Why so many fouls across the NBA? + Suns rookie Ryan Dunn’s rapid rise

This is not the NBA game we were told to expect.

If there is one takeaway from the season’s opening week, it’s that we are drowning in a sea of foul calls and free-throw attempts and, at times, it is making the games unwatchable.

On Friday, the Philadelphia 76ers and Toronto Raptors combined to shoot 99 free throws — the most in an NBA regulation game since 2017 — despite the league’s No. 1 foul magnet, Joel Embiid, missing the contest. That same night, the Atlanta Hawks and Charlotte Hornets combined for 56 fouls and 69 free throws in a game that took just over two and a half hours to complete. That was a decline for Atlanta; the Hawks and Brooklyn Nets combined for 71 free throws two nights earlier.

The stories go on. The Memphis Grizzlies and Utah Jazz had 77 foul shots in their opener Wednesday; Memphis returned two nights later to combine for 72 with the Houston Rockets. Even on bad nights, teams are eating at the line: On Saturday, amid what was otherwise one of the most depressing offensive outings of the young season, Denver was in the bonus at the 9:58 mark of the second quarter against the LA Clippers and at the 7:06 mark of the fourth.

Ah, yes, the bonus. Might as well begin quarters with both teams in it at this point. I can’t even remember seeing a “foul to give” situation this past week, because everybody is out of team fouls long before any last-shot scenario might arise.

Those specific outliers underscore a larger point about the league through the first five days of games: fouls upon fouls upon fouls. Teams are taking more 3-pointers than ever, and yet somehow, they’re getting to the line more often too.

It’s a huge jump, actually: The league-wide free-throw rate is up 22.7 percent from the first five days of last season. If you use the full-season numbers, it’s a similar result: up 21.8 percent. Meanwhile, teams had taken 42.1 percent of their field goals from 3 through Saturday’s games, compared to 39.5 percent for last season as a whole and 39.1 percent in the first five days of 2023-24.

One factor makes this particularly shocking. It is well-documented that the league reinterpreted physicality around the basket at midseason last year and began calling dramatically fewer fouls. We went from 46 free throws a game before the All-Star break to 40 after, and most expected that trend line to continue.

If anything, in fact, some thought it would accelerate. Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle, among others, alluded to preseason meetings with officials (these happen every year) where they indicated more physicality would be allowed and freedom of movement wouldn’t be as big a priority. Carlisle isn’t some noob to this either; he’s the president of the National Basketball Coaches Association, with 23 years of experience as a head coach.

Instead, the exact opposite has happened. Despite all those arrows pointing in the direction of fewer fouls and free throws, we’ve hurtled sharply and abruptly in the opposite direction. It would actually be worse if it weren’t for replay, which is fairly reliably overturning at least one egregiously wrong foul call a night.

But why? It’s hard to write it off to just early-season jitters or lack of discipline when the comparison with the first five days a year ago is just as jarring as the full-season date. What’s going on?

I asked Atlanta coach Quin Snyder about this phenomenon after Friday’s game and whether it was consistent with what he had expected heading into the season. He wasn’t about to eat a $25,000 fine just to add a few zingers to my story, but he did point out that we’ve seen this movie before a few times, particularly at the start of the 2018-19 season.

“There’s been an emphasis historically, over the last several years, on freedom of movement. That concept having specific application in pick-and-roll is something that’s significant,” he said. ”Coaches adjust, players adjust to how things are being called, and if that’s something we have to adjust to, we will.”

While pick-and-rolls and nudging off-ball screeners certainly seem to have officials’ attention in the early going, I’m not sure that encompasses everything that’s going on.

Notably, the league’s preseason guidance on “straight-line pathways” as a point of emphasis seems to be having a greater impact than we thought. The league’s video on contact on drives like this showed three examples of contact that should be called a foul and two that shouldn’t. In practice, it feels like all five examples have been whistles in the opening week of the season.

