Warriors continue to underperform

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Golden State Warriors: 3-point kings now, they strenuously opposed the new NBA rule in 1979

By Bruce Newman, bnewman@bayareanewsgroup.com
POSTED: 06/07/2016 03:07:23 PM PDT
UPDATED: 06/08/2016 02:55:53 AM PDT


As the Golden State Warriors make their bid for a second consecutive NBA championship, their dominance over opponents is built resolutely upon the 3-point shot. For the defending champs and their two-time MVP, Stephen Curry, the 3-point shot has been, quite literally, a game-changer.

But in the most delicious irony of the team's storied run, when the three was adopted by a vote of NBA owners in 1979, the franchise most vehemently opposed to rewarding basketball's bomb throwers with an extra point was the Golden State Warriors.

Franklin Mieuli, who owned the team for 24 years, stalked out of the rule-change meeting in disgust, threatening never to return if the vote was final. "Changing the 2-point basket is immoral," Mieuli thundered. "We have separated ourselves from the main body of basketball by tampering with a game that has lasted for 90 years. ... We are going to destroy the team concept." Mieuli died in 2010, at the end of Curry's rookie season, and never got to see how truly wrong he was.

As the Warriors obliterated the NBA record with 1,077 3-pointers this season, Curry made one of those leaps that forces everyone else to reconsider their understanding of the game's limits.


He made 402 threes, which the astonished authors of a statistical analysis in The New York Times attempted to put in some kind of larger context. "The record is an outlier that defies most comparisons," they noted, presenting a chart of the 752 top individual 3-point shooting seasons in NBA history, "but here is one: It is the equivalent of hitting 103 home runs in a Major League Baseball season."

The rule change that Mieuli so despised was a holdover from the old ABA -- a league prone to using gimmicks, such as a red, white and blue ball -- after it merged with the NBA in 1976. "The NBA believed in trying to get the ball as close to the basket as you possibly could," recalls Al Attles, who was the Warriors' coach when the 3-point rule was enacted. "So it really changed the whole landscape of the league."

Attles was a teammate of Wilt Chamberlain's the night "the Big Dipper" scored 100 points in a single game, rarely straying more than a few feet from the basket. The league widened the free-throw lane to push Chamberlain away from the rim, but Attles doesn't see any way the rules makers can put the genie back in the bottle and stop Curry.

Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry (30) gestures as his teammate Golden State Warriors’ Klay Thompson (11) shoots and makes a three-point

"You can handcuff him in the locker room," Attles says. "I don't know what else you can do. Maybe you say, 'OK, you can only dribble the ball two times.' But you can't keep legislating against players. You have to let players play."

Players gonna play, but in the beginning, shooters weren't necessarily gonna shoot the three. Boston's Larry Bird, who was considered one of the NBA's finest long-range marksmen of the 1980s, only averaged three attempts or more per game once in his career. "I can remember if a guy was out at the 3-point line, you wouldn't even go out there and challenge him," Bird told ESPN.com. "We dared them to shoot that shot."

Nearly a century of orthodoxy held that any shot longer than 20 feet -- the 3-point line in the NBA is 22 feet deep in the corners, and 23 feet, 9 inches near midcourt -- had so little chance of success that it wasn't worth practicing. "When it first came in," Attles says, "it was horrendous. Guys really didn't have the ability to shoot the ball from that distance."

Even "Downtown" Freddie Brown of the Seattle SuperSonics, who came prefitted with a perfect nickname for the shot, didn't care for it. "What a lot of people don't realize is that basketball isn't meant to be played from that far out," Brown said at the time.

The thinking of most players had begun to change long before Curry and fellow "Splash Brother" Klay Thompson went into constant launch mode this season. A few even became known as 3-point specialists, though they were rarely given the green light until their coaches needed to overcome a late deficit.

But no one had ever done what Curry did this season, jacking up 240 more 3-point attempts than the previous season -- a 50 percent increase. The Warriors made the most 3-pointers in NBA history this season, averaging 13.1 per game. By contrast, the Los Angeles Lakers scored 13 threes during their entire 1981-82 championship season. And Curry demolished every known record for what the Sabermetrics geeks call Effective Field Goal Percentage (eFG%).

Though not officially recognized by the NBA, eFG percentage is a formula that attempts to account for the added value of the extra point scored. "If you shoot 40 percent on threes," explains Mike Lynch of Basketball-Reference.com, "that's the same as shooting 60 percent on twos."

During the regular season, Curry had a .630 eFG percentage, surpassing Adrian Dantley (.580) for the all-time record among scorers who averaged 30 or more points. Even without the added e-bump, his unadorned 3-point percentage was 45.4. "The more threes you shoot, generally the more you lose efficiency," Lynch says. "He's putting up insane numbers, and he's not really sacrificing much in terms of accuracy."