How good would Larry Bird be if he played in today’s 3-point mad NBA? (2024)

Editor’s note: The NBA added the 3-point shot 40 years ago. Here’s one in a series of stories that will appear this week on The Athletic explaining how the shot has impacted various players and teams across the league.

Thirty-five years later, the shot that didn’t count remains the most impressive. Larry Bird hit it while, as he put it, fading away into the trainer’s lap. Bird nailed it after getting fouled, as several Hawks players on the opposing bench lost their minds over his unforgettable shooting display.

One of the referees waved off the bucket because Bird released it after the whistle. Still, the shot punctuated a career-high 60-point scoring night from Bird. It also left a forever type of highlight, the kind that still convinces witnesses to shake their heads all these years later. Famed Yankees play-by-play man John Sterling, then calling the action as a basketball broadcaster working Hawks games, said that night it was the greatest shooting display he had ever seen.

“I’m broadcasting right next to the bench,” Sterling recalls now. “And (Hawks) players were jumping up and down and applauding and laughing and screaming. I mean, it was falling into my broadcast position. It was falling into my bench. It was just the most phenomenal shooting exhibition.”

Bird’s 60 points that day in March 1985 remain the Celtics’ franchise record. He managed it on a mesmerizing array of shots. He knocked down one long jumper while twisting to his left, almost behind the backboard, with a defender in his chest. He hit a floater from just inside the free-throw line that threatened to scrape the ceiling before falling gently through the net. He nailed a fadeaway over Dominique Wilkins even though Wilkins had guessed exactly what he would do.

“That was a magnificent display,” says Rick Carlisle, a guard on that Celtics team. “We didn’t have the internet or Instagram or Twitter where some of these shots could go out in the universe in real time. Otherwise, the legend of Larry Bird would even be bigger than what it is now.”

What Bird also didn’t have was the luxury of playing in the era of the 3-pointer.

Bird hit just one 3-pointer against the Hawks that day, a fact that seems impossible now, in a different era. So much has changed about basketball since Bird retired from the NBA in 1992. The league has spun into a world of greater athleticism and less post-up prowess. Rule changes have provided for freer offensive movement. Defenses rely more than ever on the versatility to switch between positions. And, of course, the 3-point arc – a side attraction during Bird’s tenure – has evolved into the main event for many of today’s players.

Never fully comprehending the power of the arc — to be fair, no one from his era did —Bird failed to take full advantage of a skill that could have been his superpower. In today’s NBA, his former teammates are convinced he would have been a high-volume, high-accuracy gunner capable of ruining defenses from inside the arc or well beyond it.

“He would be Dirk Nowitzki times two,” says Jerry Sichting, who played for the Celtics from 1985-88 before becoming a longtime NBA assistant coach.

Adds Carlisle, a Celtic from 1984-87, “It would be a feeding frenzy for him. I can just tell you that for sure.”

Carlisle, now the Mavericks head coach, is sitting in his office in mid-December, reminiscing about the best shooting performances he saw from Bird over three seasons as teammates. There was the 60-point outburst against the Hawks. A 50-point barrage in Dallas. And, though they weren’t teammates at the time, Carlisle remembers Bird hitting a transition 3-pointer to finish a furious comeback against the Mavericks.

After a free throw put the Celtics behind by two in the final seconds, Bird took a pass from Danny Ainge, pulled up from several feet behind the arc and drilled a game-winning shot over the outstretched arms of a leaping defender. It was a shot ahead of its time, according to Carlisle.

“That was kind of a sign of things to come in future decades,” he says.

It was also a hint of what Bird could have accomplished regularly if he had competed in the current age. Though Bird helped to usher in the 3-point era, he never embraced the line like players do now. Nobody did in the 1980s.

The NBA did not even adopt the 3-point line until Bird’s rookie season in 1979-80. Seven years into his career, Bird had learned to take advantage of the arc more than any other player at the time, but even then the effect was muted. He led the league with 82 3-pointers during the 1985-86 regular season, a total that would have tied Bird for 130th in 2018-19. Bird’s career high in 3-pointers attempted per game for a full season was 3.1 in 1987-88 – coincidentally or otherwise, he set a career high with 29.9 points per game that season.

