FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NEW YORK—From the offices of the commissioners of MLB, the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL:
Although our leagues are sometimes seen as competitors, we are also, in some respects, partners: sounding boards, panel participants, and co-investors. Experience has taught us that we have a lot to learn from one another—that whether we play on grass, turf, hardwood, or ice, with cowhide or rubber, what makes sense for one of us often makes sense for most or all of us. In our conversations this year, one concern has repeatedly resurfaced. And today, our leagues are jointly embarking on a bold but well-considered step in response to this significant challenge.
Let us begin by making one thing clear: Our players are the lifeblood of our leagues. We celebrate their ever-increasing skill, which thrills us and our fans on a game-to-game basis. However, we believe that in some respects, our talented athletes’ exploits have fundamentally distorted the ways our sports have historically been played. In short, our athletes are “too big, too strong, too fast, too good,” to borrow a Stacey King call. Out of a desire to avoid premature intervention, we have allowed these developments to play out, in the hope that they would turn out to be cyclical and self-correcting. However, because some of these trends have proved persistent, we have concluded that the resulting ramifications will not resolve themselves.
One of our responsibilities as commissioners is to monitor and maintain the entertainment value and variation of our competition. Professional sports are not static, nor would we want them to be. But left untended, they can occasionally spring leaks. Boats that take on water need new caulking to stay seaworthy; overgrown gardens look better with weeding; misaligned engines run more smoothly after tune-ups. Sports need periodic tune-ups, too, and we think it is incumbent on commissioners to call in the mechanics at appropriate times.
After extensive research, discussion, and consideration, we have determined that we must make adjustments to bring our games back into balance and ensure that our leagues continue to captivate audiences and remain compelling products with great growth potential in a changing media environment.
Thus, effective at the start of each of our next respective seasons—not during any ongoing ones—we will be adjusting certain aspects of our playing surfaces or features, as follows:
• MLB will move the pitcher’s mound back from 60 feet and 6 inches from home plate
• The NBA will move its 3-point line back from 23 feet and 9 inches outside the corners
• The NFL will narrow its goal posts from their current width of 18 feet, 6 inches
• The NHL will enlarge its net from its current dimensions of 72 inches wide by 48 inches high
The precise specifications will be announced at later dates, after further consultation with experts and stakeholders, including our sports’ respective players associations.
We realize that such alterations are likely to provoke strong responses. Hence our decision to act in tandem. Not in pursuit of safety in numbers, but because we believe that this concerted approach sends the signal that the disruptions our sports are facing share a common origin—and require a common solution.
JJ Redick, head coach of the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, recently said, “The league is more talented and skilled than it was 18 years ago when I was drafted. That’s a fact. There are more players that are excellent. There are more teams that are excellent.”
We don’t dispute that statement or the many similar sentiments expressed about MLB, the NFL, or the NHL of late. In fact, we echo those ideas: The players are incredible across the board, partly because they never cease to evolve. Now, our sports must keep pace.
The rationale for the changes we’ve selected is simple: Our athletes are inarguably bigger, faster, and stronger than they ever have been before, thanks in part to enhanced nutrition, training, and sports science. That growth has been ongoing since our sports were invented or refined in the 19th century, and even since the founding of our leagues decades later. Basketball, the latest of our four sports to arrive, was born in 1891. On average, American men born that year grew to be about as tall as Spud Webb or Jose Altuve. Members of the population pools that we pull from now are, on the whole, a lot larger and better-suited to their specialties, and those who become high-level athletes are larger and more optimally sorted still.
To some extent, the in-game effects of this growth cancel out: The improvements of players on defense nullify the improvements of players on offense. Not all of them, though. And in addition to being bigger and more gifted, players and teams are also smarter, courtesy of their burgeoning access to and facility with ever more granular information and metrics. As one of us recently expressed, the ascendance of data-driven decision-making is “not unique to the NBA, where analytics start to be too controlling and create situations where players are doing seemingly unnatural things because they’re being directed to do something that is a more efficient shot.” More efficient does not always mean more watchable; as another one of us is fond of saying, “Analytics is an arms race to nowhere.”
