the three-point line to bring the defense out. If Paul Mokeski camped atop the circle, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had to keep one foot north of the free throw line . . . while Sidney Moncrief posted up a Laker guard.

The game became static and predictable: the offense threw the ball into the post, the defense double-teamed, the offense threw the ball out, the defense rotated back, the offense reversed the ball, trying to find an open man before the defense could get back to him. Twenty seconds ran off the clock and someone took a 20-footer.

With offenses spaced so admirably, “transition defense” was born and “transition offense”--fast breaks--died. Now a normal offensive set would have two or three players back on the floor, protecting against anyone trying to break out and run. By the ‘90s, the Showtime days were over, not just for the Lakers but the entire league.

The big dogs were all defensive stalwarts. Riley, once an easygoing proponent of free-flowing self-expression, became a gritty boss who tightened up the Lakers’ defense and booted them to their 1987 and 1988 titles when people thought they were too old.

Chuck Daly’s Bad Boy Pistons won titles in 1989 and 1990. The following season, Dallas coach Richie Adubato showed his players highlights of Bill Laimbeer flopping and stymying the Portland offense in the finals, as a training video.

A year later, Riley went to the Knicks where he began describing basketball as “a game of force.”

The Bulls, a team made up of athletes rather than bruisers, won four titles in the ‘90s with an underappreciated defense. Four of them--Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Horace Grant--made all-defensive teams. A fifth, Ron Harper, joined them after making all-defensive teams earlier in his career.

By 1994, when Riley’s Knicks played the Houston Rockets in a low-scoring final series that drew low ratings, the drop in scoring was becoming noticeable.

Asking Riley about it, of course, was like asking the head of SAC if he approved of powered flight. After snarling he didn’t care what anyone thought, Riley directed reporters to Daly, by then, a TV commentator.

Instead of backing Riley up, however, Daly said he advocated rules changes “to see if we can put the basket back into basketball.”

“We’re pretty predictable,” Daly said. “Throw it into the post and see if the defense doubles down, then kick it out and swing it. Either that or the pick-and-roll.”

The dialogue goes on but without offensive free-wheelers like Westphal, Don Nelson and Paul Westhead on the sideline anymore. Brown, the purist’s purist, has a Pacer team averaging 94.8 points. For the moment, defense doesn’t just rule, it dominates.

WHAT TO DO?

Even if Jordan retired (again), if TV ratings fell off a cliff (again) and Stern decided he had to have more scoring fast, there is no agreement on how to achieve it.

Some coaches think moving the three-point line back will help. Others don’t.

Newell wants to let teams cross half court and then start the 24-second clock, to give offenses more time to attack doubling/rotating defenses.

Brown and Newell want to junk the zone defense rules and let teams play anything they want, as collegians do.

“You know,” Brown says, “you can walk Albert Belle. You can double-team Jerry Rice. Why the hell can’t we just play any kind of defense?

“We’ve killed the game. You can’t run because of these isolation moves. It takes time to get yourself set to run isolation plays. . . .

“Why should I have to guard someone 40 feet from the goal? We’re paying guys $247,500 to tell the referee, ‘That guy’s illegal!’ It’s absurd.”

Whatever it is, it’s staying that way. At Cleveland, Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik said there were probably no drastic rule changes coming. It’s the Day of the Big D, as in Drought.

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The Lowdown on NBA Scoring: DEFENSE!

A look at the average points scored per team in the NBA since 1960-61 season

1960-61: 118.1

1964-65: 110.6

1969-70: 116.7

1974-75: 102.6

1979-80: 109.3

1984-85: 110.8

1989-90: 107.0

1994-95: 101.4

1996-97: 95.7