The free throw is the last cheap point and it got harder to buy

Rule changes aimed at unnatural shooting motions removed an efficiency edge that some offences were entirely built on.

There is no more efficient sequence in basketball than two uncontested shots from fifteen feet taken by a competent shooter, and for several seasons the smartest offensive players in the world understood that better than the rule book did.

The technique was simple enough to describe and infuriating to defend. Attack a closeout, jump sideways into the defender's chest, or hook an arm through his, or launch a shot from an angle no one would ever choose voluntarily, and collect the whistle. It was not cheating. It was reading the letter of a rule written to protect shooters and using it to manufacture contact rather than to be protected from it.

Then officiating changed to disallow abnormal movements toward a defender, and a whole class of possession quietly stopped working. What interests me is what it revealed about how much offensive value was sitting in that trick. Players whose scoring rate was celebrated as unstoppable lost a chunk of it without losing any physical ability at all. Others barely noticed, because their fouls were drawn by arriving at the rim rather than by geometry.

That is the useful test for evaluating a scorer now. Where do the free throws come from? Rim pressure generates fouls that survive any rule change, because a defender contesting a layup will always occasionally hit an arm. Perimeter jump-shot fouls do not survive, because they depend on an interpretation, and interpretations move.

There is a fairness argument on the other side that deserves a hearing. Defenders were being taught to invade a shooter's landing space, and the shooters' response was a rational reply to a genuine danger. Take away the reward for drawing contact and you have taken away some of the deterrent that kept defenders honest. I suspect we will see the closeout get more physical again over the next few years, and then a correction, and then another rule.

That cycle is the actual history of the sport, told properly. Not a march of tactical progress but a long argument between people finding edges and people writing rules to close them.

The edge always comes back. It just moves a few feet.