#194 1967 · American Basketball Association · Professional sports league managementreframe
A broke upstart league couldn't out-recruit the NBA, so it changed how points were counted instead
the problem
A new league needed to look different from an entrenched incumbent it had no hope of out-spending
background
By the mid-1960s the NBA had the players, the arenas, and the television relationships an upstart league couldn't match dollar for dollar. The American Basketball League had already tried and folded in the early 1960s attempting the same head-on competition. When the ABA launched in 1967 under commissioner George Mikan, a former NBA star himself, it needed a way to be a different product, not just a cheaper or smaller copy of the same one.
One idea already existed but had never taken hold: Abe Saperstein's short-lived ABL had informally drawn a 25-foot arc onto its courts in 1961 and awarded three points for shots beyond it, reasoning only that a struggling league 'must have a weapon.' The NBA had never adopted it and treated it as a novelty rather than a real strategic option, leaving it sitting unused when the ABA needed exactly this kind of differentiator.
the move
Mikan built the three-point line into the ABA's rules from its first season, explicitly to let smaller, faster guards score against the NBA's dominant big-man style and to make games look more open and exciting on television — a rule change that cost nothing to implement but reshaped which players and plays were valuable.
the payoff
ABA players adopted the shot immediately and aggressively — Louie Dampier alone averaged over seven three-point attempts a night in 1968-69 — while the NBA publicly dismissed the line as 'a gimmick whose only purpose is to capture the fans' fancy' for over a decade, only adopting it on a one-year trial in 1979, and even then at a tentative 2.8 attempts per game leaguewide in its first season.
what came after
The three-point line the NBA once mocked became, decades later, the single biggest strategic force in professional basketball, driving the modern spacing-and-shooting era; the ABA itself folded in 1976 with four teams absorbed into the NBA, but the rule it popularized outlived the league that bet on it.
references
- [1]The forefathers of the NBA's 3-point revolutionFanSided, 2021fansided.com
- [2]The History of the Three-Point ShotUp in the Rafters, 2024upintherafters.com