The 2-point shot is less and less utilized in the NBA – the debate is on

The NBA is on the cusp of accomplishing something that it hasn’t seen before. The jury’s still out on whether it’s a good thing.

With about seven weeks left in the season, 2-point shots are accounting for 49% of scoring. And if that stat holds up — there’s no indication that it won’t — this will be the first season in which 2-pointers make up less than half of the league’s point production.

The current breakdown: a record-low 49% of scoring comes from 2-pointers, a record-high 36% comes from 3-pointers, and a near-record-low 15% comes from the foul line. Those numbers are just more proof of how the 3-point shot continues permeating the game, and that’s why plenty of people are wondering aloud if the league has a real problem on its hands.

“I don’t have any problem with guys and teams shooting a lot of 3s,” said Golden State’s Stephen Curry, the league’s all-time leader in 3-pointers and someone closing in on 4,000 such makes for his regular-season career. “Obviously, that’s the way that I play, and I love that factor in the game. But you’ve also got to put the work in behind the scenes to take full advantage of it.”

This isn’t a new phenomenon.

Barring some sort of major shift in how the game is played over the next seven weeks, the league is on pace to break the record for 3-pointers in a season (it’ll be the 15th consecutive season in which the 3s-per-game record falls) and 3-pointers attempted in a season (a new mark will be set there for the 19th time in the last 22 seasons).

Boston is leading the 3-point assault this year, though the Celtics are hardly the only 3-happy team. But the defending NBA champions are clearly more reliant on the shot than anyone else, with 46% of their points this season coming from beyond the arc. They’ll almost certainly become only the third team in NBA history to finish a season with more points from 3s than 2s, joining the 2018-19 Houston Rockets and 2020-21 Utah Jazz.

“Everybody can’t play the same way,” Celtics All-Star forward and two-time Olympic gold medalist Jayson Tatum said. “You’ve got to have the right personnel. But, you know, the way we play works for us. So, we play to our strengths.”

The Celtics are the only franchise in NBA history to have eight different players make 100 3s in a season; they’ve done it in each of the last two seasons and are on pace to do it again this year. For them, the 3-pointer is the golden ticket; they’re 33-6 this season when they make at least 17 3s, and just 8-10 when they don’t make that many.

They had five 3-point shooters on the floor together last season and the result was an NBA championship. It was, at times, impossible to guard. Golden State rode the brilliance of Curry and Klay Thompson to four NBA titles in their years as the Warriors’ “Splash Brothers,” a duo that helped usher in a new era of 3-point reliance. And the math is simple: shooting 40% on 3s gets you more points per attempt than shooting 50% on 2s does.

“Right now, I think the defense has to catch up and maybe NBA teams will shoot less 3s,” San Antonio star Victor Wembanyama said at the All-Star break, before he was shut down for the year with deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder. “But analytics back it up, so it makes sense.”

Wembanyama was averaging 8.8 3-point tries per game this season, the most of any center in the league, and his 403 attempts on the season from beyond the arc is still more entering this week than some of the game’s best shooters — a list of players that includes Phoenix’s Devin Booker, the Los Angeles Lakers’ Austin Reaves and Miami’s Duncan Robinson. TIM REYNOLDS, Basketball Writer, MDT/AP