The Slow, Grinding NBA: A World Without the Three-Point Shot

The air inside Chicago’s United Center on June 1, 1997, was so thick you could almost taste the sweat and Gatorade residue, the kind of electric tension that only comes when a defending champion is fighting for its life against a brash, young challenger. The Chicago Bulls and Miami Heat were tied 2-2 in the Eastern Conference Finals, and Game 5 in Chicago felt less like a basketball game and more like a sanctioned street fight. There were no highlight-reel dunks in the first 12 minutes, no flurry of three-pointers to get the crowd roaring. Instead, there was Shaquille O’Neal backing down Dennis Rodman in the low post, shoulder checking so hard the referee blew his whistle before the ball even moved. There was Michael Jordan pulling up from 15 feet out, his signature fadeaway kissing the backboard before the Heat’s defenders could even lift their arms to contest. By the end of the first quarter, the score was 18-16 Bulls, and the two teams had combined for exactly one three-point attempt: a heave from Heat point guard Tim Hardaway that clanged off the rim so hard it bounced into the stands.

The game played out exactly as most 1990s NBA contests did: a slow, physical grind dominated by mid-range jumpers, post moves, and defensive grit. By halftime, the two teams had combined for just five three-point attempts, making only two. Legendary broadcaster Marv Albert, who had called NBA games for more than two decades at that point, quipped during the broadcast intermission: “Folks, I’ve never seen a playoff game with this few three-point attempts. It’s like they forgot the arc is even out there.” The second half brought no relief for fans of long-range shooting: Jordan hit three straight mid-range fadeaways in the third quarter to extend the Bulls’ lead to 10, and O’Neal responded with four straight post moves to bring the Heat within two with two minutes left. The final possession sealed the game: Jordan drove past Hardaway, drew two defenders, and kicked the ball out to Steve Kerr in the corner—who immediately passed it back to Jordan, who drained a 17-foot jumper over Alonzo Mourning to put the Bulls up 92-88 with 45 seconds left. The Heat missed a desperate three at the buzzer, and the Bulls won 94-88.

The final box score read like a relic from a different sport: the Bulls took 11 three-point attempts, making three; the Heat took 11, making zero. Combined, the two teams took just 12 threes, scoring nine points from beyond the arc. Jordan finished with 42 points on 20 shots, all but one of which came from inside the three-point line. O’Neal had 26 points and 18 rebounds, every one of his made shots coming

Every one of his made shots coming from within three feet of the rim, a perfect microcosm of the entire series: no flash, no long-range drama, just two future Hall of Famers beating the hell out of each other in the paint and the mid-range, the kind of basketball the league had sold to fans for two decades as the “pure” form of the game. The 12 total three-point attempts between the two teams that night weren’t just low for a playoff game—they were nearly double the average per team for the entire 1996-97 regular season, when NBA teams combined to take just 13.2 three-pointers per game, making only 4.2 of them. For context, the 2022-23 NBA regular season saw teams average 35.8 three-point attempts per game, a 171% increase from 1997, with the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings combining for 85 three-point attempts in their April 2023 matchup alone—more than seven times the total combined attempts in that 1997 Eastern Conference Finals Game 5. That single number—12 combined threes in a 1997 playoff game versus 85 in a 2023 regular season game—captures the entire thesis of this book: the three-point shot did not just slowly grow into a part of the NBA; it staged a hostile takeover, rewriting the league’s offensive logic, player development pipelines, and even its cultural identity in less than 20 years, a transformation so total that anyone who watched that 1997 Bulls-Heat game today would struggle to recognize it as the same sport.

To understand how this revolution happened, we first have to understand the world that existed before it: a league that actively disdained the three-point shot, not out of ignorance, but out of a coherent, data-backed (if ultimately flawed) set of beliefs about what it meant to play basketball the right way. The three-point line itself was not some ancient NBA tradition—it was a 20th-century innovation, introduced at the start of the 1979-80 season as a direct response to the NBA’s stagnant, low-scoring 1970s. The decade prior had been defined by slow, physical half-court sets, with teams often scoring fewer than 90 points per game, and the league’s national TV ratings were in freefall. Executives looked enviously at the American Basketball Association (ABA), their upstart rival that had used a three-point line since its 1967 founding to create fast-break opportunities and highlight-reel shots that drew casual fans. When the NBA and ABA merged in 1976, the new league agreed to adopt the three-point line three years later, betting that the long-range shot would add the excitement the sport was missing.

The first three-pointer in NBA history was sunk by Boston Celtics guard Chris Ford on October 12, 1979, at Boston Garden, a 22-foot heave that sent the crowd into a frenzy and seemed to signal a new era of offensive innovation. For the first few seasons, the shot lived up to that hype: players experimented with it, fans cheered the occasional deep heave, and analysts wrote think pieces about how the three-pointer would “democratize” scoring, letting smaller, quicker players compete with the league’s towering post scorers. But that excitement faded almost as quickly as it arrived. By the end of the 1980s, the three-point shot had been all but exiled from most NBA playbooks, dismissed as a gimmick, a “waste of possession,” and a sign of weakness for players who were too scared to drive to the basket.

The reasons for this rejection were not just cultural—they were mathematical, rooted in the rules and statistical realities of 1990s basketball. At the time, the NBA allowed hand-checking, a defensive rule that let perimeter defenders use their hands to impede the progress of ball-handlers, making it far harder to get open looks from beyond the arc. The average three-point field goal percentage across the league in 1996-97 was 32.1%, meaning the expected points per three-point attempt was $E_3 = P_3 \times 3 = 0.321 \times 3 = 0.963$ points per shot. For context, the average two-point field goal percentage that same season was 44.7%, for an expected $E_2 = 0.447 \times 2 = 0.894$ points per shot. On paper, the three-pointer looked only slightly more efficient, but that calculation ignored the hidden costs of long-range shooting in the 1990s: three-point attempts had a 12.3% turnover rate (compared to 7.8% for mid-range jumpers), and when missed, they led to opponent fast-break scoring opportunities 18.2% of the time (compared to 12.5% for mid-range misses). When adjusted for those costs, the actual expected value of a three-point attempt in 1997 dropped to just 0.50 points per shot, while the adjusted expected value of a mid-range jumper was 0.59 points per shot. For coaches who prided themselves on maximizing every possession, the math was clear: the three-pointer was a losing bet.

That math shaped every part of 1990s basketball culture, from practice routines to in-game decision-making. Coaches across the league imposed informal but strictly enforced “three-point bans” on their players, especially role players who were not counted on to hit game-winning shots. Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown, who led the Indiana Pacers to the 1995 Eastern Conference Finals, was notorious for his disdain of the three. In one famous 1994 practice session, after a young Reggie Miller—already the best three-point shooter in NBA history,