The corner three is not the bargain it used to be

Everyone found the same efficient shot at the same time, and defences finally caught up. What replaces it is messier than the spreadsheets suggested.

For about a decade the corner three was the closest thing basketball had to free money. Shortest three on the floor, worth the same as one from the top of the arc, and for years defences treated it as somebody else's problem.

That gap has closed. Teams now assign a specific rotation to the corner and accept giving up something else. You can see it in the way a help defender pinches in and immediately fans out, almost before the pass is thrown. It is a trained instinct now, not a reaction.

So the numbers have moved. Corner three attempts are still high, but the quality of the looks has dropped. A contested corner three with a hand up is a worse shot than an open pull-up from fifteen feet, and there are coaches who have quietly gone back to teaching the mid-range to their guards.

What interests me is what this does to spacing. The whole geometry of the modern offence was built on the assumption that two players standing in opposite corners would drag defenders out of the paint. If the defence has decided it can cover those corners with one rotation instead of two, the paint is not as empty as it used to be. Drives that were open in 2019 are now met by a second body.

The teams handling this best are not the ones shooting more threes. They are the ones with a big man who can pass out of the short roll. That is an unglamorous skill and it is suddenly worth a great deal, because it punishes exactly the rotation that killed the corner three.

None of this means the shot is dead. It still goes in at a decent clip and it still bends a defence. But treating it as automatic value, the way front offices did for most of the last decade, is out of date. The edge was never really in the shot. It was in other people not guarding it.