La NBA y la nueva era . La linea de Tres Puntos.

Stephen Curry hit 272 3-pointers this season. “When you’ve got them, you’ve got to take them,” the Knicks’ Mike Woodson said.

By JOHN BRANCH

http://www.nytimes.com/

Published: April 26, 2013

OAKLAND, Calif. — When Reggie Miller entered the N.B.A. in 1987 as a skinny rookie with a high-
arcing jump shot, about 1 of every 18 field-goal attempts in the league was a 3-pointer. This season, 3-pointers represented almost 1 of every 4 shots taken.

Miller broke Larry Bird’s rookie record for 3-pointers made, with 61. He laughs at that number now.

“Today, Steph Curry, he gets that in a month,” Miller said in a phone interview.

Leaguewide, players made 35.9 percent of 3-point attempts this season.

Evidence of the steadily rising influence of the 3-pointer can be seen across the basketball

landscape. Teams averaged a record 20 attempts a game this season, and the trend is pushing steadily upward, or outward, really, far from the basket and beyond the line painted 23 feet 9 inches away.

Golden State’s Stephen Curry set a league record with 272 3-pointers this season. Two teams, the Knicks and the Houston Rockets, attempted more 3s than any other N.B.A. teams in history.

All are in the playoffs, where the 3-point shot, a novelty when it began in the N.B.A. in 1979, is the star attraction. Some see it as something like art.

“Did you see the Warriors and Denver the other night?” asked Chris Mullin, who, like Miller, began his career in the 1980s and is in the Hall of Fame. The Warriors tied their first-round series with the Nuggets on Tuesday, 1-1, while trying 25 3-pointers among 79 field-goal attempts. Golden State made 14 of them and cruised to a 131-117 win.

“That was beautiful,” Mullin said. “It was even more beautiful because they were making them. But, still, you’re playing, you’re getting up and down, you’re running and you’re passing. That’s the game, to me.”

Other parts of the postseason have been similarly punctuated by the exclamation point of the drained 3-pointer — as crowd-provoking as a dunk, but worth 50 percent more on the scoreboard. On Wednesday, the Rockets and the Oklahoma City Thunder both tried 35 3-pointers — 40 percent of the total shots — in Game 2 of their series. The Thunder made 11, the Rockets made 10, and Oklahoma City won by 3 points to take a 2-0 series lead.

The Knicks, who took more than a third of their shots in the regular season from behind the 3-point line — they established league records for made 3-pointers (891) and attempts (2,371) — took a 2-0 lead on Boston as nine Knicks attempted at least one 3-pointer. That sort of across-the-roster barrage was unheard-of only a few years ago.

“That’s pretty much what we do,” Knicks Coach Mike Woodson said this month. “They’re not bad shots. You’ve got guys who can make them. If I didn’t have players who could make them, trust me, I wouldn’t be shooting them. We’ve got a bunch of guys who can make the 3, and we’ve shot it with high percentages this year. When you’ve got them, you’ve got to take them.”

The 3-point line was borrowed from the American Basketball Association, the footloose ’70s-era rival to the staid N.B.A.

The league was an offense-happy one. In 1975-76, the last season before the two leagues merged, A.B.A. teams averaged 112.5 points per game. The N.B.A. average was 104.3.

The N.B.A. imported most of the A.B.A. stars and four of its franchises: the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs and the New York (later New Jersey) Nets. Also hoping to import some of the A.B.A.’s attitude, it added the 3-point line for the 1979-80 season.

It was largely a gimmick. Even in the freewheeling A.B.A.’s final season, 3-pointers represented only about 1 of every 25 field-goal attempts. They were used in desperation, not as inspiration.

In the N.B.A.’s first season with a 3-point line, overall scoring actually dropped slightly. The average team attempted only 2.8 3-pointers per game, or about 1 of every 33 shots from the field.

When the Philadelphia 76ers won the 1982-83 N.B.A. championship, they shot a total of 109 3-pointers (they made 25) during the 82-game regular season.

It was not until the 1986-87 season that N.B.A. teams averaged more than one made 3-pointer per game.