Even then, Bird’s volume was minimal compared to the shooters of today. According to Basketball-Reference.com, 152 players who qualify for the minutes-per-game leaderboard this season are taking at least that many 3-pointers per game, including Joel Embiid, Aaron Gordon and OG Anunoby. Bird took as many long-range shots, in other words, as some non-shooters do today. James Harden, at the pace he made 3-pointers last season, would need only two years to sink as many 3s as Bird did throughout his entire career.

The entire mentality around 3-point shooting has shifted. Sichting said he did not see a 3-point line until he reached the NBA. High school and college games were still played without an arc back then. During Sichting’s NBA days, coaches and teammates tried to encourage him to move back a few feet behind the line for some of his attempts, but he never took to the longer shot. Beyond the philosophical changes, he says, players were limited by the lack of resources around them. These days, coaching staffs are loaded up so every player has an assistant or two at all times. Even in the summer, players work with personal trainers who put them through rep after rep in game situations.

Back then, players would fetch their own misses.

“The NBA was a mom-and-pop shop back then,” Sichting says. “You had a couple of assistant coaches, maybe. We couldn’t practice 3s. It would take us all day to shoot as many 3s in the summer as these guys take because we didn’t have (rebounders). We’d be chasing the ball all over the gym. We would have shot a lot more if we had all that kind of manpower.”

The 3-point shot is seen as a weapon now, something for players to develop from the time they are children. As early as middle school, and sometimes even before then, youth basketball players are learning how to maximize the power of the 3-point arc. Ainge, the Celtics president of basketball operations who played with Bird from 1981-89, said NBA players these days almost exclusively practice 3-pointers, getting repetitions in many cases from several feet behind the arc. To watch Boston’s Carsen Edwards go through a workout, pulling up for shots just a few feet inside half court, is to know that the line itself does not limit players anymore.

When looking at the altered landscape, it’s clear Bird missed out on what could have been formative years for his shooting range. He could not have known the possibilities the 3-point arc would one day bring to life the strength of the shot that Stephen Curry has yielded better than anyone else.

“If Larry grew up in the world today,” Ainge says, “I’m pretty confident that he would be shooting nine or 10 3-point shots per game and shooting them at a very, very high clip.”

Carlisle agrees Bird would have shot 3-pointers with that type of volume. If so, that would have put defenses in a bad, bad place.

Carlisle understands as well as anyone how much outside shooting matters. Last month, he went on a rant after Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal suggested on a TNT broadcast that Mavericks big man Kristaps Porzingis should spend more time posting up. Delivering an entertaining response, Carlisle pointed out that post-ups are no longer efficient opportunities for most players, including Porzingis. Though Porzingis stands 7-foot-3, he can make an oversized impact while stationed on the perimeter. Even while shooting just 34.3 percent from behind the arc in the early stages of the season, Porzingis has helped key what has been a historic Mavericks offense.

“No. 1, he’s 7-foot-3, which is pretty amazing,” Carlisle says. “Dirk was 7-foot-1, but that extra two inches is pretty substantial. And he has a high shooting pocket. He has the range. He has the ability to drive it. And his ability to space has been one of the real energizers of our offense this year. I mean, our stats when he’s spacing the floor at the 3-point line offensively are very, very high.”

Before Porzingis, Carlisle leveraged Nowitzki’s rare shooting touch to drive the Mavericks offense for years. Nowitzki had enough gravity that even when he didn’t get the ball, or shoot it, his mere presence on the court opened things up for teammates. It’s a concept Curry and the Warriors advanced to new lengths during their recent run of greatness. Respected shooters – especially the very best – make life easier for everyone around them.

Bird was one of the very best.

“He, for me, is one of the top five shooters of all time,” Carlisle says. “You factor everything into it. He had a touch where he could consistently swish 8-foot shots, 12-foot shots, 19-foot shots and 25-foot shots. Dirk would do the same thing. Steph Curry does the same thing. (Kevin) Durant does the same thing. And guys that are that good at all those different levels of the floor are the guys who are the super special shooters. It’s just as simple as that.”

Carlisle also includes Reggie Miller among the top shooters ever. Bird never had the same 3-point shooting numbers as those other guys, but, again, he played in a different NBA world.

“When I first got to the Celtics in the fall of ‘84, we were taking a few 3s, but hardly any,” Carlisle says. “And the only guys that took them were Larry, who took a few, and Ainge, who took a few. And that was it.”