See below for Part 1 of the 2024-25 Points of Emphasis video (narrated by SVP, Head of Referee Development and Training Monty McCutchen), which provides examples and guidance regarding Straight-Line Pathway Plays and Verticality: pic.twitter.com/TtpiHQh6wZ

— NBA Official (@NBAOfficial) September 25, 2024

The anecdotal eye test backs up the data. In addition to the replay reviews where we can all see what happened and shrug in wonder, we’re getting a lot of non-shooting whistles on drives like this one below. Watch as Desmond Bane kinda, sorta gets his hands out on Jalen Suggs, I guess, and is called for a foul. Last March, they’d let twice this much contact go without a second thought:

Here’s another typical play, where there is marginal contact and the official gives the benefit of the doubt to the driver and blows the whistle. There was no chance this got a whistle in the second half of last season, and it was overturned on replay, but coaches only have two challenges and it’s a long night of whistles. I’ve also seen at least a couple calls similar to this upheld.

So now what? Do we need another midseason intervention? Did defenses overestimate how much physicality they could play with after how the refs called the second half of last season? Will everyone slowly adjust and pull the averages back to something closer to normal in the coming weeks?

One thing I can say for sure: This wasn’t what we were promised, and it’s ugly. The silence of the whistles in the second half of 2023-24 produced some of the most watchable basketball in memory. It yielded faster games with better flow and a more entertaining product. In particular, fans were treated to multiple-minute live-action stretches nearly every night.

This season, so far, we’ve gone backward and then some. Hot-take artists whining about the 3-point attempts are complaining about the wrong thing. The real scourge in the early part of the season is the mind-numbing parade to the free-throw line.

Cap geekery: The apron strikes back

It’s not really a new collective bargaining agreement until we start getting unintended consequences. Now that teams have had some time to fully digest the implications of the 2023 contract, let’s hear it for the new, unexpected twists.

Two items, in particular, stand out after teams finalized their rosters and negotiated rookie contract extensions in October: roster spots and incentives. In both cases, the fear of the luxury tax aprons is driving teams’ behavior.

In terms of roster spots, the fact that every guaranteed salary for a veteran counts a bit over $2 million against the cap, while two-way contracts count for zero, has had the unsurprising effect of incentivizing to keep three two-ways and not bother filling their 15th roster spot.

With a generous cap of 50 active nights on two-ways, this approach can get teams nearly all the way to the trade deadline before they have to make some real choices.

The most egregious example right now is in New York, where the Knicks must limbo under the second-apron line after trades for Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns pushed them dangerously close. Right now, they’re doing so by only carrying 12 players, hearkening back to days of yore when that was a standard roster. It’s illegal to stay below 14 for more than two weeks, but the Knicks will take their sweet time since every day saves a bit more under that apron line.

New York won’t be alone in minimizing the number of players under contract. It’s become de rigeur for teams above the tax line to not bother filling the 15th roster spot until the final few days of the season, but now there are even greater incentives because the apron rules might take the bat out of their hands. For teams in a New York-type situation that are sweating every dollar, it might not even be possible to pay a 15th player before the last day of the season. (This fine piece by Spotrac’s Keith Smith goes into the topic more deeply.)

As for incentives, we might be seeing the slow death of them in contracts. While some contract extensions have carried over incentives, such as the one signed recently by Denver’s Aaron Gordon, it’s notable that only one of the seven non-max rookie extensions signed this offseason contained incentives. Even that one was for a mere pittance, at $500,000 a year for the Golden State Warriors’ Moses Moody.

The reason is that incentives count against the apron regardless of whether they are earned. In the past, a team could add a $1 million incentive for Jordan Poole winning Defensive Player of the Year (yes, really) and laugh it off, because it had no impact on their cap flexibility. That’s no longer the case, as such an incentive now counts against a team’s first-apron limit. Additionally, teams are remembering that it counts against other team’s limits too; thus, incentives loom as a barrier to future trades with that contract.

That’s also a possible reason more extensions weren’t signed. In the past, incentives were a great way to bridge negotiating gaps. Because they could be worth up to 15 percent of the value of the contract, any disparity smaller than that size between the two sides was easily smoothed out by adding incentives to the deal. In a related story, non-max rookie extensions of yore were often littered with incentives.

