If you are like legendary sportswriter Bob Ryan and it seems like more basketball players are attempting more three-pointers than ever before, that’s because they are.
The highest team average for three-point shot attempts per game is held by the 2018-19 Houston Rockets at 45.4 per game. So far, in 2024, the Boston Celtics are averaging 51.6 three-point attempts per game. The Golden State Warriors are also close to the all-time record, averaging 45.0 three-point shots per game. The Chicago Bulls and Charlotte Hornets are also shooting threes at a rate above 44 per game.
Through the first five games of the season, Celtics star Jayson Tatum has taken 61 three-point shot attempts. Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves has shot 53 threes in four games.
All of those three-point shot attempts in today’s game of basketball are just too much for Bob Ryan.
“For me, the three-point shot is the single worst thing to happen to basketball in my lifetime,” Ryan said during a recent appearance on The Ricky Cobb Show. “And let’s back up for a little history. The ABA did not introduce the three-point shot. The ABA absorbed the three-point shot.
“The three-point shot, as we know, it was a gimmick of a promoter. It was the gimmick of a promoter, that man being Abe Sacks, the impresario of the Harlem Globetrotters who founded a league in 1961 called the American Basketball League he hoped would be an opposition to the NBA.
“That league lasted a year and a half. It folded in the second year, but he had a three-point shot because he needed a gimmick,” Ryan continued.
“The Eastern League, which was a league I was quite familiar with, having grown up in Trenton, New Jersey, and we had a franchise. I was a big fan of the Eastern League, (they) adopted the three-point shot. And when the ABA came into being in 1966, clearly it needed gimmicks, and they had of them: the 3-point shot and the red, white and blue basketball. But just keep in mind that is the derivation of the three-point shot.”
Bob Ryan blames Steph Curry.
“All over America, 8-year-olds are cranking up threes. Steph Curry is the single most influential player of the 21st century… now it is Steph Curry. Every little kid wants to be Steph Curry, and it’s the game, the three-point shot. The Warriors mastered it with multiple championships. The Celtics mastered it last year en route to a championship, and it looks like they’re going to use the same technique to try and get there.”
Bob Ryan isn’t alone in blaming Steph Curry. Curry’s own coach, Steve Kerr, said in 2021, “We were in Boston the other night and before the game there was a game with 10-year-olds being played on the main court and it was on our screen as we came in for our pre-game, you know, walked our pre-game scout. We walk in, the game’s on, all guys are watching it, all the coaches are watching it, and about seven straight possessions, these 10-year-old kids launched three-pointers, and I turned to Steph, and I said, ‘Steph, this is all your fault.’”
Bob Ryan wasn’t even the only sports reporter to call for a change to the NBA three-point shot this week. Bomani Jones also expressed frustration with it on his show The Right Time.
“It’s become the jab, basically. Every boxer’s got a jab,” Jones said. “But it’s not supposed to be a jab. It feels like it’s supposed to be an uppercut, an option, something that you have.”
A Syracuse study published in February revealed that, because of so many three-point shots now being taken, the expected value from a three-point shot is now worth less than two-point shots. But does anyone besides Bob Ryan and Bomani Jones care?
The post Legendary Sportswriter Says Three-Pointers Are The ‘Worst Thing To Happen To Basketball’ appeared first on BroBible.
Legendary Sportswriter Says Three-Pointers Are The ‘Worst Thing To Happen To Basketball’
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