It’s NBA Quarter-Century Week at The Ringer, continuing our site’s yearlong package examining the best of the best—from movie performances to NFL teams to video games—of the past 25 years. This week, we’re focusing on basketball and some of our favorite people and teams lost to time—and today, we’re visualizing the biggest trends and transformations that have impacted the game since 2000.
It’s hard to overstate just how much pro basketball has mutated since Y2K. The 2000s NBA was an analog league full of hulking centers, midrange jumpers, and pixelated national TV games framed in 4:3. But the game has since changed in every imaginable way: stylistically, financially, globally, and culturally. We’ve witnessed the rise of the 3-pointer, the death of the post-up, the internationalization of the MVP race, and the billionaire-ification of the NBA’s ownership class and even of some players.
As part of its weeklong reflection on the NBA quarter century, The Ringer asked me to come up with a set of charts that explain the past 25 years of the best basketball league in the world. Let’s start with shooting.
1. The Kings of the Court
Let’s start our celebration of the great shooters of the quarter century by flagging the top scorers from every spot on the floor. It’s like Settlers of Catan, but for the modern NBA. I love making this chart every individual season, but when we do it for the past 25 years, a few things jump out:
Holy Nowitzki! Dirk owns the midrange. Not only did Nowitzki single-handedly change the expectations for shooting skill in the frontcourt, but the dude also blended volume and efficiency in the midrange better than anyone since Jordan, and this chart proves it. With all due respect to Kevin Durant and Kobe Bryant, when you think of midrange greatness over the past 25 years, you have to start with the big German guy. He outscored everyone in the quarter century in five distinct areas, and he barely trails Chris Paul at that right elbow spot, too.
The only other player with as many unique territories as Dirk is Stephen Curry, who took what Nowitzki did in the midrange and brought it beyond the arc. Not only is Curry the leading scorer in five different zones beyond the arc, but he also ranks second in five others.
The three kings of the paint of the past quarter century are Shaq, Tim Duncan, and LeBron. That feels right—these dudes have combined to win 12 titles since 2000, and each provides a reminder that many basketball games are still won and lost near the rim. By the way, LeBron outscored everyone in the most important hexagon on the whole chart—the one right under the rim—by thousands of points. Those buckets near the cup are the biggest reason why James passed Kareem to become the league’s all-time leading scorer, but those 3s didn’t hurt, either …
The deep 3 revolution is just getting started. Both Trae Young and Damian Lillard earned spots on this chart by changing conventional wisdom about long 3-point shots. Along with Curry, they have proved once and for all that 30-footers are not wild shots and bent the geometry of offense even further.
Not only did Ray Allen hit one of the most iconic jumpers of the quarter century—his left-corner 3 changed the fate of the 2013 Finals in dramatic fashion—but this chart also reminds us that Allen was the best 3-point shooter of his era, especially in the corners.
2. The Shot Chart Revolution
If I could include only one chart to sum up how the league has changed since 2000, this would be it. This image perfectly captures the death of the midrange as well as the “solved” nature of contemporary hoops, in which every team pursues the same types of shots. I’ve been making some version of this chart for years now, but it still hits me every time.
In 2000, only 17 percent of the league’s field goal attempts came from beyond the arc. In 2025, it’s over 42 percent. This chart visualizes the league’s great reorg—for better or worse, we’ve turned our backs on post play, fadeaways, and elbow jumpers in favor of more and more 3s. And we still haven’t reached the peak of the long-ball revolution. Last season, a staggering 78 percent of the league’s more than 116,000 total jumpers came from downtown, while 2-point jumpers reached a new low; in 2024-25, they accounted for less than 12 percent of the league’s total shot attempts. Sorry, Dirk.
3. The Moreyball Manifesto
This chart plots out the why behind those massive changes. It shows exactly how the average value of an NBA shot varies depending on its location. (For example, attempts at the rim generate 1.2 points per shot.) The takeaway is simple: Shooting efficiency really lives only near the hoop and beyond the arc, and shots in between the paint and the 3-point line are bad choices for a vast majority of NBA shooters. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, but for typical rank-and-file NBA shooters, the midrange math is just too brutal to overcome.
As the league fell in love with analytics in the 2010s and a guy named Wardell Stephen Curry started melting our faces and winning titles with the best 3-point shot we’d ever seen, the rest of the NBA caught on to what was happening. Not only did coaches start handing out green lights like Halloween candy, but front offices also started seeking more and more shooting talent and players started getting better and better at long-range shooting. The combined effect is the Stephification of the whole league, and it’s affected a lot more than just shot selection.
