Did you know? The three-point line was once dismissed as a gimmick
The shot that now defines modern basketball started life in a rival league and took decades to be taken seriously.
A borrowed idea
The three-point line was not born in the NBA. It was popularised by the rival American Basketball Association (ABA) in the late 1960s as a way to make its games more exciting and to spread out the defence. Many traditionalists saw it as a gimmick — a circus shot rather than real basketball.
A slow adoption
The NBA only adopted the three-pointer for the 1979-80 season, and even then it was used sparingly for years. Teams treated it as a low-percentage last resort, not a core weapon. For decades the shot sat at the edge of strategy, not the centre of it.
The revolution in the maths
What changed was analytics. Teams eventually did the arithmetic: three points beats two often enough that a decent three is more valuable than a long two-point shot. Once that sank in, the three moved from novelty to foundation, and offences reorganised themselves around spacing and shooting.
Where the line sits
The distance varies by league — the NBA line is 23 feet 9 inches at the top and 22 feet in the corners, while FIBA’s is a uniform 6.75 metres. Those few feet reshaped a whole sport: the shot once dismissed as a gimmick is now the number every modern offence is built to generate.