The Spark: How an ABA Gimmick Ignited a Statistical Firestorm

On the evening of October 12, 1979, the Boston Celtics hosted the Houston Rockets in the first regular-season game of the NBA’s 60th anniversary. The league had just completed a lavish celebration of its own history, but the real present was tucked away in the rules: a new orange line, 23 feet and 9 inches from the basket, that no one quite knew what to do with. Celtics guard Chris Ford stepped to the line and swished the first three-pointer in NBA history, a modest footnote in a 114-106 Boston win. The box score listed it as just another field goal, worth one more point than the others. The fans barely murmured. The coaches, including Boston’s legendary Red Auerbach, saw it as a gimmick—a desperate stunt from the upstart ABA that had been forcibly merged into the NBA three years prior. What they didn’t realize was that this orange line was a statistical time bomb, quietly ticking toward an explosion that would remake the entire sport. The three-point shot wasn’t just a new way to score; it was a new way to *think* about scoring, a challenge to the very geometry of basketball efficiency. And its journey from circus act to cornerstone of strategy is the story of how data, slowly and then all at once, conquered the hardest court in sports.

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The ABA’s Desperate Gamble: Birth of a Gimmick

To understand why the three-point line entered the NBA not with a bang but with a shrug, you have to go back to the late 1960s, to a rival league fighting for its life. The American Basketball Association (ABA) was founded in 1967 as a bold, brash alternative to the staid, established NBA. But by its second season, the ABA was bleeding money, struggling to draw fans in crowded markets like New York and Los Angeles. Its survival depended on being different—visibly, audibly, *wildly* different. The NBA had the better players, the bigger arenas, and the national TV deal. The ABA had to give people a reason to look.

Enter the three-point line. Conceived by ABA commissioner George Mikan, the former Minneapolis Lakers star, the rule was less a stroke of analytical genius and more a promotional masterstroke. Mikan’s memo to his rules committee was blunt: “We need something to separate our game from the NBA’s.” The committee, which included coaches and owners desperate for a selling point, loved the idea. It was simple, visual, and promised more scoring—the ultimate crowd-pleaser. In a 1979 interview, ABA founder Joe Mullaney recalled, “We wanted more excitement, more action, more points. The three-pointer was a natural. It gave smaller players a chance, it opened up the floor, and it made every shot from outside a potential highlight.”

The ABA launched in 1967 with the line set at 25 feet at the corners and 25 feet at the top of the key—a distance that varied around the arc, a quirk that would later cause confusion when the NBA standardized it. The first three-pointer in ABA history was made by Larry Jones of the Denver Rockets on October 15, 1967. Jones, a 6-foot-4 guard, was no specialist; he was a solid all-around player. But the rule immediately created a new archetype: the long-range gunner. Players like Larry Miller, who once attempted 27 threes in a single game, and the flamboyant “Skywalker” David Thompson, who could launch from anywhere, became attractions. The media dubbed it the “home run” shot, tying it to baseball’s most exciting play.

But from the start, the three-pointer was a solution in search of a problem. ABA coaches used it sparingly, often as a last resort. In the league’s inaugural season, teams averaged just 2.7 three-point attempts per game, and the overall field goal percentage on those attempts was a dismal 27.8%. The math was brutal: at that rate, a three-pointer was worth only 0.83 points per shot, compared to the league-average two-point field goal, which yielded about 1.00 point per shot (assuming a 50% two-point percentage, typical for the era). In purely economic terms, it was a terrible investment. Yet fans loved the drama of a long bomb, and the ABA leaned into the spectacle. The three-pointer became a marketing tagline, emblazoned on posters and TV ads: “See the shot that changes everything!”

The underlying statistical idea—that a shot’s value should be measured by its *expected points* (points multiplied by probability of success) rather than just whether it went in—was never articulated. It was pure showmanship. As ABA star Spencer Haywood later admitted, “We thought it was a gimmick, too. A fun trick, but not something you built an offense around.” The league’s own statistics department barely tracked three-pointers separately in the early years. They were a novelty item, like the red-white-and-blue ball the ABA also introduced, designed to catch the eye on color TV. The three-pointer’s true potential was hiding in plain sight, buried under the noise of its own promotion.

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The Skeptical Adoption: NBA’s Reluctant Embrace

The ABA-NBA merger of 1976 was less a union of equals than a bailout. Four ABA teams—the Nets, Nuggets, Pacers, and Spurs—were absorbed into the more conservative NBA, bringing with them their colorful balls, their slam dunk contest, and their three-point line. The NBA, however, had no intention of keeping the latter. The league’s power brokers, from commissioner Larry O’Brien to the old guard of coaches, viewed the three-pointer as an affront to basketball purity. The NBA’s identity was built on the fundamentals: the pick-and-roll, the post-up, the mid-range jumper. The three-point line felt like a carnival game imported into a cathedral.

For three years after the merger, the NBA held the three-pointer at arm’s length. It was discussed in committee meetings as a potential “experiment” but consistently voted down. The opposition was visceral. Red Auerbach, the Celtics’ president and a purist to his core, publicly called it “the worst thing to happen to basketball in my lifetime.” He argued it would encourage low-percentage shots, disrupt offensive flow, and cheapen the art of the inside game. His sentiment echoed throughout the league: basketball was a game of percentages and positioning, not of heaving prayers from 25 feet. The NBA’s statistical culture, if it could be called that, was purely descriptive—counting points, rebounds, and assists—not prescriptive. No one was asking, “What is the optimal shot selection?” The question was, “Who scored the most points?”

But the NBA’s resistance was also financial. The late 1970s were a turbulent time for the league. TV ratings were stagnant, attendance was uneven, and the NBA needed a spark to compete with the ascendant NFL and the flashy, high-scoring World Hockey Association (which had also merged into the NHL). The ABA’s gimmick, for all its perceived ugliness, had one undeniable virtue: it generated headlines and highlight reels. In 1979, the NBA’s competition committee, led by future commissioner David Stern, made a pragmatic calculation. They would adopt the three-point line, but with a twist: they would standardize the distance at a uniform 23 feet and 9 inches from the basket, a compromise between the ABA’s 25-foot arc and the NBA’s own desire to keep it “reasonable.” The goal was to add excitement without letting the shot dominate the game. “We wanted to open the court a little, give teams another weapon, but not change the fundamental nature of basketball,” said Stern in a 2009 interview. “We thought of it as a garnish, not the main course.”

The official announcement came in the summer of 1979, buried in a press release about rule changes. There was no fanfare, no marketing campaign. When the 1979-80 season opened, the three-point line was just another line on the court, ignored by most. The first game, Celtics vs. Rockets, saw a total of four three-point attempts—two by each team—and only one make (Ford’s). The next night, across the league, teams combined for 22 attempts in 11 games. The shot was a footnote, a curiosity. Coaches instructed t