There Is No Ethical Hooping Under Basketball Capitalism
Free throws are too efficient, and until that changes, foul-grifting is here to stay.
Recently, two of my favorite basketball analysts —
and Ben Taylor — have released content that touches on similar themes, despite approaching them from different directions. Here is Marc’s story on what to do about the epidemic of foul-grifting in the NBA…
…and here is Ben’s video on Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s knack for drawing contact and getting to the line by, um, whatever means necessary:
Despite 11 other players having a higher free throw rate this season, Gilgeous-Alexander has become the face of the so-called “unethical hooping” movement in the NBA today. Perhaps this is because he is using a league-high 8.0 free throws per game (23 percent more than anyone else) to lead the league in scoring, while probably also winning the MVP. That automatically makes SGA a lightning rod for the foul-grifting debate, the same way that James Harden was in a previous generation of the game.
But I think it goes even deeper than that, because while grifting was sort of Harden’s whole deal,1 SGA seems like he doesn’t need to do it. He has the body type and skills to be a Kobe or a Jordan; there’s a school of thought that players shouldn’t resort to foul-grifting if they’re capable of getting ethical, farm-raised buckets the way the Basketball Gods intended.
Obviously, this whole debate is a bit silly. Putting aside whether SGA is really even a foul merchant or not, it’s a little like the concept of pitch-framing in baseball: It is the refs’ entire job to decide what is within the rules of the game versus not. If they are missing calls, it is their job to improve — or the league’s job to fix the rules — not the job of players to leave wins (and money) on the table out of some grand sense of obligation to the Spirit of the Game. This is why the idea of “ethical” versus “unethical” hooping rings somewhat ridiculous to me, as though there is some kind of Basketball Afterlife where Saint Peter2 will judge you at the pearly gates for how much you sinned against the sport.
(Kevin Durant had better hope that doesn’t exist, at least.)
Besides, I’ve joked before that “there is no ethical hooping under capitalism”… and let me explain what I mean by that. The scoring system of basketball ensures that foul-grifting will always be a problem, no matter how much you try to tamp it down, unless some pretty fundamental changes are made. Because, as the late longtime vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger, once said:
“Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.”
The incentive is points per possession. The average NBA free throw trip yields 1.77 points per possession, while the average field goal attempt yields just 1.08 points per possession (and as I’ve covered before, we seem to have reached a sort of equilibrium where 2- and 3-point attempts are roughly equal in efficiency now).
Obviously, this type of differential will incentivize players to try to convert more of their possessions away from the lower-efficiency type (field goals) and into the higher-efficiency type (free throws). Again: Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.
To combat this, Marc favors a top-down approach: give referees the discretion to call a grifting penalty on players who try to bait fouls — resulting in a personal foul on them, plus one free throw and possession for the opposing team.
I don’t mind it in theory, though I always question whether the solution to a problem of subjectivity — when should the refs blow the whistle? — is to introduce more subjectivity, in the form of yet another judgment call. As someone who sometimes tries to think like an economist — especially when it comes to incentives — my mind immediately jumps to a bottom-up solution: Change the structure, change the outcome.
To that end, what if we simply made foul-drawing less valuable? One piece of basic, unwieldy math is that if free throws were worth 0.61 points apiece instead of 1, then the average points per possession of a free throw trip would be the same as that of a field goal attempt. Obviously, fractions of a point are not feasible. But you could achieve a similar effect by requiring players to make more free throws per trip — for instance, at the league average FT%, giving 2 points for going 4-for-4 at the line and 1 for going 3-for-4 results in a comparable average points per possession (1.16) to a standard field goal attempt.
We would have to tweak this to handle And-1s or 3-shot fouls,3 but this general idea would make free throw possessions far closer in value to shots from the field — and thus far less desirable to grift for.
Alternatively, we could try moving the FT distance back to a distance that is more difficult to make as many shots from. The league-average rate on a wide-open 3 seems to be around 39 to 42 percent, depending on how we estimate it, which would make free throws too underpowered (96.2 points per 100) relative to regular shots, but there should be some magic number between 15 feet and 23 feet, 9 inches at which the average FT conversion rate would be around 47 percent — just enough to bring the expected return to ~108 points per 100 possessions, in line with field goals.
Now, you might argue that this makes things even more convoluted than giving refs a way to directly punish floppers and foul-grifters. It would also rely on players and coaches to do the math and realize just how drastically the incentive structure around free throws has changed. It would take a while for the new meta this creates to filter through the game — and yes, it might cause some unintended consequences of its own.
But I would argue that foul merchants were among the biggest unintended consequences of James Naismith’s early basketball rules, by setting the value of free throws such that they are far more efficient than any other shot. And in terms of enforcement, I believe it’s preferable to have the players choose their own way to approach a new incentive instead of imposing harsher top-down policing from officials, though I do see the argument for a stricter but less radical/reformist application of the same incentives we’ve always had.
Either way, we have to realize that “unethical hooping” is the product of how disproportionately valuable each trip to the free throw line is in the modern NBA. If we truly want to discourage it, we have to make foul-grifting a less attractive strategy, and that begins and ends with the cold, hard math of the scoreboard.
Filed under: NBA, Insane Ideas
By which I mean, everything in his game — the extra steps, the rip-throughs, the contact-seeking — was designed to optimize within the technical letter of the rules, without regard for their spirit.
Namesake for the Cinderella college basketball team in New Jersey who went to the 2022 Elite Eight, of course.
Perhaps you just get the normal extra free throw for an And-1 — you earned it! — while we modify the payout structure for 3s to still make the possession less overpowered:
Great stuff NP! The good doctor could never have imagined the limits this game would be pushed to. You're correct; we need something here because a 1.77 PPP yield is too much delta to leave on the table for players.
Hmmm I don't love players taking even more FTs. I like the idea of backing up the FT line. I was trying to experiment with 2s being worth 3 point and 3s being worth like 5 but then how many FTs would you have per foul?
I'd also like the idea of replacing current fouls with how they do in soccer or hockey, where you keep playing and if you score, we all forget about the foul. But I'm sure that would have even more unintended consequences than anything else.