Before the Revolution: Basketball's Low-Percentage Era

Consider the year 1979. Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency six years earlier. The Iran hostage crisis was unfolding. Disco dominated the airwaves. And in the corridors of Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks were running a motion offense that looked remarkably similar to something their grandfathers might have drawn up on a chalkboard in the 1940s. The ball moved. Players cut. Big men posted up near the elbow. Shots came from the mid-range, the post, and occasionally—very occasionally—from beyond a newly painted arc that most coaches regarded as the basketball equivalent of a carnival game.

That arc, of course, was the three-point line, introduced experimentally in the 1979-80 NBA season as part of a broader experiment that would also bring the game into the modern age of shot clocks and wider lanes. The NBA, desperate to boost scoring and entertainment value after a decade of decline, had decided to borrow an idea from the American Basketball Association, which had implemented the three-pointer four years earlier. The ABA's version was a circular arc at the top of the key and a straight line connecting to the baseline—distinctly different from the college game's implementation, which would eventually use the same dimensions the NBA settled on. When the ABA merged with the NBA in 1976, the new league inherited the idea but waited three more years to fully implement it, giving teams and players time to adjust to this radical departure from basketball orthodoxy.

The adjustment period, it turned out, would last much longer than anyone anticipated.

The Geometry of Ignorance

To understand why the three-point shot struggled for acceptance in its first two decades of existence, you have to understand how NBA coaches and executives thought about basketball during this era. The conventional wisdom of the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s can be distilled into a few core beliefs that, in retrospect, seem almost charmingly wrongheaded.

First, and perhaps most importantly, the three-point shot was considered a low-percentage shot. This seems counterintuitive today, when we know that a 35 percent three-point shooter contributes more to winning than a 50 percent two-point shooter, but in the pre-analytics era, raw shooting percentages dominated how people evaluated players and strategies. A 33 percent three-point shot was considered poor; a 45 percent two-point shot was considered respectable. The mathematics of expected value—that 0.33 × 3 = 0.99 exceeds 0.45 × 2 = 0.90—simply wasn't part of the basketball vocabulary.

The second core belief was that the post game represented the purest form of basketball excellence. Big men who could establish position, receive entry passes, and score with their backs to the basket were the gold standard of NBA talent. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's sky hook was considered the ultimate high-percentage shot—not because of its mathematical efficiency, but because of its aesthetic beauty and the skill required to execute it. Bill Cartwright was a top draft pick in 1979. So was Sam Lacey. So was Greg Ballard. The league was obsessed with size, with low-post presence, with the belief that the way to win was to get the ball to your big man and let him go to work.

The third belief was that mid-range shooting was the foundation of a complete offensive repertoire. Larry Bird was revered not because he launched threes (though he did, at a rate that would seem quaint today), but because he could score from everywhere inside the arc. Magic Johnson was celebrated for his passing, but also for his ability to hit mid-range jumpers. The jump shot from 15 to 20 feet was the measure of a shooter's range. Everything beyond that was suspect.

These beliefs weren't irrational by the standards of the time. They reflected decades of basketball wisdom accumulated since James Naismith nailed his peach basket to a wall in Springfield, Massachusetts. The game had been built on the principle of getting high-percentage shots, and "high percentage" had been defined by proximity to the basket. The three-point line shattered this framework without providing any clear reason why coaches should rebuild their entire understanding of the game around it.

The Original Three-Point Experiment

The 1979-80 season marked the official introduction of the three-point line to NBA basketball, though the implementation was different from what we know today. The league used a straight line from the baselines rather than the arc we're familiar with—a design choice that created an asymmetry that players and coaches found aesthetically jarring. The arc at the top of the key was 23 feet, 9 inches from the basket at its farthest point, with the corners closer, sometimes significantly so depending on the arena. This inconsistency would persist for decades, creating different strategic considerations for teams playing in different buildings.

In that first season, the league average for three-point attempts was roughly 2.4 per game. To put that in perspective, today's Houston Rockets—widely considered the most three-point-happy team in modern history—attempt around 45 per game. The volume was so low that the three-point shot barely registered as a factor in game planning. Coaches didn't concern themselves with defending it because most opponents rarely attempted it. The shot existed, technically, but it occupied the same strategic space as the underhand free throw: theoretically available, practically ignored.

The early adopters were few and far between. Jack Gillin, coaching the Milwaukee Bucks, encouraged his players to shoot from downtown. But for every Gillin, there were dozens of coaches who explicitly forbade their players from shooting threes except under the most desperate circumstances. Kevin Loughery, who coached the Chicago Bulls, famously insisted that his players focus on "real basketball" shots—meaning everything inside the arc. The cultural message was clear: if you were taking three-pointers, you weren't playing the right way.

The experiment continued through the 1980s with relatively little change. The three-point line was officially adopted as a permanent part of the game in 1994-95, but it had been present in some form for 15 years at that point, and its impact on how the game was played had been minimal. Teams that wanted to could use it; teams that didn't want to could largely ignore it. Most chose to ignore it.

Then, in 1994-95, the NBA made a decision that would prove to be a significant historical error: it eliminated the three-point line. The reasoning, such as it was, involved concerns about declining scoring and a desire to "return to the fundamentals" of the game. Commissioner David Stern, in one of his more memorable miscalculations, believed that removing the three-pointer would force teams to play more aesthetically pleasing basketball—post-ups, mid-range shooting, the kind of game that older fans remembered fondly.

The decision lasted exactly two seasons, 1994-95 and 1995-96, before the league restored the three-point line, having discovered what should have been obvious: removing a scoring option doesn't make the game more entertaining, it makes it less so. The brief experiment in elimination, however, tells us something important about how the NBA's power brokers still viewed the three-point shot—as an aberration, a gimmick, something that could be removed if it wasn't serving the game's interests.

The Big Man Era

To fully appreciate the mindset of this era, you need to understand how much the NBA's identity was wrapped up in dominant big men. The 1980s and early 1990s belonged to centers and power forwards in a way that seems almost alien to modern basketball sensibilities.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was the unquestioned superstar of the early 1980s, his sky hook as unstoppable as any shot in league history. When he began to age, Hakeem Olajuwon emerged as his spiritual successor, refining the post game into something appro