NBA Finals Foes Celtics and Mavs Shoot the Greatest of Threes

This is part of a series of NBA Data Nuggets being published throughout the 2024 NBA Playoffs.

The Dallas Mavericks and Boston Celtics took very different journeys to the 2024 NBA Finals. The Celtics’ two All-Stars have been together for seven playoff runs. The Mavs are in their first full year with their dynamic backcourt combination. The Celtics started the season 8-2 and never relinquished the No. 1 seed. The Mavs were headed for the play-in tournament with just more than two weeks remaining in the regular season.

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Both teams, however, got to this point by launching 3-pointers. Boston and Dallas took the highest and second-highest percentage of their shots from 3-point territory, respectively, out of all NBA teams this season. In 2022-23, they also occupied the top two spots in that metric, but with the Mavs ahead of the Celtics.

Boston, which also ranked second in the league in 3-point percentage, is a historically great shooting team. Eight Celtics knocked down at least 100 threes this season. A decade ago, in 2013-14, no team had more than four players cross that threshold.

Three-point attempt rates have plateaued over the past few years after the explosion of shots from behind the arc across the league that occurred in the second half of the 2010s. The range of strategies from different teams when it comes to threes has narrowed as well. In 2018-19, the Houston Rockets took 52% of their shots from downtown while the San Antonio Spurs only took 29% from distance. In 2023-24, the gap between the teams most and least inclined to shoot threes—the Celtics at 47% and the Denver Nuggets at 35%—was much smaller.

Daryl Morey’s 2010s Rockets pushed the boundaries of kindergarten-level arithmetic by building an entire team around the idea that three is more than two. They were ahead of their time, but maybe a little too far ahead. Boston and Dallas have scaled back the approach just slightly while still sticking to the foundation laid out by “Moreyball.”

“I love 3-pointers,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said at a press conference in October 2022 shortly after he took the job. “I like math.”

The NBA better hope its fans also like 3-pointers, because they’re about to see a lot of them.

More NBA Data Nuggets:

–Glen Taylor Played a Role in Some of NBA’s Biggest Business Stories
–Shooting Variance Explains Bulk of NBA Playoff Outcomes
–NBA Postseason Play Really Is Different

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