NBA has bowed to power of three
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were rookies. Bill Walton’s move to the Clippers — the San Diego Clippers — was making headlines. And the league was trying something new in the 1979-80 season: a three-point shot.
Its debut was inauspicious. The New York Times’ season preview called the shot a “gimmick” twice in the first two paragraphs.
“We don’t need it; I say leave our game alone,” Boston Celtics president Red Auerbach said, theorizing that the reason for the shot was that “TV panicked over the bad ratings.”
Oddly enough, a Celtic, Chris Ford, is credited with making the first official NBA three on opening night against the Houston Rockets. Each team wound up with one in the game. The shot soon settled in as a rarely used weapon, with teams averaging three attempts per game the first season.
Thirty-six years later, the threepoint shot has gone from a gimmick to a vital part of every team’s offence. This season, teams are taking an average of 24 three-point shots each game, and making an average of eight of them.
Both of those figures would be records, breaking the totals set last season.
It is not just desperate long-shot teams that use the three as a weapon, as some early critics feared. The Golden State Warriors, one of the best teams of recent times, are taking 30 a game.
There are many reasons for the rise of the three-point shot, but one may simply be math. It took a while, but coaches finally stopped listening to the traditionalist naysayers and realized that a shot that is worth 50 per cent more pays off, even if it is a little harder to make.
“Teams have all caught on to the whole points-per-possession argument,” Lawrence Frank, the coach of the then-New Jersey Nets, said a few years ago as the rate of threes began to rapidly increase.
Brian Taylor, a point guard for the Clippers out of Princeton, became the first three-point specialist in the first year of the shot. “Gene Shue believed in it,” Taylor told NBA.com recently, referring to his coach. “So we had set plays for it. It was amazing.”
Taylor led the league in threes that season with 90. Last season, 73 players reached that total.
Danny Ainge was the first to demonstrate that the three-point shot could be a key element of an elite team’s offence, 148 in 1987-88 for an outstanding Celtics team. John Starks of the New York Knicks was the first to break 200 in 1994-95.
Then along came Stephen Curry. The Warriors guard shattered the record with 272 in 2012-13, and broke it again last season with 286. He has193 threes in 40 games this season and should easily become the first player with 300 threes, if not 400.