Has Scoring Become More Important Than Defense in the NBA?

As of January 8, 2023, there have already been 14 times that an NBA player has scored 50+ points and there have been 91 times that a player has scored 40+ points. The season is only halfway over… For the 2021-22 season, there were only 19 times that a player scored 50+ in the ENTIRE SEASON. It’s not just the individual players that have changed, but it’s the teams as well. This season, the average points per game for an NBA team is 113.8 points; but 10 years ago, in 2013, the league average was 98.1 points.

The main question with this surge of scoring is why? There isn’t an exact answer to that question, but there are a couple of reasons that people point to. Ever since the “seven seconds or less” offense was made by Mike D’Antoni, who was the Phoenix Suns’ head coach in the mid-2000s, scoring has seemed to be much more of a priority than it’s ever been.
With “seven seconds or less,” the offense would revolutionize a league known for its slow-paced play. The basic plan was to advance the ball down the court and set up a shot within the first seven seconds of the shot clock. The point guard was intended to complete a high-post pick-and-roll, which would present ample opportunities. The point guard had three options: keep possession and drive to the hoop, pass to the big man rolling, or kick out to an open shooter. In a league where shooting was not as popular as it is now, this frequently left defenses in ruins. This led to other teams leaving their “grit and grind” or their defense-focused game plans behind and adopting this new and fresh style of play. Ever since then, teams’ priority has increasingly become more focused on scoring quickly, and teams’ points averages have gone up.

Some insiders claim that it is the amount of talent that has changed and that players have just simply gotten better. Before Kevin Durant emerged as a generationally efficient scorer in the 2009-10 season, only four players averaged 30 points per game or more on 60% true shooting or better: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Michael Jordan, and Adrian Dantley. Halfway through this season, six players are on pace to average that. NBA insiders, fans, and analysts are saying that the surge in scoring is because talent has increased, and with the efficiency that these high-level scorers are performing, it’s hard to say that it is not true.

Therefore, scoring has become more of a priority due to two main reasons. The first is that the “seven seconds or less” offense has pushed teams into more offensive-oriented game plans. The second is that NBA players have become more efficient and that has caused averages to increase.