The NBA's bizarre free-throw drought continues: Is it the NBA's pitch clock?

Final scores in the 70s. Teams are going entire halves without free throws. What's going on? Proposing a new theory.

Giannis Antetokounmpo argues with referee Josh Tiven in early March. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

A crazy thing happened on Wednesday night. The Cleveland Cavaliers didn’t take a free throw in the first three quarters of their game against New Orleans. 

Three quarters of basketball, not a single shooting foul whistled by officials against the Pelicans. It marked the first time this season that a team – any team – entered the fourth quarter with zilch in the FT attempt column. About 2,000 NBA games have been played since the last time it happened.

A basketball comet streaked across the sky, an event so rare you might watch an entire season’s worth of games and never see it. 

And then, three minutes later: another comet zipped across the sky!

That’s right: it happened again. Over in Memphis, just seconds later, the Charlotte Hornets concluded the third quarter of their game with zero free throws to their name. It hadn’t happened all season and then, in a span of five minutes, it happened TWICE.

Charlotte’s first free throw against Memphis came at the 10:13 mark in the fourth quarter, an and-one for Charlotte point guard Tre Mann. That came a few ticks earlier than the Cavs’ first free throw attempt against New Orleans, which came at the 9:00 mark, an and-one for Darius Garland.

The Cavs finished the game with just three free throws, the team’s lowest total since 1994. Cleveland star Donovan Mitchell wasn’t even alive the last time it happened. Back in Memphis, Charlotte finished with a parade of free throws in the fourth quarter, ending up with 13, still down from their season average of 18.5.

Believe it or not, the bizarre free-throw droughts didn’t end there. Up in Portland, the Blazers logged just one free throw in the first half. That’s the lowest free-throw total at halftime for the ball club this season. And the season before that. And the season before that and the season before that.

These are the latest entries in the league’s bizarre disappearance of free throws, and with it, all that high scoring in the NBA we heard so much about. Is there something behind it? I’m going to propose a new theory.

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The scoring crash continues

Two weeks ago, I wrote that NBA scoring was crashing. The floor keeps lowering. Since then, we’ve seen four teams score in the 70s in a full game. There was only one sub-80-point performance of the season until last week.

The ceiling is sliding down, too. Of the 18 teams that played on Wednesday night, none of them scored over 120 points in regulation. On the Wednesday before the All-Star break, ELEVEN teams scored over 120 in regulation. And then poof, all gone. GMs and coaches told Ethan Strauss in his piece last week that something was up.

As I pointed out in that Mar. 1 post, most of the scoring fall off can be attributed to referees swallowing their whistle. We just saw Charlotte, Cleveland and Portland go the majority of their games without taking a single free throw.

These extremes come one day after the league office told my guy Marc Stein that it’s all just noise:  

An NBA spokesman, when I lodged a formal request for comment, told The Stein Line on Monday that there has been no directive from the league office to referees to call games differently.

The league's position, then, is that we have witnessed a statistical anomaly over the past few weeks with myriad possible causes.

The handful of team officials I spoke to in the past 48 hours wasn’t buying it.

“It’s obvious something happened,” said one skeptical long-time general manager. “But they can’t say that. It’d be tinkering with the game.” One East team source, in a text late Tuesday night, put it succinctly:

“Epidemic.”

As in, officiating epidemic. The numbers don’t point to shooters going ice cold or teams having a sudden case of the dribbling yips. Nor did the numbers suggest that teams were throwing the ball out of bounds like a quarterback avoiding a sack. Instead, the signs pointed toward officials swallowing the whistle.

Here’s a chart of the shooting foul rate in the NBA across the season. The sharpest decline came in late early February just before the All-Star break, but has since continued to slide.

It’s the hottest issue inside and outside the NBA right now. On the Bill Simmons podcast this week, Bill and Ryen Russillo opened their Sunday show with a discussion of

Ethan Strauss

‘s piece on disappearing free throws and what The Ringer called “the sneaky rule change.” 

On the Lowe Post podcast, Kevin Pelton and Zach Lowe hit the topic (thanks for the shoutout KP!), with Pelton stunning Lowe with the stat that free throw rate had fallen to such an extent that February marked the third-lowest free throw rate in any month in NBA history.  

And here’s Keith Smith and Trevor Lane on their YouTube show, discussing the topic with an interesting angle about the NBA prepping its stars for the physicality of the Summer Olympics. America!

In the third quarter of ESPN’s broadcast on Wednesday, Ryan Ruocco and Doris Burke discussed it during the Lakers-Kings game. Discussing the Lakers’ free throws, Doris went to her co-host: “Ryan, did you see the note from our research department about free throws being down significantly?”

