Since the explosion of women’s basketball in popularity, there has been an increase in commentators suggesting that women’s basketball must lower the rims. They hold that the 10 foot height combined with the athletic differences between men and women make the women’s product worse off, and simply lowering the rims would generate more dunks, easier scoring, and a more impressive women’s game.

This position is absolutely ridiculous.

Whether for material, logistical, historical, or cultural reasons, lowering the rims makes no sense.

Let’s start with the game itself. Dunking was an innovation, not an original part of the game. The first documented dunk comes from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, though other sources claim the first ‘dunk shot’ in a UC Davis game in 1935. However you slice it, dunking wasn’t a constant staple until nearly half a century after basketball’s creation.

Lowering the rims would allow more women to dunk in the short term, but there are already high school and college prospects who can dunk. If the athletic and talent growth the WNBA and NCAA are experiencing continues, we’ll be on course for a dunking revolution on the women’s side in no time.

Statistical sources only just started tracking NBA dunks in 2001 and collegiate dunks since 2008. The number of dunks in both contexts has trended upwards each season.

Logistically, dividing women’s and men’s basketball would meaningfully limit access to facilities for both sides. How do we lower all the rims at schools where women already play? Do all schools need adjustable rim heights? What about schools where there are existing Title IX issues, potentially driving hoops to be women’s or men’s only?

Right now, only 27 states use a shot clock in high school. This most basic piece of hoops technology, a timer that can count back from 30 and buzz, is not accessible to thousands of young athletes. If we can’t get technological advancements from two decades ago to every player in America, regardless of gender, how are we going to make such a huge and costly change for every female player in the nation?

Lowering enough rims so young women’s access to basketball isn’t completely destroyed is not logistically possible. It’s an undertaking that would take years and cost millions of dollars for dubious benefit.

If the issue with women’s basketball is not enough dunks, then the answer is to develop more dunkers, not to put a minimum half-decade logistical nightmare on women’s basketball teams.

Brittney Griner is 6'9" and has been able to dunk a basketball since high school.

That logistical delay would go hand in hand with completely changing how women practice, functionally having to relearn their shot and basketball as a whole. Who’s to say that our best players would benefit from a lower rim more than the changes would confound them?

Lowering the rims also throws all the existing records in collegiate and professional directly out the window. The statistical outputs would drastically shift and would generate a generational divide.

We’ve already seen previous eras of retired players punch down at new generations for having it easier, while younger players deride the retired as being sour and envious. That divide would only widen.

In addition to the historical implications, it would culturally shift basketball to being about the rim height. The discourse around hoops would de-center the players in favor of theorizing about the rights and wrongs of the adjustment.

Even if lowering was a roaring success that generated a whole new class of dunkers, many critics would pivot the complaint about the lack of dunks to discrediting the act as being on a lower rim.

Centrally, the people who advocate for a lower rim would not be the people to follow through and watch the game on that lower rim. They’re discrediting women’s basketball as it is, and changing it in a way to make it easier to dunk would only begat further discrediting of the sport as a whole.

Women’s basketball is exploding, seemingly everyone agrees on that. Some of the best and most mercurial guards in years are attracting record amounts of fans. Shooters are hitting further and further threes, and more and more prospects can dunk, grab the rim, and truly get up for blocks.

To fundamentally change the women’s game, for those who are already uninterested or unimpressed by it, would stop the giant swell the game is rising upon.

In conclusion: Don’t lower the rims. Watch Toby Fournier next season. Watch Deb Davenport next season. Watch Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers duel as well as any great creators have. Don’t get drawn into solutions from those who don’t love this game. Don’t lower the rims.