Remember back in the day (a mythical place where everything seemed ever so much better than it actually was), when basketball was all about finding the shortest distance between two points? In other words, when the likes of Wilt and Kareem and Patrick and Hakeem set up on the low blocks, and it was a perimeter guy's Job One to execute a precise entry pass?
The skyhook was a thing, then. Getting your man on your hip, turning and going to the rack was a thing. 7-footers could be sentenced to long prison terms for attempting any shot beyond five feet.
Needless to say, it's not that game anymore.
No, sir. Now the perimeter guy's Job One is to hang out at the 3-point line, wait for an open look and make it rain. A big man setting up on the low blocks, in 2018, will wait so long there will be buzzards circling his head before he sees the basketball.
And so to last night, when the Houston Rockets gave us the most extreme example of today's game yet.
Twenty-six 3s. Twenty. Six.
Even more astonishing: The Rockets shot it 55 times from beyond the arc to get those 26 3s. That was 25 more times than they shot it from anywhere else on the floor. Which means the entire focus of their offense, the place where they set up in the halfcourt, was 23 feet, 9 inches from the basket.
And if you're thinking here, Mr. Crotchety Back In The Day Get Off My Lawn Geezer, that this isn't basketball ... well, your fellow geezers would agree with you. They would also agree, given how often Steph Curry and his contemporaries start loading up as soon as they cross center court, that perhaps it's time the NBA moved the 3-point line back a ways.
I suggest Jupiter.
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