- Okay, check this out.
The object of this game is simple.
You're a basketball player, you have 48 minutes
plus maybe some overtime to attempt as many shots
behind this three-point line as you can
before time runs out, but if you don't pace yourself
or you don't get enough of your shots
into the basket, you might irritate these other four players
or your coach or your fans and get yourself
stuck on the bench.
Three-point chucking is one of so many little games
you can find between the winning and losing of sports,
and with so many volume shooters running
around the NBA these days, we've seen some incredible
high scores set in this particular game.
But long before guys like James Harden
and the Splash brothers made three-point barrages
a regular event, before playing this game was even possible
within NBA basketball, the weirder and more experimental
ABA awarded three points for an outside shot.
And when it came to threes, you better believe the ABA
had guys who chased high scores.
There aren't many good, definitive stats
from this era, but there are some bananas anecdotes,
like reports of Tony Jackson attempting 12 threes
in a half in 1962 and making 10 of them,
but the ABA's real king of threes was this little cutie,
Louie Dampier, Dampier is on record
attempting over 2200 threes in his ABA career,
including a number of games with double-digit takes
from behind the line.
He was nice too.
Look at this gorgeous form, his gooseneck follow-through.
That crisp shot went in 36% of the time
over Dampier's ABA career.
The NBA acquired the ABA in a 1976 merger
and adopted its three-point line
starting with the 1979-1980 season.
That was Larry Bird's rookie year
and the future three-point champ had a couple nights
that season, putting up five, six or even seven
threes in a game, but the guys who really leaned
into the rule change were those
who were used to it from the ABA.
In 1981, former ABA-er Joe Hassett
became the first player on record
to shoot 10 three-pointers in a game,
doing so a couple times including one night
in which he only hit three of the 10.
Shout out to Joe Hassett.
Aging superstar and former ABA-er Rick Barry
is supposed to have attempted 10 threes
the night he set a record with eight makes,
that's an unofficial stat, because attempts
weren't tracked in the box score that night,
and I don't respect it anyway, because Rick Barry
refused to shoot his threes underhand
like he shot his free throws.
Anyway, to find official high scores
that stuck for a while, we need
to visit a chucking hot bed, Denver, Colorado.
On January ninth, 1982, John Roche came off the bench
for the Denver Nuggets to fire 13 three-pointers
in just 26 minutes.
He hit eight of them, including seven in a half.
All of this happened in a blow-out loss, delicious.
This is not a coincidence.
The Nuggets are a former ABA franchise,
and in the 80s they were coached by a former ABA player,
Doug Moe, who brought that league's reckless flare
with him to the NBA.
Moe basically never called plays.
He barely made his team practice.
Moe's system was known as the passing game,
players ran and shot and passed and ran and shot some more,
hardly pausing to play defense and counting
on the thin Denver air to ensure their tired opponents
couldn't defend them much either,
or to quote Moe, the passing game is basically
doing whatever the hell you want.
Moe's nuggets once scored 184 points in a game,
but surrendered 186 to the Pistons.
Doug Moe kicks ass, and the guy who broke Roche's high score
for three-point chucking was basically the quintessential
Doug Moe Denver Nugget.
Michael Adams wasn't really anyone.
The 5'10 point guard fell to the third round
of the 1985 NBA draft then spent time
bopping around leagues like the CBA and USBL
before he landed with the Nuggets.
In Denver, Adams found a real role and the green light
to his extremely weird jumper fly.
Adams had this one-handed push shot
that looked kinda like a teardrop floater,
but he used it for everything
from free throws to three pointers.
Once Adams became a Nugget, he released it constantly,
averaging almost five three-point attempts a night,
and he typically justified his volume with accuracy,
like the time in 1989 when he attempted 12 threes
and hit eight including seven in the first half alone,
but we're not here to talk about averages or typical games.
We're here to talk about extremes,
and Adams really let loose
on March 14, 1988.
He attempted 15 three-pointers, hitting five
in a loss to John Stockton in the Utah Jazz.
On the very same day Adams set that high score
for threes in the game, over 1000 miles away in Ohio,
another great shooter named Del Curry and his wife Sonya
brought a son into the world, little baby Stephen.
That is just too marvelous to be a coincidence.
I know a prophet when I see one.
