The Radish and the Arc: Birth of a Forgotten Idea

The Arena Was Silent

On the night of October 12, 1979, in a nearly empty Boston Garden, a man named Chris Ford caught a pass near the right wing, squared his shoulders, and did something that millions of Americans would spend the next four decades debating, dissecting, celebrating, and eventually universalizing. Ford, a reserve forward for the Boston Celtics, rose up and released a shot from approximately twenty-three feet and nine inches away from the basket. The ball arced through the air, struck nothing but net, and dropped through the hoop with a sound that, in that moment, seemed to echo across an entire sport.

It was the first three-point field goal in the modern history of the National Basketball Association.

And almost no one cared.

The crowd that evening numbered just 2,272 souls, a far cry from the Garden's capacity and a stark reminder that the NBA, in the autumn of 1979, found itself in the depths of an existential crisis that few outside the league fully appreciated. The three-point line, that arc of painted wood that would eventually transform professional basketball into something unrecognizable to the men who first drew it on league floors, had arrived almost as an afterthought—a rule borrowed from the dying American Basketball Association, a compromise forced by lawyers rather than visionaries, and a shot that most coaches regarded as fundamentally antithetical to the game's proper nature.

Dick Motta, the veteran coach who would guide the Celtics to the NBA Finals that very season, called it a "gimmick." Lenny Wilkens, then coaching the Seattle SuperSonics, predicted it would never become a meaningful part of the game. One general manager, speaking anonymously to Sports Illustrated that fall, dismissed the entire concept as "a three-ring circus." The three-point shot, in those early days, belonged to the margins of basketball—a trick play, a desperation measure, something you attempted only when the clock was winding down and better options had already evaporated.

Yet in a small room adjacent to the Celtics' locker room that October night, a twenty-eight-year-old assistant coach named Mike Schuemeyer sat with a yellow legal pad, carefully recording every instance when a player on either team crossed that curious new arc. Schuemeyer, who had arrived in Boston via a circuitous path that included graduate work in statistics at the University of Massachusetts and a brief stint in the Kansas City Kings' front office, had been running numbers on basketball since before such things were fashionable. And the numbers he was running that night, and in the nights that followed, suggested something radical: that the coaches, general managers, and commentators who dismissed the three-point line as a gimmick were profoundly, almost catastrophically, wrong.

"I knew immediately that this was going to change everything," Schuemeyer would later recall, in one of the few interviews he ever gave about those early days. "Not because of the shot itself, but because of what it meant for spacing, for how defenses would have to play, for the entire geometry of the game. Once you introduced a value differential between shots from different locations, you couldn't un-think it. The math was undeniable."

The math, of course, would take decades to prove itself conclusively. But Schuemeyer's conviction, born in that cold Boston autumn when the Garden's rafters still hung with banners celebrating past championships, represents the first documented instance of someone in an NBA organization recognizing the three-point revolution's transformative potential. His yellow legal pads, filled with painstaking notations about shot locations, expected values, and efficiency differentials, would eventually find their way into the hands of forward-thinking analysts—but their immediate impact was precisely nothing. Schuemeyer was an assistant coach, young and unproven, and the men who ran the league in 1979 had no framework for understanding why a twenty-eight-year-old from Massachusetts was so excited about a shot that everyone agreed would never amount to much.

This is the central paradox of basketball's data revolution: the insights arrived decades before anyone was prepared to receive them. Schuemeyer and his contemporaries were not simply ahead of their time—they were operating in a different temporal reality entirely, a world where basketball's future had already been drafted by men who didn't yet understand what they'd created. The three-point line, in its awkward, contested, largely ignored first decade of existence, planted seeds that would not germinate until an entirely new generation of coaches, executives, and players emerged to cultivate them.

To understand how this happened, we must travel back further than 1979, back to the summer of 1967, when a struggling professional basketball league decided to try something desperate.

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The American Basketball Association's Radical Experiment

The American Basketball Association was born in 1967 out of desperation and ambition in roughly equal measure. A group of investors, led by the tycoon George K. J. (they never did agree on what the initials stood for) and a collection of mid-market businessmen, looked at the established National Basketball Association and saw an opportunity. The NBA, for all its success, had largely consolidated its market in major metropolitan areas, leaving vast stretches of the country—particularly the South and the Southwest—underserved by major league sports. The ABA's founders believed they could capture that territory, build a loyal fan base in cities like Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Denver, and Indianapolis, and create a genuine second major professional basketball league.

Their strategy, from the beginning, was differentiation. The ABA would not simply copy the NBA; it would offer an alternative product, a different kind of basketball experience. The league adopted a red, white, and blue basketball—a move that was partly aesthetic and partly legal, allowing them to argue that their basketball was a distinct product not subject to the NBA's existing contracts. The ABA played its games on wider courts, employed a three-point line (borrowed, improbably, from a college basketball experiment in the early 1950s that had already been abandoned), and cultivated a slightly more flamboyant, less traditional brand of basketball.

The three-point line, in this context, was less a revolutionary innovation than a marketing gimmick—one of several experimental rules designed to make the ABA seem exciting and different. The league's founders understood that they were competing for attention against an established product, and any hook that might draw eyeballs was worth trying. The fact that the three-point line was genuinely new, genuinely untested, and genuinely unpredictable was almost beside the point; what mattered was that it was different, and difference was the ABA's entire reason for existing.

The early years of the ABA's three-point experiment produced results that were ambiguous at best. The shot was popular with fans—barnstorming three-point contests became a staple of ABA halftime entertainment—but its strategic value remained unclear. Players, for the most part, treated the three-pointer as a novelty, something to attempt when the mood struck or when a particularly favorable matchup presented itself. Teams did not develop systematic strategies around the three-point line; they did not reorganize their offenses to generate more of these shots; they did not calculate expected values or analyze the shot's true impact on winning and losing.

This is a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the three-point line's first two decades of existence: coaches, players, and executives might acknowledge the three-pointer's existence, might even appreciate its spectacle, but they almost universally failed to recognize its strategic significance. The conventional wisdom held that basketb