Sometimes you just have to ask for things and you will get them, which is what happened with Duncan Robinson and an NBA rule change.
Robinson spoke on a podcast recently about how the league should remove last-second heaves from beyond half court at the end of quarters from a player’s shooting stats. He rightfully said that many players will dribble out the clock instead of launching low-percentage shots that will hurt their shooting numbers.
It seems ridiculous, but you can’t really blame them considering so many players have financial incentives tied to their statistics.
Someone at the league must have been listening (odd), as Shams Charania of ESPN announced yesterday that Duncan Robinson would be getting his wish:
The NBA will implement a new change for the 2025-26 season: unsuccessful end-of-period heaves will now be recorded as a missed field-goal attempt for the team, not the player, sources tell ESPN. Those long heaves will no longer impact an individual player's percentages.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) September 10, 2025
Last second hail Mary's will still count against the team’s overall shooting percentage, but the player will not be penalized for taking them, which should lead to more attempts than we’ve seen in recent years.
It will have a larger effect on shooting numbers than you might think.
NBA rule change will boost the numbers of players who took the risk
We know NBA players can make shots from beyond half court because they do it all of the time.
Stephen Curry immediately comes to mind as a guy who wants the ball in these situations, as we know he can hit a shot from pretty much anywhere in the gym. Curry shoots so many threes that one miss isn’t going to affect his average much but there are other players for whom this rule change will matter.
Nikola Jokic shot 22 heaves at the end of quarters last season and if you take the misses (21) out, his 3-point percentage goes up by nearly three percentage points, which would have given him an even stronger case for MVP last season.
So, the players who took the most of these types of shots will be the ones who can expect the biggest bump by not having them count. It would be interesting to go back historically and track how big a difference this would have made for players who shot 20+ heaves in a season.
It always infuriated me in the past when players would dribble out the clock instead of launching a shot because you never know, it could go in and be the difference in a close game, and at the very least, we’ve seen those shots be huge momentum shifters at the ends of halves and quarters.
This rule change should end that for good, so you can thank Duncan Robinson when there are more full-court makes next season. Hopefully he’ll have a few himself.