In MLB, pitchers throw harder almost every year, strikeout rates are near historic highs, and batting averages are near their nadir. In the NBA, 3-point attempt rates have been rising for decades, without a corresponding dip in success rates; after a temporary lull in that long-term climb, 3s have resumed their ascent this season, with no ceiling in sight. As the Lakers’ LeBron James put it, “There’s a lot of f---ing 3s being shot.”
In the NFL, kickers are routinely nailing long field-goal attempts that once would have been pipe dreams, transforming the dynamics of drives. And although NHL scoring has bounced back from the lows of the so-called dead-puck era and its aftermath, goal rates remain well below where they were in the 1970s and ’80s and most of the ’90s. Save percentages have dropped in the past few seasons, but blocked shots are up, and some analysts postulate that more massive and mobile goalies are leading to less spacing on the ice and causing more congestion at the net. Although we would suggest that some purported by-products of these problems, such as a sameness in play styles in the NBA, are largely overblown, we cannot dismiss the complaints completely.
Although our chosen course may sound drastic at first blush, it is intended only to bring our leagues more in line with earlier eras. This is not a departure from tradition, but a return to it. Moreover, experimentation of this sort is itself a sports tradition, as evidenced by the ample historical precedent for such measures’ successful implementation.
In baseball’s distant past, the pitching distance was moved farther from the hitter multiple times, for the express purpose of improving the pitcher-batter balance. In the 1969 season, the mound was lowered, for the same reason. No height, and no distance—even 60 feet, 6 inches—is set in stone. In football, the goalposts were relocated from the goal line to the back of the end zone in 1974, partly because kickers had gotten too good at racking up field goals. (Extra-point kicks shifted from the 2-yard line to the 15-yard line in 2015.) In basketball, the 3-point line has moved back and forth before in the NBA, and it has made multiple retreats in the past two decades at the college level, for both men and women. In 2005-06, the NHL started to progressively reduce the size of goalie equipment to open up more of the net.
Aside from the fact that we have opted to coordinate our efforts, the vision we are laying out today is far from radical. In most cases, the ideas we are endorsing have been independently proposed and discussed for a decade or more. In some cases, we have previously floated and tested them ourselves. They represent our most promising path toward accomplishing our goals without—for now—physically expanding the dimensions of our playing surfaces in a manner that might demand major construction and potentially jeopardize the public’s proximity to the action.
From the shot clock to the pitch clock, pass blocking to two-line passes, judicious tweaks to our regulations have helped make our leagues what they are today. With a new round of rule changes, we can combine the best aspects of our sports in the present with the best aspects of their storied pasts—and make them the best they can be in their bright futures.
We are cognizant of the risk of unintended consequences, such as suppressing dunks, hampering hitters, or injuring pitchers. We are also aware that we make up only a small subset of worldwide sports leagues, and that we are not the only leagues thinking along these lines. Bigger goals have long been considered in soccer, for instance; FINA banned high-tech swimsuits; and after the effect of “Tiger-proofing” golf courses waned, the USGA elected last year to deaden golf balls. We view these analogues to our initiatives as further indications that we cannot take a passive approach. We plan to conduct further conversations on this subject with our counterparts in women’s leagues and other men’s leagues in the U.S. and abroad.
We thank our fans for their enthusiasm for our great games, and we welcome the passionate feedback that this announcement is sure to precipitate. We have become convinced that these changes will restore the sports equilibrium and position our leagues to survive and thrive for the rest of the 21st century, and we are eager to demonstrate how well this way forward will work.
We will not be taking questions at this time.
Gary Bettman
Roger Goodell
Robert D. Manfred Jr.
Adam Silver
