When 3×3 basketball became an Olympic sport, five years ago, America’s favourite pass-time was picking the best all-time trio from the NBA galaxy. Should it be LeBron James, Michael Jordan and Kevin Durant or should it be Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy? Or Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and Robert Horry?
The common myth was that 3×3 is just a shrunk version of the 5-on-5 basketball. At its best, a leaner version to woo the attention challenged in this era of instant gratification. “With the many options that young people have, we cannot expect any more that they will come automatically to us. We have to go to them,” the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, had reasoned.
At its worst, a gimmicky marketing trick to melodramatise basketball, more Harlem Globetrotters than NBA, more make-belief than real. Even the modernists crooned: “Why make an already short game (40 to 48 minutes) shorter?…
