The Shot That Changed Everything: Setting the Stage

The Shot That Changed Everything: Setting the Stage

The Oracle Arena was shaking. Not metaphorically—though the collective gasp of 19,596 fans might have qualified—but literally. When LeBron James elevated for that chase-down block on Andre Iguodala, when his palm swallowed the ball inches from the rim and sent it ricocheting into the stands, the building trembled with something that transcended sound. It was the sound of history being made in real-time, the raw audio of a championship being stolen and given back in the same breath.

June 16, 2016. Game 6 of the NBA Finals. The Cleveland Cavaliers, down 3-1 to the greatest regular-season team in history, had clawed their way back to Oracle Arena for what everyone knew might be their last stand. The Golden State Warriors had won 73 games that season, shattering Michael Jordan's Bulls record. They had Stephen Curry, the unanimous MVP, raining threes from distances that made defensive coordinators weep. They had Draymond Green terrorizing opponents with a versatility the league had never seen. They were supposed to be invincible.

And then LeBron happened. His block. Kyrie Irving's pull-up three over Stephen Curry with 53 seconds left. Kevin Love's defensive stand on Curry in the final seconds. A championship that had seemed impossible, achieved through sheer force of will and the kind of late-game heroics that get immortalized in highlight reels forever.

But here's what the replays don't show you, what the highlight packages edited down to thirty-second bursts of athletic perfection obscure: the real story of that series wasn't written in the paint. It wasn't LeBron's block, as magnificent as it was. The real story was happening everywhere else on the court—specifically, 23 feet, 9 inches away from the basket.

That's the distance to the three-point line at the top of the arc, for those of you who haven't spent countless hours staring at NBA courts while normal people wondered about your mental health. Twenty-three feet, nine inches. In the grand scheme of a basketball court that stretches 94 feet long, it's almost an afterthought. A line drawn on a wooden floor. Nothing special.

Except it was everything special. It was the line that separated the old game from the new one. It was the line that Daryl Morey had bet his entire career on, the line that Mike D'Antoni had built entire offenses around, the line that Stephen Curry had turned into his personal canvas for creating art that the basketball world had never seen before. And on that June night in Oakland, as the Cavaliers celebrated and the Warriors dealt with the devastation of a season that had promised everything and delivered nothing, the three-point shot hung in the air like a question that the entire league was still trying to answer.

How did we get here? How did a line drawn 23 feet, 9 inches from the basket become the most important feature of modern basketball?

That question—that impossible, deceptively simple question—is what this book is about.

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Before we can understand the revolution, we need to understand what it was revolutionary against. For most of basketball's history, the game was played from the inside out. Coaches drilled this into players from the moment they could dribble: get the ball into the paint, where scoring was easiest and fouls were most likely. The three-point line existed, sure, but it was treated like a suggestion rather than a mandate. Something you took if you were open, but never something you actively sought out. The conventional wisdom held that two points inside the arc were worth more than two points outside it, that the extra distance made the shot too difficult to justify its use as anything more than a last-resort option when the clock was dying.

This wisdom had numbers on its side, in a sense. Mid-range shots—those taken between the three-point line and the paint—were considered the bread and butter of offensive basketball. The assumption was that a 45% mid-range shooter contributed more to winning than a 38% three-point shooter because, well, 45% of two is better than 38% of two, right? The math seems obvious when you write it out that way.

But the math was lying. And the people who eventually figured out that the math was lying would change basketball forever.

To understand how, we need to travel back to Houston in 2003, where a man named Daryl Morey was about to stumble into an NBA front office and fundamentally alter the way the game would be played for the next two decades.

Morey had no business being in basketball. His background was in business and technology—Harvard MBA, consulting work, a stint at the MLB's Boston Red Sox where he learned to think about sports through the lens of data and efficiency. When he was hired as the Houston Rockets' director of operations analysis in 2003, he was the kind of person who used phrases like "expected value" and "probability distribution" in everyday conversation. The basketball traditionalists in the organization didn't quite know what to make of him. He wasn't a former player. He hadn't paid his dues in the scouting trenches. He was, to put it bluntly, a numbers guy in a sport that still believed in gut feelings and veteran intuition.

But Morey saw something that the traditionalists couldn't see. He saw the three-point line differently.

See, here's the thing about that 23-foot, 9-inch line: it's not actually 23 feet, 9 inches everywhere. At the corners of the court, the line is closer to the basket—only about 22 feet away. And here's where it gets interesting: if you're taking a corner three, you're essentially taking a shot that's almost identical in difficulty to a long two-pointer, but worth 50% more points. A corner three from 22 feet with a 40% success rate is worth 1.2 points per attempt. A mid-range shot from 18 feet with a 45% success rate is worth only 0.9 points per attempt.

The math was there, hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone bold enough to follow it.

Morey was bold enough. And patient enough. When he became the Rockets' general manager in 2007, he began implementing what he called "Moreyball"—an approach to basketball that borrowed concepts from the Oakland A's famous "Moneyball" strategy that had revolutionized baseball a few years earlier. The core principle was simple: maximize expected value on every possession. Take shots that give you the most points per attempt, and avoid shots that give you the least.

Under Morey's philosophy, the mid-range jumper became basketball's version of the sacrifice bunt—a tool that might have its occasional uses but should never be a primary weapon. Why take a two-pointer from 17 feet when you could take a three-pointer from 23 feet? Why shoot 45% from mid-range when you could shoot 35% from three and still come out ahead in terms of points per possession?

The league laughed at first. The mid-range was basketball poetry, the thinking went. The pull-up jumper from 18 feet was an art form, a demonstration of skill and footwork that separated the great scorers from the merely good ones. You couldn't reduce basketball to math without losing something essential, something that couldn't be quantified.

But Morey kept crunching numbers, kept acquiring players who could shoot threes and attack the rim, kept building an offense around the radical idea that 1.5 was greater than 1. And then, in 2008, he acquired a point guard named Tracy McGrady and a center named Yao Ming, and the Rockets won 22 games in a row—a franchise record that still stands. The league started to pay attention.

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While Morey was busy revolutionizing basketball strategy from the front office in Houston, a coach named Mike D'Antoni was doing something similar from the sideline in Phoenix—except D'Antoni's approach was less about spreadsheets and more about something he called "seven seconds or less."

D'Antoni had come up through the European basketball ranks, where the game was played faster and more free-flowin