A stopwatch and a stripe reinvented basketball
Two rule changes - decades apart - rescued the NBA from stalling and rewired how it scores.
By the early 1950s pro basketball was crawling. Teams with a lead would simply hold the ball, and in one 1950 game Fort Wayne beat Minneapolis 19-18, attempting just 13 shots all night. To force the action, Syracuse Nationals owner Danny Biasone reasoned that good games averaged about 120 shots over 48 minutes, divided 2,880 seconds by 120, and arrived at a 24-second shot clock. The NBA adopted it for the 1954-55 season and scoring surged.
The second revolution came decades later. The NBA installed a three-point line for the 1979-80 season, borrowing the idea from the rival ABA. Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics hit the league’s first three-pointer on October 12, 1979.
Early on the shot was dismissed as a gimmick - teams attempted barely a few per game.
Today it defines the sport, with teams launching dozens of threes a night. Together, the clock and the arc turned a stall-prone game into the fast, long-range spectacle we know.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