Anyway, as the 80s turned into the 90s,
players like Adams had pushed the three-pointer
far enough into the mainstream
that others felt like they had license
to chuck now and then.
Dudes like Vernon Maxwell, who often took a bunch
of three-pointers for legendary Houston Rockets teams
that would go on to win championships,
or like Dale Ellis who became an all-star
with the three-pointer as his weapon of choice.
In 1990, Ellis actually set a record with nine three-point
makes in a game, but he did it extremely efficiently
on just 11 attempts.
Very impressive, but that's not the game, Dale!
Only one man from this era had the nerve
to beat Michael Adams's high score in the game of
attempting threes, whether or not they went in:
Michael Adams.
In 1990, the Nuggets parted ways with Coach Moe
and replaced him with Paul Westhead.
They played even faster than before,
but they sucked.
By April of '91, the Nuggets had long since figured out
that they were garbage.
Winning just 20 games would get them the lottery pick
that became Dikembe Mutombo.
While playing out the string, Adams figured he might as well
shoot for a record number of threes.
On April 12th, 1991, Adams was only able
to tie Dale Ellis's record of nine makes,
but he obliterated his own high score to get there,
attempting 20 three-pointers.
That nothing to lose might as well shoot logic
resurfaced with another team a couple years later.
During a brief era in which the three-point line
was a bit shorter, Coach Dick Motta's
1996 Dallas Mavericks crumbled.
They were badly hurt, and their stars hated each other.
With no hope of winning and intrigued by the fore-shortened
three-point line, Motta tried something revolutionary:
playing small ball long before it was cool.
Jason Kid ran point, the center was 6'9 Lorenzo Williams
and everyone else in the line up was a wing player
compelled to shoot and shoot.
Motta's Mavericks absolutely
destroyed team three-point records
including a single-game output of 49 threes
against the Nets on March fifth 1996.
That record would stand for over 20 years,
but Dallas's most prolific individual shooter,
George McLoud couldn't quite
crack the high score that night,
tying Michael Adams's mark with 20 attempts,
and 20 remain the high score for a whole other decade,
even as the record for individual
three-point makes got broken.
Kobe Bryant hit 12 three-pointers
in the game in January of '03,
but did so on only 18 attempts.
You might call that efficient, I call it a waste.
You're hot, shoot more than 18 threes, coward.
No, for someone to break Adams's
record of 20 three-point attempts,
it would take another bad team of despondent players
mailing in a meaningless, late-season game.
Specifically, it would take the Golden State Warriors
verses the Portland Trailblazers on April 15, 2005.
What an occasion, both teams sucked.
The Warriors won the game by 20 points
and did so while attempting 32 three-pointers,
a strategy coach Mike Montgomery described
as we thought we'd shoot some threes.
Portland shot even more, 37 in a losing effort.
The two teams combined for an NBA record
69 three-point attempts.
The Blazers barely had a coach at this point.
They'd fired Maurice Cheeks in March
and let their director of player personnel Kevin Prichard
replace him as interim, and the Blazers were
so badly injured that night, that Ruben Patterson
who'd recently demanded a trade,
was forced to participate simply so Portland
could fill the minimum active roster of eight players,
but the real hero in the losing effort was Damon Stoudamire,
the dominative point guard had to play all 48 minutes
and in that time, he unwittingly set a new high score,
attempting 21 three-pointers, even though he was ice cold.
Stoudamire hit only five of those 21 attempts,
that's the kind of performance you can only produce
on a garbage team, wrapping up a forsaken season
with only eight healthy bodies and a non-coach as coach.
Does that freedom to heave feel good?
Well, asked about his achievement following the loss,
Stoudamire reportedly shrugged in surprise and said,
"You're on the floor long enough,
and that's just going to start bouncing your way."
He makes it sound kinda tedious.
It's like when Mom and Dad have tickets
to see Lord of the Dance and leave you alone
for the night and you eat a whole cake for dinner.
The freedom's fun for a little bit,
but you just end up feeling sick.
But some people always eat cake for dinner.
If meaningless April basketball is the perfect Petri dish
for three-point high scores,
then JR Smith might just be the perfect organism
to culture in that dish.
