Mike Prada - Spaced Out

For Vincent Prada, who introduced me to this amazing sport, among many other things. I miss you every day. RIP

Contents

Introduction: The Game Done Changed

What happens when the same sport is suddenly played on twice as large a playing surface with the same number of players?

An NBA regulation court measures 94 feet long, 50 feet wide, and 10 feet high, plus a few feet to account for aerial acrobatics. That multiplies to a surface area of nearly 13,000 square feet12,280 if you only count up to the 10-foot rim, up to 13,144 if you include the three extra feet to the top of the backboard. Those have been basketballs official spatial dimensions for a century, back in the days of cage leagues and annual Spaldings Official Basketball Guides .

For most of that time, the sports practical playing surface was nowhere near that lofty figure. From the first days of the 10-second and backcourt violations in 1932, through the widening of the lane from six to 16 feet, beyond 1955s invention of the 24-second shot clock, a typical basketball sequence smushed the sports 10 combatants into a geometric shape that was a fraction of its maximum size.

Those rules and cultural changes each made a significant long-term impact, of course. Widening the lane to 16 feet created perimeter play. The 24-second shot clock popularized the fast break, a de facto speedway for players to zip through the middle two quadrants of the floor into the smaller scoring zone. The three-point line, first introduced in 1979, demarcated remote suburbs that a growing, but limited subset of ambitious players began to colonize.

But those nudges, until as recently as a decade ago, had only extended the practical geometric shape of the sport to a quarter of its 13,000square-foot surface. Basketball was evolving as most sports do: meaningfully, but gradually. It took eight decades for the 10 players to extend the danger zones borders beyond the edge of the lane to the three-point arc. Even the widest broadcast camera angles stopped just beyond that point, knowing the 10 players on the floor would fit snugly into that space.

And then, everything changed.

At some point in the mid-2010s, the NBA rapidly went from living with the three-point shot to loving it. Teams hunted long balls, then longer balls, then even longer balls. They positioned players to help generate those long shots, placing them well beyond the outer borders of the previously understood confines. Twenty-five feet became 30, then 35, then 40, and now encroaches into the backcourt. Broadcast camera angles had to zoom out to half court to have a chance at capturing all 10 players in one frame.

You know this time period as the three-point revolution, or some form of the term. All you have to do is scan a shot chart, peek at a box score, or watch a two-minute highlight clip to know that this is not the NBA you once knew. With the possible exception of the years following the implementation of the 24-second shot clock in 1954, the NBA has never faced as much upheaval as it has over the last decade, or even half decade.

The object of this book is to challenge that premise. Not because the sport isnt, in fact, transforming. Quite the opposite. Somehow, for all the justified attention the three-point revolution of the 2010s has received, its impact on every fabric of the sport itself has been underplayed .

The sport as once we knew it simply does not exist anymore. Wefrom players to coaches to analysts to fanscan no longer assume that any fundamental strategic, tactical, or individual skill tenant that we once held to be self-evident still applies. Wethe royal we must re-examine everything we thought we knew about the sport we hold so dear.

This book is an attempt to do just that. It is, first and foremost, a story of how and why the leagues relationship with the long ball transformed from a prolonged 35-year courtship into the steamy love affair of the last half-decade. It will heavily feature three crucial rule alterations in a 25-year-span, the innovative figures that first capitalized on their chain reaction in the ensuing years, and the people still thrusting the game further forward.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. In truth, this book is about all the downstream effects of this revolutionary moment in NBA history. It will illustrate all the ways a sport that still features five players a side, 48 minutes per game, and is decided by numbers on a scoreboard has become something far different, now that its players are occupying so much more of those 12,280 square feet on each sequence.

The new NBA is often described as a triumph of pace and space, which is a useful shorthand as long as you understand that the league keeps raising the upper limit on both halves of that phrase. In the span of a few years, long-range shooting went from being a luxury of champions to a necessity for competitiveness, and then to the foundation of every single team in the sport. Size went from being an asset to a detriment and then back to being an asset, as long as it included a mastery of the smaller mans skill set. Good offense, once powered by inside play, rapidly changed focus to bomb away from the perimeter, and then just as quickly leveraged the threat of the latter to create easier pathways for the former. Effective defenses once prioritized brute physicality, then shifted into limiting a teams three-point attempts, and are now increasingly willing to live with certain types of threes as a means of deterring drives to the basket.

Its tempting to say that old, in some form, can again become new in the NBA. History tends to rhyme, if not repeat itself outright. The innovators that pushed and are still pushing the sport forward have built on the foundation of others.

But theyve done so by recycling and reimagining the right elements of the sports history. Some are timeless. Some are more important than before. Some are less important. Others are of similar import, but in different constructions. And some are brand new concepts that have surged from fringe to mainstream so quickly that theyve become second nature to even the most inquisitive fans, hoopers, coaches, and analysts.

The sum of that work and the widening of the practical playing surface has blended the old and new together to create strategies, philosophies, tactics, schemes, skill sets, movement patterns, and measures of basketball intelligence that didnt exist in the past. It has become a completely different experience to play the game and an ever-complex one to strategize up close or analyze from afar. It has paradoxically become much easier for fans to consume while also being much harder to understand.

The goal of this book is to bridge that disconnect once and for all. It is for casuals and diehards, practitioners and consumers, pro and amateur analysts, Xs and Os aficionados and sneakerheads. It will feature on-court diagrams. It will occasionally veer into dense and overly technical language. But its not intended only for League Pass junkies, nor is it tailored entirely to casual fans or folks who stopped watching years ago. Instead, it yearns to give a layperson a taste of the sports granularity and help experts gain a new appreciation for how fundamentally its changed in less than a decade.

Are you ready to fall back in love with the Spaced Out version of NBA basketball? Lets begin at the scene of its first domino.

. Limited to eight seconds in 2001.

1. Carnival Basketball

The NBAs decades-long journey to accept the long ball, and the team that finally saw its full potential.

The object of basketball is to score more points in a set amount of time than your opponent. That means a shot worth three points is more valuable than many shots worth two points. If youre good at making three-pointers, the defense must stretch out to honor that threat, which allows your team to get much easier two-point shots.