SHOOTING FOR GLORY
3-point event where it’s at
It wasn’t a tough question for J.J. Redick, but it was definitely a basketball question.
Redick, the Los Angeles Clippers point guard, was sitting on a riser at the NBA All-Star media day and the question was about his team, and its up-and-down year, and the stellar play of the Warriors and the Spurs and what the Clips had to do down the stretch and so on and so forth.
Redick is one of the most thoughtful players in the league, and he paused, and then he smiled, and then he passed.
“I have no idea, man,” he said. “I’m just trying to make threepointers on Saturday night.”
Redick is not an All-Star, but his long-range shooting touch has him in the 3-point contest. As such, he’s in what has become the main event of All-Star weekend as it comes to Canada for the first time.
The game will be a spectacle on Sunday night, and the dunk contest anchors the Saturday night schedule, but it is the bomb contest that promises the most compelling drama. And it’s why Redick isn’t thinking about anything else.
The field is loaded. Stephen Curry, the reigning league MVP who is in the process of destroying his own record for made 3-pointers in a season, will defend his title. His teammate Klay Thompson on the buzzsaw Warriors might be his closest rival.
The crowd at the Air Canada Centre is guaranteed to be lively because Kyle Lowry of the Toronto Raptors will also take part. And even former Raptor Chris Bosh, the 6-foot-10 power forward, will take his shot at making threes.
Redick says he will practise a lot before Saturday, hoping to improve on his 3-point debut last year, when he didn’t get out of the first round. (“I shot a lot of long twos last year,” he says with a smile.) He’s going to work on what side of the racks he stands on, so that his footwork is smooth, he says.
“Not that shooting threes in a three-point contest is an exact science or anything,” Redick says. “Ultimately the ball just has to go into the net.”
It has been going into the net from distance in the NBA at an ever-increasing rate, which helps explain why the 3-point contest has become such a marquee event.
Ten years ago, Ray Allen led the NBA with 269 3-pointers made, and no one else made even 200. This season, at least 10 players are on pace to crack 200, with Curry — absurdly — having already done so. He has hit 245 in 52 games, having set the NBA record last year with 286 in the entire season. San Antonio, meanwhile, won the NBA title in 2005 with a leading 3-point shooter, Bruce Bowen, who made 102 of them.
Bosh says that’s the key difference about the 3-point event today: guys like Curry and Thompson and Lowry are the key cogs on very good teams.
“It used to be role players (who shot threes),” Bosh said, and he’s right.
The term “3-point specialist” was common even 10 years ago but today, you almost have to be able to shoot them just to remain on the floor. Bosh, asked if he has been working on his stroke, does not even pause: “Of course I’ve been practising,” he says. “Steph Curry?”
He lets it hang there, just saying the name is enough to indicate the task at hand.
“Of course I’ve been practising.” Has Lowry? “I haven’t yet,” says the Raptors guard. “DeMar stood me up.” (It’s unclear what DeRozan, his teammate, would have done in the aborted practice situation.) But he is excited to go up against the league’s best, and to represent the Raptors as his team hosts the basketball world.
“It’s definitely going to be fun,” Lowry says, adding that he knows the attention has grown on the event. “The dunk contest is always hyped, but the 3-ball is such an important part of the game now.”
Redick says the changing game is part of the new focus on the shooting event, and another part is the league realizing that its marquee stars could play leading roles in it. Gone are the days when, say, Craig Hodges, who wasn’t even on an NBA roster in 1993, was asked to defend his title anyway.
It’s the opposite of what has happened with the dunk contest, which had the epic battles of Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins in the late 1980s, was revived with Vince Carter’s otherworldly performance 16 years ago, and has stumbled through format changes and various low-wattage lineups in the years since.
And there was that time Blake Griffin jumped over a car. This year, Zach LaVine of the Minnesota Timberwolves will defend his title against, um, Will Barton and Aaron Gordon? (Detroit’s Andre Drummond, who is 6-foot-11 and thus has the virtue of not having to jump, will also compete.)
Redick attempts some diplomacy on that front.
“I don’t know who is — I’m not calling anybody out or anything — but that’s what’s missing from that event,” he says.
Across the room, Curry is holding forth on his ability as a shooter from distance, as though to underline Redick’s point.
“I feel like I could go toe-to-toe with pretty much anyone,” Curry says. “But it’s a lot different shooting off a rack.”
Somehow, I suspect he will manage.