Trying to Curry favour with 3x3

Bengaluru: No one has single-handedly changed the game of basketball more than Stephen Curry has!

Not even ‘Black Jesus’, aka Michael Jordan, can stake claim to what Curry has achieved. 

Over the last decade and more, the light-skinned, blue-eyed flame thrower has rewritten the rules of the game. From the year Curry laced his shoes for the Golden State Warriors in 2009 to now, where he’s lacing no-look threes as a 36-year-old, the average three-point attempts per game taken by teams has gone up from 18.1 to 37.5.

Jordan didn’t have this on-court impact because no one could ‘Be Like Mike’. But, Curry, with his small frame and genial smile, is relatable. That boy next door, who serves you one hot loss after another while dancing for his daughters, is what everyone wants to be, and his art is what everyone wants to perfect. 

So far so good but it’s about to take a turn for the worse. 

While this three-point fetish is spiking scoring rates, allowing smaller guards to become gravity, and taking the game further away from the rim to avoid injuries, the outcome of the game going small is that the bigs are becoming extinct. 

You might argue that most NBA teams come laden with 7-footers, and you’d be right, but what those big men do today as opposed to a decade ago is vastly different. Given how the game is set up now, even they are hoisting three-pointers because that - as reductive as this sounds - is just more points per shot than getting your body mangled inside the paint for two points. 

So, three-pointers are the new mid-range pull-up. It’s not as mentally taxing as skiing through a forest of bigs for a lay-up, but surely as sexy when done right - a la Curry.  

And this is exactly what the think tank behind designing the 3x3 basketball were hoping for. 

When the game lasts all of 10 minutes, or you race to 21 points, it’s difficult to run plays so isolation becomes the norm, and shooting beyond the arc, naturally, assumes importance because you get two points (in 3x3) as opposed to one for making the dash for the rim. Effectively, if you put up four to five good threes, you’re beyond halfway towards a win. 

That’s just effective practice, and the 3x3 Basketball Nationals in Bengaluru last month were an embodiment of this new wave. 

Save for the Tamil Nadu men’s team, which eventually won the title (we’ll come back to this), every other outfit was bent on flinging threes from beyond the line from the time the ball was in play. 

It was a ploy which gave teams some success, although it didn’t work out for Karnataka (we’ll come back to this too), it was not a good look because some players were not concerned about the clock, the circumstance, or the game at all, they were letting it float to the rafters because that seemed like the most acceptable thing to do. 

Tamil Nadu didn’t. Granted, they had the Pranav Prince’s cape to ride on and Arvind Muthu Krishnan’s narrative-defying skills to depend on, but they still used the half court as if their personal chess board and got the job done. They were using 5x5 spacing and speed to achieve 3x3 success.   Karnataka, on the other hand, played 3x3 basketball as they had heard about it on the streets - fast and fun - and looked as scraggy. But that’s what was bound to happen because nearly all of the players playing the short format are representing their States in the long format so there is an exchange of skills. 

The problem is not so apparent when the nuance of the 5x5 format seeps into the 3x3 format. When the hasty, almost neurotic pace and poise of the short format becomes the norm in 5x5 basketball, there’s a problem. 

Sounds familiar? That’s because this unhealthy seepage of bad habits from short format to long isn’t dissimilar to what transpired in cricket between Twenty20 Internationals and Tests. 

The likes of Basketball Federation of India president Aadhav Arjuna and former India captain R Rajan maintained that the 3x3 format has nothing to do with the OG so the purists can rest easy. 

“In the last 10 years, teams such as Spain and Serbia have started to focus on 3x3 basketball and that has gotten them a lot of medals. I think we have the players to win us 3x3 medals in world events so our focus is on this format,” said Arjuna. 

“We will build a separate system where 3x3 players are specialists for that format. We are also planning on a separate coach for that format.”

When asked if this is going to take BFI’s attention away from 5x5, Arjuna denied the possibility but as he spoke on, the reality became more evident. Even Rajan didn’t think the short format was going to hog the limelight, but the reality is that at the club or college level, which is an essential part of a hooping culture, players have more access to 3x3 tournaments than 5x5 games.

On an average, a basketball player representing the state, club and college is going to play around 60 games a year. To lend perspective, that’s how many games a 6th-grade school student takes on in the US. That could explain the rarely-believable skill level of NBA stars. 

To keep their passion going and offset the lack of organised games, local players have had to look elsewhere. Organising 5x5 games can be quite the hassle so there weren’t too many tournaments of that sort going around, but, of late, organisers have realised the potential for business with the shortest format and they’re cashing in. 

Naturally, anyone who wants to play will turn up at these tournaments. Since they’re usually over in a day or two, players don’t have to wait around, hoping for a miracle to lace up for their next game. It’s all just more efficient. 

But… they don’t defend as much because the ball anyway goes to the loser of the possession for the next play, they don’t drive in as much because there’s always that three-point line, they don’t use the big man as much because the spacing doesn’t allow it as much, and there’s less emphasis on quality and basketball IQ in this format. All of this makes the purists view the original format through rose-tinted glasses while understanding that 5x5 does look a tad slow and dragged on when compared to 3x3.  

This is the era of instant gratification, and the 3x3 format embodies it. This is the era of the three-point shot, and Curry is the poster child for it. Both these paradigm-changing movements have their positives, but they cannot be fully consumed and accepted without a level of self-awareness.