During Wednesday’s PTI, Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon brought in Brian Windhorst for a Five Good Minutes segment (all-time classic) and they asked him about it, too. It’s everywhere.

The gambling world noticed

Vegas is paying close attention. In response to the scoring surge earlier in the season, Vegas average over/under in January landed at 232.7 points, per Rotowire betting data. It fell slightly in February, on average, to 231.1.

In March, chasing the officiating downturn, it fell precipitously down to 223.8 — about seven points.

But Vegas is still misfiring on its over/under lines. The over/under was 217.5 for the Nuggets-Heat game; they scored 188. Bookmakers expected a huge combined score — a line of 233.5 — for Raptors-Pistons. It fell way short of that total: Raptors 103, Pistons 114. 217 points.

Late Wednesday night, sports betting guru Ben Fawkes — who just launched a Substack — tweeted out this fact:

What we’re seeing now feels different. The handful of NBA execs and coaches I spoke to aren’t bristling about the fact that the league might have changed the rules on the fly. What they worry about is that it happened without any heads up.

Like any workplace, they want to know when an operational change happens. Every team wants transparency. It builds trust between the parties and lowers the decibels on officials. And the sense that I get is that teams aren’t not buying that this is just a noisy statistical blip. Evidently, as the run on unders has occurred, it caught Vegas off guard, too.

I mean, you watch these eight non-calls from the Cleveland game and tell me how many would have been called earlier this season:

Three? Five? Six? None of them were called. Again, zero free throws in three full quarters.

Whistles are down just about everywhere

It’s not just the lack of free throws. It seems like anything in control of officials that leads to scoring is being pulled back. It appears officials are letting defenses get away with a lot — like camping out in the paint.

As recently as December, a defensive three second violation was whistled 0.309 times every 100 possessions. It slid to 0.292 in January, tumbled to 0.187 in February and finally down to 0.136 here in March.

In other words, referees are calling illegal defense half as often as it did during the early-season scoring boom. If you think referees are turning a blind eye to defenses trying to gain an advantage, there you go.

But it’s not just shooting fouls declining.

It’s not just illegal defense getting called less.

It’s just about everything.

Check out this chart. Non-shooting fouls, down. Technicals, down. Travels, done (since November).

As Strauss wrote last week, GMs and coaches that I spoke to hypothesized that the lack of whistles might be a direct response the NBA trying to cut down on the (misguided) chatter about how the NBA plays no defense. Across the board, it seems defenses are getting a break. And it might be a more palatable viewing experience for the audience who crave the Jordan era.

But one thing that Keith Smith mentioned on his NBA Front Office show that really resonated with this East Coaster: these games are so much quicker now. He mentioned with glee that, as a Boston-focused NBA writer based in Orlando, watching the Celtics-Blazers game in Portland the other night was a total breeze. Over and done in about two hours.

And that’s another thing. If the NBA did nudge officials to cut back on everything, then it’s a means to what end? Some say it’s to bring back physicality and give the defenses a chance. I hear that. And that maybe the best explanation, if there was one.

But what if it’s to have quicker games? What if it’s to follow baseball’s lead?

The soft pitch clock

This is the thing about calling fewer fouls (or violations altogether). It not only appeases the audience by having less idle time with amazing athletes standing around but it also quickens the game.

I asked Michael Beuoy of the indispensable inpredictable.com to see if games are indeed faster and this is what he sent me:

Wow. So, yes, the lack of whistles have shaved down the game duration by about 2 minutes. This makes sense. If free throw trips are down, the games should be tighter.

This bucks the trend of the last two seasons where games got longer after the All-Star break by 1-2 minutes. Again, not to beat a dead horse here, but this is not normal what we’re seeing.

Here’s the sneaky thing about Cleveland having a historically-low free throw total on Wednesday: the game ended in less than two hours. According to inpredictable tracking, it lasted just 1 hour and 57 minutes — 18 minutes faster than a typical NBA game. Started at 8:11 pm ET and ended by 10:08 pm ET. And that’s with the Pelicans taking 26 free throws of their own.

There’s only so much the league can do to trim down the broadcasts. But I can understand why they’d want games to be faster and more action-packed. It’s like the NBA is almost, intentionally or not, implementing their own pitch clock. Make games breezier, fans will stay locked in.

At a certain point, it didn’t matter if baseball games were significantly shorter and breezier. Most people tuned in because of the perception that it was. The pitch clock saved baseball! In the same way, I could see NBA fans returning to watching the league if they felt like it was quicker and seeing fewer cheap foul calls.

Ultimately, teams and coaches aren’t happy about the soft rule change. There are whispers that it messes with the integrity of the game, and I think that’s a serious issue that the NBA needs to manage. But being candid, I can’t say that the Haberstroh household will complain about the earlier bed times. And I’m guessing America feels the same way.