Other indicators suggest Bird would have been one of the top outside shooters in any era. He led the NBA in free-throw percentage four times. Though his career 37.6 percent 3-point shooting figure does not sparkle, a closer examination of Bird’s resume proves him far more capable. After struggling on limited attempts early in his career, he shot 39.4 percent from the start of the 1984-85 season to the end of his career even though his numbers dipped after he encountered several health issues late in his NBA life. He hit at least 40 percent of his 3-point tries during each of his four prime seasons, topping out at 42.7 percent in 1984-85. The league average that year was 28.2 percent. Today, it is 35.5 percent.

“Most of us would get hot, get in the zone for a game,” Ainge says. “Larry would get in the zone for a month. He would have these 35-point games and 40-point games, just these long stretches of games where he was just on fire. He just was a great, great shooter.”

Bird was so much better than everyone else, Sichting said, that he regularly made up his own rules to spice up the competition. He would walk into practice and say he planned to shoot nothing but 3-pointers that day. Or he would declare he was only going to use his left hand.

At least once, Sichting said, Bird grew so sick of playing against lesser opposition he asked coach K.C. Jones for a sub. Sichting recalled the Celtics being “dead tired” nearing the end of a long road trip. Bird still made 12 of 13 shots that night against the Spurs en route to a stat line of 33 points and 11 rebounds. The Celtics won 135-119, but Sichting remembers that game mostly because of what Bird said.

“Sometime in the third quarter, he’s 10 for 10 and I don’t think he had missed a free throw either. And he tells K.C. to take him out because he’s bored,” Sichting says. “He said to him on the bench, ‘This isn’t any fun. Take me out, Coach.’ When he was healthy, he was the best player on the planet. Obviously.”

Sichting thinks Bird, a small forward when he played, would be the best stretch 4 in basketball now, especially if he had a creative coach to maximize his stocked skill cupboard. Bird could have shot step-back bombs like Harden. He could have picked-and-popped like Nowitzki or run a steady diet of pick-and-rolls himself as a ballhandler. At the other end of the court, teams today do more to challenge slower players on the perimeter, but Sichting thinks Bird would have held up there by forever thinking steps ahead.

“He could make up for his lack of foot speed or jumping ability,” Sichting said. “And hey, what are you going to do with him at the other end if he’s got a good point guard? It’s going to be the same weapon at the other end, except he’s going to be better than your guys.”

From those Celtics, it’s not just Bird whose game would have shifted in the present era. Ainge considers Kevin McHale a “fantastic shooter” who never had a chance to show off his outside skills. Really, Ainge says, McHale never needed to venture far from the hoop. He shot 55.4 percent from the field for his career, including back-to-back 60.4-percent showings from 1986-88. Those Celtics also had Bird, Robert Parish, Cedric Maxwell and Bill Walton. They almost always had at least one mismatch down low.

Though post-ups aren’t used nearly as often today, Ainge believes any of those Celtics big men would still be used down low. He marvels at the skill sets of the low-post threats from that time, pointing out that nobody else has been able to copy Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook – one of the most unstoppable signature shots in league history.

“He’s taught No. 1 draft picks how to do it, like, nobody else has been able to master it at the efficiency that guy was able to do it,” Ainge says. “And I think that’s fascinating. But yeah, it’s a different type of game now. It’s a different type of skills. And now you have point guards with the ball in their hands for 50, 60, sometimes 70 possessions in a game. And it was just a different game then. The game was more spread out. The game was shared more among the five guys. Not that the point guards that have the ball are not sharing the ball – because they are. They’re penetrating it. But it starts with, if you go under a screen, they shoot the 3.”

Bird could have done that. Ainge believes Bird could have done just about anything. If there is any doubt about how much of Bird’s game would translate to the modern NBA, Ainge intends to quash it. He puts Bird up there with the other best shooters he has seen in a lifetime of basketball, including Ray Allen, Steve Nash, Drazen Petrovic and Paul Pierce. As Ainge mentions, Bird won three straight MVP trophies during years when Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon populated the NBA. The latter two superstars didn’t enter the league until Bird’s second MVP season, but Ainge’s overall point stands. He believes Bird would have contended for MVPs in any era, including today’s.

“He just was a great, great shooter who was also a good post-up player, great passer, great midrange shooter, great left-handed shooter,” Ainge says. “He was a great rebounder. He was just great in so many facets of the game on top of being such a brilliant player.

“Today, yeah, he’d shoot more 3’s, but it would be a shame if he didn’t do all of the other things he could do on the court as well.”

More in the series at this topic page

(Top photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)