4. The Quest for Peak 3
In today’s NBA, learning to rebound means learning to corral errant 26-footers. Last season, we crossed yet another Rubicon: For the first time in NBA history, more rebounds came off missed 3s than missed 2s. It’s a wild stat, but it’s also a good example of how an evolving shot diet touches all aspects of the game, including the art of the board. In 2000, an average game included fewer than 20 missed triples. Last season, that number was 48, and for the first time ever, it outpaced the number of missed 2s per contest. Three-point rebounds used to be a side dish at Rodman’s restaurant—now they are the main course.
One big question for the next 25 years: Will the 3-point rate continue to increase? I say yes, for three reasons. First, we just witnessed another big uptick last season: In 2024-25, the 3-point rate ballooned to 42.2 percent, up from 39.5 percent in 2023-24. Second, all of the talent arriving in the league is showing up with a pace-and-space mindset, while many of the league’s midrange artisans are aging out. As vets like Chris Paul, DeMar DeRozan, and Kevin Durant fade out, they’re taking their old-school bags with them. Third, we’ve already seen forward-thinking teams push the envelope even more. Last year’s Celtics broke the record by taking 53.6 percent of their shots from beyond the arc—they ranked second in the league in offensive efficiency and scored a ridiculous 119.5 points per 100 possessions.
5. The International Players Anthem
Before 2000, the NBA was largely an American basketball league driven by American-born superstars. However, as basketball grew in popularity around the world and the late commissioner David Stern invested in international marketing, the composition of the league changed. According to official NBA data, in 1999-2000, there were 36 total international players in the NBA. By 2014, that number had surged past 100 for the first time, and as of the 2024-25 NBA season, opening-night rosters featured 125 international players from 43 unique countries.
But here’s the thing: The internationalization of the league has disproportionately affected the superstar set. And if there’s one chart that proves that the best players in the world are now more likely to come from abroad, it is this one:
6. The MVP Goes Global
It all started with the Dream. Hakeem Olajuwon became the first foreign-born MVP in NBA history in 1994. Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki each did it in the 2000s, but by the time James Harden won the MVP award in 2018, American players had still won 59 of the league’s 63 total MVP awards. Then came Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, and SGA—these four superstars have combined to win the past seven MVPs, and if this year’s MVP futures odds are any indication, the trend is bound to continue. All five of the league’s MVP favorites right now are international, including Luka Doncic and Victor Wembanyama, two ascendant stars who have yet to even win one.
7. Money Ball
NBA owners used to be a collection of millionaires. Now, it’s a bunch of billionaires. This chart visualizes the sale prices of NBA franchises since 2000. The trend is obvious and ongoing. Mark Cuban bought the Mavericks from Ross Perot in 2000 for $285 million; he turned around and sold a majority of the team to Miriam Adelson and Co. at a $3.5 billion valuation just over two decades later. That’s a 12-times increase in 23 years, and if that’s not proof that the business of the NBA is booming, consider this: Mark Walter and TWG Global purchased a controlling stake of the Lakers at a reported $10 billion valuation earlier this year. Ten billion!
The inflection point came in 2014, when Steve Ballmer dropped $2 billion on the Clippers. That single check redefined the sports ownership market overnight. Every owner, every banker, every executive took notice. The sale didn’t just reset the bar—it obliterated it. What was once the high-water mark became the new floor, and suddenly valuations that started with b became ordinary. By the 2020s, deals like $4 billion for the Suns, $3.5 billion for the Mavericks, and $6 billion for the Celtics seemed par for the course.
But these dramatic upticks in franchise valuations are only one data point—the hockey-stick trajectories of the league’s media rights deals provide even more evidence. At the dawn of the 21st century, Stern’s NBA was raking in about $766 million per year from ABC/ESPN and TNT for its big media rights deals. This season, Adam Silver’s NBA is expected to receive $6.9 billion to $7.1 billion in the first year of a megadeal that includes new contracts with Disney, NBC, and Amazon.
This is more than just mundane financial trivia—the massive growth in “basketball-related income” is driving downstream effects that are fueling corresponding increases to player salaries. By the time it’s all paid off, Jayson Tatum’s current contract is expected to pay him about $314 million—that’s more than what Cuban paid for the Mavericks in 2000.
The implications of this growth are both financial and cultural. As team prices have soared, only a handful of hyper-wealthy individuals can even afford to buy into the league, which is resulting in cultural changes in league ownership circles and raising questions about private equity and sovereign wealth funds becoming central to the future of the NBA. Teams have never been cheap, but these new price tags usher in a new phase in NBA ownership.
Ultimately, the NBA is a business association, and through that lens, the league’s past 25 years have been a triumph for all of its key stakeholders. Players are richer than ever. Owners are, too. But are all of these shifts good for the fans? That’s the biggest question for the next 25 years.