No, NBA teams are not all playing exactly the same way
Everywhere you look these days, you can hear someone making some form of the same argument: “Every NBA team plays the same way.” It’s everywhere. It’s on TV. It’s on Twitter. It’s made its way over to Bluesky. It’s probably in your group texts and your DMs and your G-chats, if you’re still using that.
In the sense that somewhere between most and all teams shoot a lot of threes, there is a degree of similarity. But there’s a pretty big gap between the team that shoots the most threes (55.7% of Boston's shots come from beyond the arc) and the team that shoots the least (just 34.1% of Denver's shots are treys). And there are much wider disparities in the ways teams go about actually generating their shots — even among those who get similar types of looks.
Chicago takes the second-highest share of its shots from three, for example, but runs around twice as many hand-offs per 100 possessions as does Boston. In turn, the Bulls run both isolation plays and off-ball screens significantly less often than do the Celtics. Despite those differences, they’re pretty similar in terms of their shot profile, and that's all that people tend to focus on.
