The Dark Ages of the Paint: Life Before the Three-Point Line

The air inside the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium on the evening of October 12, 1979, smelled like stale beer, unwashed polyester warm-ups, and the sharp, pine-sap scent of the just-waxed hardwood. The crowd of 7,213, mostly blue-collar Buffalo locals who’d come to watch their Braves take on the Boston Celtics in a preseason exhibition, buzzed with the low, expectant hum of a meaningless early-season game—until the public address announcer’s voice crackled over the tinny speakers, explaining a strange new marking painted just inside the old sideline: a line 23 feet, 9 inches from the basket, with a smaller half-circle arching out to 22 feet in the corners. “This is the three-point line,” the announcer said, “and shots from beyond it count for three points instead of two.”

The hum died. A smattering of boos rippled through the stands. On the Celtics’ bench, 32-year-old point guard Nate Archibald, already a 10-year veteran with two All-NBA selections to his name, squinted at the line like it was a crack in the floor he was supposed to avoid stepping on. “What the hell is that for?” he muttered to his 23-year-old rookie teammate Larry Bird, who was busy lacing his Converse All-Stars and looked up only long enough to shrug. “Gimmick,” Bird said, without looking up. “Something the league made up to sell more tickets to people who don’t know basketball.”

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Archibald’s confusion was not unique. The three-point line was not a new invention—it had been a staple of the rival American Basketball Association (ABA) since the league’s founding in 1967^[1]—but it was a stranger to the NBA, which had prided itself on 33 years of “pure” basketball played almost exclusively in the paint. For the NBA’s old guard, the line was an insult, a compromise forced on the league as a condition of the 1976 merger with the ABA, when four upstart ABA teams (the Nets, Nuggets, Pacers, and Spurs) were absorbed into the older, more established league. The NBA had agreed to keep the three-point line, along with the slam dunk contest, as a concession to ABA fans who might otherwise abandon the sport. But league executives, coaches, and players had no intention of letting the gimmick stick. They assumed it would be a novelty, a footnote in the rulebook that would be forgotten within a season.

They were half right. For the first decade of its existence, the three-point line was indeed a footnote—one that most of the basketball world would have happily torn out of the book entirely. The 1980s NBA was a brutal, paint-dominated universe ruled by a caste system of 7-foot-tall giants who treated the area within the 16-foot-wide three-second lane as their personal fiefdom. To shoot from beyond the arc was not just a bad strategic choice; it was a cultural transgression, a sign of cowardice, a rejection of the hard-nosed, physical ideals that the league marketed

That was the soul of basketball itself. If you wanted to earn your stripes in the NBA, you didn’t stand 24 feet from the hoop waving your arms like a windmill; you drove the lane, absorbed the forearm to the ribs, and finished through contact at the rim, the leather ball slick with sweat and the hardwood splintering under your shoes. The three-pointer was not just a bad shot—it was a moral failure, a sign you were too scared to get your nose bloody, too soft to mix it up with the giants who ruled the paint.

The penalty for violating this unwritten code was swift and merciless. On the night of January 19, 1982, at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, 21-year-old Golden State Warriors rookie Chris Mullin, a 6-foot-6 sharpshooter out of St. John’s who had been drafted third overall just six months prior, found himself on the receiving end of that punishment^[2]. The Warriors were getting blown out by the Portland Trail Blazers, and Mullin, who had already hit 7 of his first 10 field goal attempts, caught the ball on the right wing, dribbled once to create space from his defender, and let fly a 25-foot jumper that swished through the net. He did it again on the next possession, and again on the one after that: three straight three-pointers, all from the right wing, all nothing but net, cutting the Blazers’ lead from 18 to 12 in less than two minutes. The