Chapter 1: The Dark Ages of the Three: When Mid-Range Was King and Deep Shots Were a Joke

June 18, 1997. Game 6 of the NBA Finals, United Center, Chicago. The Utah Jazz, down 86-85 with 12 seconds left, have the ball. John Stockton drives, draws two defenders, and whips a pass to the right corner to Jeff Hornacek, a career 40.3% three-point shooter. Hornacek catches, rises, and releases a clean look. The ball swishes through the net. The Jazz bench erupts. Karl Malone pumps his fist. The title is theirs. Then the whistle blows. Referee Joey Crawford calls a violation: Hornacek’s foot crossed the three-point line before he released the ball. The basket doesn’t count. The Bulls grab the rebound, Michael Jordan hits a fadeaway over Bryon Russell three seconds later, and Chicago wins its fifth championship. For the next 15 minutes, every

June 18, 1997. Game 6 of the NBA Finals, United Center, Chicago. The Utah Jazz, down 86-85 with 12 seconds left, have the ball. John Stockton drives, draws two defenders, and whips a pass to the right corner to Jeff Hornacek, a career 40.3% three-point shooter. Hornacek catches, rises, and releases a clean look. The ball swishes through the net. The Jazz bench erupts. Karl Malone pumps his fist. The title is theirs. Then the whistle blows. Referee Joey Crawford calls a violation: Hornacek’s foot crossed the three-point line before he released the ball. The basket doesn’t count. The Bulls grab the rebound, Michael Jordan hits a fadeaway over Bryon Russell three seconds later, and Chicago wins its fifth championship. For the next 15 minutes, every sports talk show in America replayed the tape on loop, arguing whether Hornacek’s left foot was an inch over the line or not. The Jazz were furious. Stockton, ever the stoic, told reporters after the game, “I saw the replay. It was close. But that’s the game.” Hornacek, for his part, laughed it off: “I guess I should’ve worn longer shorts that day.” But for anyone watching closely, that moment was a perfect metaphor for the state of the three-pointer in the NBA in the 1990s: so close to being a game-changing weapon, but still dismissed as a gimmick by the establishment. That dismissal was not random. It was the product of 30 years of basketball orthodoxy, built on a foundation of flawed efficiency math, defensive rules that favored physicality over skill, and a cultural bias that framed the three-pointer as a “soft” option for players who couldn’t compete in the mid-range or the paint. To understand how the NBA would eventually rewrite its entire playbook around the three, we first have to unpack why the shot was treated like a joke for three decades after its 1979 introduction.

The Gimmick That Almost Wasn’t: The Three-Pointer’s Rocky Birth

The NBA did not invent the three-pointer. That honor goes to the upstart American Basketball Association (ABA), which launched in 1967 with a 19-foot three-point line (shorter than the NBA’s eventual 22-foot line) as a core selling point to differentiate itself from the more conservative NBA. The ABA’s version of the three was a hit: stars like Julius Erving and Rick Barry averaged more than three three-point attempts per game by the early 1970s, and the shot became a staple of the league’s fast-paced, highlight-reel style. When the NBA merged with the ABA in 1976, however, the three-point line was scrapped entirely. NBA owners and coaches argued it was a “gimmick” that would disrupt the flow of the game and reward “lucky” shots over skill. It took three more years of declining ratings and competition from the newly formed NCAA (which had adopted the three-pointer in 1986, but was already experimenting with it in lower divisions) for the NBA to reconsider. On October 12, 1979, the NBA officially introduced the three-point line for the 1979-80 season, set at 22 feet from the basket center (the same distance as the ABA’s original line, but with shorter corner distances to account for court geometry). Then-NBA commissioner Larry O’Brien framed it as a tool to “level the playing field” for small-market teams that couldn’t afford to sign elite post scorers. Almost no one in the basketball world agreed. > [!TIP] 侧边

June 18, 1997. Game 6 of the NBA Finals, United Center, Chicago. The Utah Jazz, down 86-85 with 12 seconds left, have the ball. John Stockton drives, draws two defenders, and whips a pass to the right corner to Jeff Hornacek, a career 40.3% three-point shooter. Hornacek catches, rises, and releases a clean look. The ball swishes through the net. The Jazz bench erupts. Karl Malone pumps his fist. The title is theirs. Then the whistle blows. Referee Joey Crawford calls a violation: Hornacek’s foot crossed the three-point line before he released the ball. The basket doesn’t count. The Bulls grab the rebound, Michael Jordan hits a fadeaway over Bryon Russell three seconds later, and Chicago wins its fifth championship. For the next 15 minutes, every sports talk show in America replayed the tape on loop, arguing whether Hornacek’s left foot was an inch over the line or not. The Jazz were furious. Stockton, ever the stoic, told reporters after the game, “I saw the replay. It was close. But that’s the game.” Hornacek, for his part, laughed it off: “I guess I should’ve worn longer shorts that day.” But for anyone watching closely, that moment was a perfect metaphor for the state of the three-pointer in the NBA in the 1990s: so close to being a game-changing weapon, but still dismissed as a gimmick by the establishment. That dismissal was not random. It was the product of 30 years of basketball orthodoxy, built on a foundation of flawed efficiency math, defensive rules that favored physicality over skill, and a cultural bias that framed the three-pointer as a “soft” option for players who couldn’t compete in the mid-range or the paint. To understand how the NBA would eventually rewrite its entire playbook around the three, we first have to unpack why the shot was treated like a joke for three decades after its 1979 introduction.

> [!TIP] Sidebar 1.1: The ABA’s Three-Point Legacy > The three-pointer was not an NBA invention. The upstart American Basketball Association (ABA), which launched in 1967 as a rival to the NBA, built its brand around the 19-foot three-point line, along with a red-white-and-blue ball and a slam dunk contest that would later become the NBA’s All-Star Weekend centerpiece. ABA stars like Julius Erving and Rick Barry averaged more than 3.3 three-point attempts per game by the 1972-73 season, and the shot was a core part of the league’s fast-paced, highlight-driven identity. When the NBA merged with the ABA in 1976, the three-point line was one of the first casualties of the consolidation: NBA owners and coaches voted unanimously to scrap it, with then-Boston Celtics head coach Tom Heinsohn telling reporters, “That gimmick has no place in a serious basketball league.” It would take three more years of declining NBA ratings and a mandate from then-commissioner Larry O’Brien to “modernize the game” for the three-point line to return, set at 22 feet from the basket (23 feet in the corners, due to court geometry) for the 1979-80 season.

When the three-pointer made its official NBA debut on October 12, 1979, the reaction from the coaching establishment was almost universally scathing. Then-Los Angeles Lakers head coach Jack McKinney, who had led the team to a 9-1 start before a near-fatal biking accident, told reporters after a game in which his team attempted just 1 three-pointer all night: “That shot is for guys who can’t drive to the basket or hit a 15-footer. We’re not going to waste possessions on a gimmick.” His replacement, Paul Westhead, doubled down on the anti-three rhetoric after the Lakers won the 1980 championship behind Magic Johnson’s 42-point Game 6 performance: “We won this title playing real basketball, not that ABA circus stuff.” The numbers backed the coaches’ contempt in the shot’s first decade. In the 1979-80 inaugural season, the league’s 22 teams combined to attempt just 1,153 three-p