Jaylen Brown clearly had enough on Saturday. Despite driving into the paint 23 times against the San Antonio Spurs, the most that any player in the NBA had gotten downhill on that particular day, the former Finals MVP finished with zero free throws in the hard-fought game. The referee crew deemed that he was not fouled on any of his 23 drives or 28 shots from the floor. In the four-point loss, the Celtics took just four free throws the entire game, the second fewest in the history of the Celtics’ storied franchise.

After the game, Brown blasted the officials for not calling fouls, knowing full well the league would not be pleased with his pointed commentary. ]

But free throws? That’s been the main driver of the scoring decline. Team trips to the charity stripe, according to pbpstats.com data, have fallen from 26.1 free throws per 100 possessions in October to 24.6 in November to 23.1 in December to finally 21.7 in January, representing a nearly 20% decline from October to January in free-throw rate.

The end result is games are seeing about eight points on average being wiped away in the month of January.

The betting community has tried to keep up with the sudden drop in scoring. Sportsbooks have lowered the expected point totals further and further trying to find footing. According to Odds Shark data, the bottom began to fall out on Jan. 1 when all five games cashed the under and then proceeded to have a run of unexpectedly low-scoring games. In the first 12 days in January, not a single night on the schedule saw more overs than unders on the game slate. Between Jan. 5 and Jan. 7, the results tilted way off-balance; there were a whopping 20 unders to just six overs.

Then on Jan. 10, the night of the Brown rant, Vegas bookmakers issued the lowest over/under line of the season, listed at 214.5 for the L.A. Clippers at Detroit game. They combined for 190.

On Monday night, four of the six games cashed the under, headlined by yet another single-digit night from Boston in the free-throw-attempt column. Vegas set the over/under total at 227.5 points in the infamous “illegal screen” night from Mazzulla’s news conference. Indiana and Boston combined for just 194, with neither team reaching 100 points. Indiana also finished with single-digit free throws. 

The story of the night was Mazzulla begging for a foul call and not getting it.

The 2024 parallel

This wouldn’t be the first time the league saw a midseason change in how tightly the games were being called.

In early March 2024, I reported that teams were seeing a precipitous drop in scoring, anchored mostly by a sudden decline in free throws granted by officials. Were officials told to allow more physicality? There were weeks of denials, first to Marc Stein at The Stein Line and then from the league office headlined by then-executive vice president Joe Dumars and senior vice president of referee development and training Monty McCutchen, discrediting the notion on The Lowe Post on ESPN that they secretly decided to let the players play more.

In April, the league changed its tune. After the board of governors meeting, commissioner Adam Silver announced at a news conference the league had made “a bit of an adjustment along the way” in how the game was being officiated in order to bring more balance to the game.

“We get feedback from our teams and we calibrate as we go in terms of how people view the game,” Silver said. “I think there was a sense earlier in the season that there was too much of an advantage for the offensive players.”

Translation: The league pulled the strings to give certain advantages back to the defense. Which, by the way, I’m not arguing is a bad decision. The league kept it a secret and didn’t tell anyone outside of the referees. Not the teams. Not the media. And sportsbooks were, just as they are now, trying to list accurate over/unders without complete information.

This is important stuff. Relatedly, the NBA recently mandated teams to list accurate injury reports every 15 minutes, which was widely seen as a way to serve sportsbooks and help protect against inside information malfeasance in the wake of a bombshell gambling scandal.

Did the league office make another adjustment on the fly? 

According to several head coaches and executives around the NBA, a league memo hasn’t been sent out to alert the stakeholders the game was being officiated any differently. But some team analytics groups have tried to make sense of the new officiating trends they were seeing and presented the data to front offices and coaching staffs, according to sources who spoke with Yahoo Sports. Many insiders have expressed skepticism that there is an explanation beyond an officiating alteration like the one seen in 2024.

So what’s changed exactly?

If players and head coaches want consistency, some areas of the game seem to be handled differently these days. But I should point out that one area that has been called consistently throughout the season is the foul rate on drives. Looking at the player-tracking data, 7.1% of drives have resulted in a foul in January, which was the same exact rate in December. That’s not it.

Looking elsewhere, there are some clues as to why scoring has fallen lately. The biggest call that seems to be impacted is the three-shot foul, which in terms of referee power, may be the single-most influential call in the game. Anytime one whistle can give a team three points instead of zero is going to be scrutinized.

Turns out, the proportion of fouls that are called on 3-point shots has declined by 26% from October to January. Prolific three-shot foulers Jalen Brunson, Donovan Mitchell and Keyonte George had totaled 38 three-shot fouls entering January. Since the New Year? They’ve totaled one combined. Two other proprietors of the three-shot foul, Austin Reaves and Jerami Grant, simply haven’t played.

Though the downturn in three-shot fouls may have led to some unhappy 3-point shooters, it has almost certainly improved the flow of the game. (There’s a reason why the G League goes with a one-shot free throw to earn 1, 2 or 3 points for the first 46 minutes of the game.)

In the aggregate, though the three-shot foul had been the more notable culprit to the early-season free throw parade, fouls on 2-point attempts have also dropped by about one per team per game in January. That might not seem like a lot, but even one less foul call means a lower likelihood of playing in the bonus, which helps to keep scoring totals in check.

It remains to be seen if the January drop will stick for the rest of the season. Teams, fans and sportsbooks would certainly like some normalcy. But a return to early-season free-throw levels can’t be ruled out. If you ask Jaylen Brown, maybe the only consistency is the inconsistency.