The mid range never died, it moved to the end of the shot clock

The shot that gets called inefficient is the only shot available once a good defence has taken away everything else.

The arithmetic against the long two is genuinely sound. It is worth one less point than a shot taken a foot further back and it goes in at a similar rate, so as a diet it is indefensible and the leaguewide reduction in those attempts was correct. Nobody sensible is arguing to bring back a possession that starts and ends with a contested eighteen footer.

That is not the same as saying the shot has no place, and the way the argument gets repeated has flattened a real distinction.

Look at when these shots happen now. Not early. Early in a possession a good offence is hunting the rim or a clean three, because those are the best available outcomes and the clock allows patience. The mid range appears at the other end of the possession, when the first action has been switched, the second has been covered, and there are five seconds left with the ball in the hands of the best player against a defence that has correctly refused to give up anything better.

At that moment the choice is not between a two and a three. It is between a shot the defence has conceded and no shot at all. Compare the mid range pull up to a forced pass, a turnover, or a hopeful three over a contest and it stops looking inefficient rather quickly.

Playoff basketball makes this obvious. Series get slower, defences get more specific, help gets scouted, and the possessions that decide games are frequently the ugly ones. Teams with nobody who can create a decent look from fifteen feet against a set defence run out of options in exactly those moments, and you can watch it happen every spring.

So the skill did not become worthless. It became specialised. It is now a late clock tool belonging to two or three players on a roster rather than a staple for everybody, and treating it as forbidden has produced a generation of wings who cannot do it at all.

Efficiency arguments are about the average shot. Games are decided by the specific one.

The team that cannot manufacture a bad shot on purpose will end up taking a worse one by accident.