Stephen Curry made 402 three-pointers in the 2015-16 season. The previous record was his own, 286, set the year before. Golden State won 73 regular-season games, one more than the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, and Curry was voted the league’s first unanimous most valuable player.
The arithmetic
A shot worth three points made at 40 per cent returns 1.20 points per attempt. A long two made at 45 per cent returns 0.90. That gap had been visible in the data for years before anyone built a roster around it, largely because nobody could take enough of the first kind of shot to matter.
Curry could, from distances that had previously been treated as desperation range, and the defensive adjustment — meeting him thirty feet from the basket — opened the lane for everyone else.
What it did to the sport
League-wide three-point attempts have roughly doubled. The mid-range jumper, the signature shot of the previous three decades, is now taken mostly by a handful of specialists.
Whether that has made the game better is a genuine argument. That it made teams more efficient is not one.
