The corner three is getting harder to find, and nobody has adjusted

Defences pre-rotate to the corners now, which means the cheapest shot in basketball costs a lot more than the spreadsheets say.

Ten years ago the corner three was the free lunch of the sport. Shortest three on the floor, roughly twenty-two feet instead of twenty-three and nine, and defences hadn't yet decided it was worth abandoning the paint to guard. Coaches drew up drive-and-kick actions and the corner shooter stood there like a man waiting for a bus he knew was coming.

That bus is late now.

Watch a decent modern defence handle a middle pick-and-roll. The low man doesn't wait to see whether the ball actually gets downhill. He's already peeling off the strong-side corner on the first hard dribble, gambling that the roller can be walled off by the tagger, and he's back out to the shooter before the pass lands. The whole rotation is pre-loaded. You still get the shot. You just get it with a hand arriving on time instead of a hand arriving late, and the gap between a wide-open catch and a contested one is enormous.

Here's what irritates me. Efficiency models still treat every three from the same spot as roughly the same shot. Points per attempt from the corner remains the number people quote in film sessions, and it flatters an action that has quietly stopped generating clean looks. Meanwhile the above-the-break pull-up, the shot everyone spent a decade calling inefficient, has become the shot defences are least prepared for, because guarding the corner properly means the screener's defender is dropping and the ball handler has a runway of two or three feet.

There's a positional wrinkle too. The corner is the worst place on the floor to be a mediocre shooter, because your defender simply doesn't come. Stand there at thirty per cent and you've taken your own team from five attackers to four. At least in the slot you can screen, dive, run a handoff. The corner is a job with exactly one skill requirement and no fallback.

So what should teams do? Use the corner as a decoy more than a destination. Send a shooter through it to drag the low man, then relocate him up to the wing where the closeout has to cover more ground and arrives off balance. Empty the corner entirely on side pick-and-rolls so there's nothing for the help to sink toward. Both are old ideas that got buried under the analytics-era reflex of parking bodies in the two spots where the arc is shortest.

The corner three isn't dead. It's just no longer a bargain, and pretending otherwise is how offences end up with a beautiful shot chart and a mediocre offensive rating.