Not anymore. Instead, this fall we had at least seven opening-night rotation players (Chicago’s Josh Giddey, Golden State’s Jonathan Kuminga, Brooklyn’s Cam Thomas, Memphis’ Santi Aldama, Dallas’ Quentin Grimes, Charlotte’s Tre Mann and Toronto’s Davion Mitchell) who didn’t reach agreements and will hit restricted free agency this summer.

Moreover, the same logic applies to restricted free agents re-signing with their own teams. Even after months of stalemate, this summer’s deal between Isaac Okoro and the apron-constrained Cleveland Cavaliers contained no incentives. Nor did the deal for Chicago’s Patrick Williams.

Between existing contracts and extensions of them like Gordon’s, we’ll still have incentive-laden deals on the books for at least half a decade. But one wonders if, by 2030 or so, contracts with anything more than token incentives will have gone the way of the woolly mammoth.

(This section won’t necessarily profile the best rookie of the week. Just the one I’ve been watching.)

Is it possible for a rookie to win Most Improved Player? Can we show the voters video of Dunn shooting last season and make it possible?

The Suns forward from Virginia, selected 28th in June, has unexpectedly been the most accomplished member of the 2024 draft class thus far, starting for Phoenix on Sunday while guarding Luka Dončić in a Suns win.

More shockingly, he leads all rookies in made 3s through Sunday’s games. That damns with faint praise — nobody in the class is even averaging double figures — but still. You could have found approximately a zillion-to-one odds on “Ryan Dunn will lead all rookies in 3s” before the season, and so far, it’s happening.

As many of you know, I went to Virginia and watched a lot of Dunn’s college games. Dunn’s defensive talent was obvious, but offense was another story.

He showed occasional flashes of perimeter development in his first two seasons, but those quickly petered out in lost confidence and untaken looks. By midseason of 2023-24, he was college basketball’s record-scratch king, not even looking at the rim when he caught the ball on kickouts at the 3-point line. He didn’t eclipse 10 points in any of Virginia’s final 14 games and air-balled a free throw in the season finale.

Dunn then followed that up by shooting 1 of 13 from 3 in summer league — hey, at least he was taking them — but it didn’t exactly get anyone’s hopes up that he’d start raining bombs.

GO DEEPER

Suns’ Ryan Dunn, with an improved jump shot, could end up as the steal of the draft

So imagine my shock — and every scout’s — when Dunn showed up in Phoenix letting it rip this fall and knocking down deep 3s from everywhere — above the break, off the dribble, all over. He launched 30 triples in just 111 preseason minutes and thus far has taken 13 3s in his 43 NBA regular-season minutes. And they’re going in! He’s 19-of-43 from deep.

It’s an amazing difference in a few months’ time, but what’s equally incredible is that it doesn’t seem like there were massive modifications. Take a look.

Here is the final 3-point attempt Dunn took from last season at the end of a miserable NCAA Tournament First Four game against Colorado State that we will never speak of again. The opponent happily concedes the shot, and it’s off to the right from the word go and barely catches rim. He’s pulling it from the left side of his body and his right foot is pretty far forward, but it’s not too dissimilar from more recent footage:

And here’s how he looked from a similar spot in preseason, when he launched 11 triple attempts in a single preseason game against Denver. Look closely, and he’s a bit more square to the basket and more balanced in his stance, and his shooting elbow is more under the ball instead of pulling it from the left side of his body:

That said, this wasn’t a down-to-the-studs shot rebuild. It’s amazing how similar most of the elements look despite dramatically different results. Not to diminish the technical stuff, but I’ll also note that confidence is a hell of a drug. He’s not thinking about shooting anymore, as he clearly was at Virginia. He’s just shooting.

Dunn might not keep shooting at 40 percent from 3 all year (I must report one of his makes banked in by accident from the corner), but the good news is that he doesn’t have to. Whatever the Suns get from him on the perimeter is basically gravy; they drafted him to be a defensive stopper. If he’s going to rain 3s on top of it, then Phoenix has perhaps the biggest steal in what otherwise is looking like a weak draft class.

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(Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)