Smith played his formative years in Denver
and surpassed Michael Adams's record for three-pointers
made in a Nugget uniform, and this was during a much slower
paced era with a much less player-friendly Nuggets coach,
George Karl, who repeatedly benched JR
for his shot selection, so JR wouldn't fulfill
his high score potential until later
when he was on the Knicks.
Not his first full season as a Knick,
in which a team coached by Mike Woodson of all people
inexplicably shattered team three-point records
and won a play-off series.
No, we're talking about the following year
when the Knicks traded for Andrea Bargnani on purpose
and completely fell apart.
Smith's unrepentant shooting wasn't as cute
on a struggling team, but you couldn't tell him that.
In December 2013, he attempted 17 threes
in a double OT game against the Bucks.
He sounded downright amazed with himself
and promised he'd do it again if given the chance.
By April, JR finally had that chance,
his opportunity to hop on the sticks
and top the charts of his favorite one-player game.
Lebron James and the finals bound Miami Heat
kicked the crap out of the lottery-bound Knicks,
but they couldn't keep JR down.
Smith attempted 22 three-pointers
and this on a night when no other Knick attempted
more than 17 shots from any range.
JR insisted he didn't intend to break Damon Stoudamire's
decade-old record, that he just shot because he was open.
But I don't know, I look at these four attempts
in the final two minutes, and I see a man
who knows it's April, his team is bad,
and he can probably get away with a high score campaign.
Well done, JR.
Smith's record wouldn't last that long,
because the three-pointer was taking over
and not just in the NBA.
Even though WNBA games are only 40 minutes,
Diana Taurasi had multiple nights
in the mid 2000s attempting 15 threes.
She reached 16 in a triple overtime game in 2006.
A decade later, Kristi Toliver matched that high score
with an even greater performance.
Toliver made her name as a shooting legend
early in her career, as a freshman at Maryland,
she buried the three-pointer that sent the 2006
NCAA final to overtime, making her the hero
of the team's first championship.
11 years later, Toliver's Washington Mystics
played a single elimination playoff game in New York
against the superior Liberty and Toliver let loose.
She matched the high score Taurasi set in triple OT
with 16 threes in regulation,
and hit a record nine of them in the process.
Thanks to Toliver's shooting, Washington came back
from a big early deficit and took the game by a wide margin.
Setting your high score in the context
of an elimination playoff game is a far cry
from the vain, nihilist, mid-April shot fests
of those early NBA record setters,
and indeed, three-point chucking doesn't only belong
to carefree players representing broken franchises,
that kid born the day of Michael Adams's first high score
turned into a multiple-time MVP and champion
all while making unprecedented amounts of threes.
I specify making threes, because Stephen Curry
is crazy-accurate from every range
and he doesn't need a lot of tries
to achieve a lot of makes.
Not the case for James Harden, who is merely good
in terms of three-point accuracy, but has un-paralleled
freedom to fling them up.
This is a guy who once shot one of 17
from downtown in a game, setting the high score
for most three-pointers missed in one night.
It helps to be coached by Mike D'Antoni,
a man who once coached in Denver and before that,
played on a 1977 Spurs team, coached by Doug Moe.
But as we speak, Harden does not hold the high score.
On October 29th, 2018, the warriors
crushed the Bulls in Chicago.
It was such a blowout, that Klay Thompson only
played 27 minutes, but in that time,
Klay produced 24 three-point attempts
with 14 dropping through the net,
nearly one three-point shot a minute
looks as ridiculous in practice as it does on paper.
Klay barely dribbled the ball to get these shots off.
He mostly ran around screens or scurried into slivers
of open space to catch and shoot
in instances like this one barely even
facing the rim before he released.
This is something totally different
from having a couple dozen threes in the final stretch
of a lost season.
The Warriors, like Hard3n's Rockets,
are a power-house built on brazen shot selection.
One guy going wild and setting a high score
isn't a bug, it's a feature of an offensive system
built to generate such looks.
The computer game has been baked
into the actual team basketball strategy.
The game of shooting as many threes as possible
has come a long way from the domain of ABA holdovers
to the funky Nuggets of the 80s,
to the boom of thee-point specialists,
to depressing, carefree April basketball to today.
Thanks in some part to these people
and the circumstances that let them run wild,
the game blends right into the sport.
Keep these heroes in mind the next time a confident shooter
with a green light sets a new high score.