Commentary : NCAA’s 3-Point Shot Misses, Badly

Five basketball seasons ago on a March afternoon in Greensboro, N.C., two superb basketball teams met to decide the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament championship. Virginia had Ralph Sampson and Othell Wilson; North Carolina had James Worthy, Sam Perkins and Michael Jordan. With 12 minutes left, Tar Heels Coach Dean Smith decided to hold the ball. Cavaliers Coach Terry Holland opted not to chase. So, while the crowd agonized, all those talented players stood around and looked at each other.

Smith blamed Holland. Holland blamed Smith. But that wasn’t the point: What could have been a superb game became a boring one. Clearly, something had to be done. The college game needed a clock to prevent all-out stalls that stole the game from the athletes and put it into the hands of too-cautious coaches. It took the NCAA Rules Committee four years, but after much experimentation and a lot of delays, it finally put into place a 45-second clock last season.

All well and good. In a game that has boomed in the last 15 years, changes should be made with care and with caution. One could hardly criticize the committee for easing into a change so radical and so important.

Move the calender ahead to April 1986. The 45-second clock works. The college game still bears no resemblance to the track-meet style of the pro game, yet no one can virtually stop a game with a signal from the bench. The Rules Committee goes into a room in Dallas and, with no one demanding it, suggesting it or even discussing it, emerges to announce there will be a three-point shot in college basketball beginning in 1986-87.

This will not be an experiment, something tried during the regular season and then dropped in NCAA tournament play, as was done originally with the shot clock. The Rule, as it henceforth will be known, will be in force in New Orleans on March 30 when the national championship is decided. The Shot, as it henceforth will be called, won’t be from a long distance, a la the NBA, to make it a shot used only on occasion. Instead, it will be a 19-foot 9-inch jumper, a shot that almost any college-caliber player can make comfortably.

“It makes you nauseous,” said USC Coach George Raveling. “The next thing you know, they’ll have a trained seal on the court.”

Raveling’s point, which reflects the view of a majority of the nation’s college coaches, is this: The new rule changes the game so radically that the game being played isn’t basketball. It’s some kind of a circus, a sort of minigame of H-O-R-S-E within what passes for a basketball game. You remember H-O-R-S-E, the game in which you take turns shooting from a spot. The guys who won were almost never the best basketball players. They were the guys too slow or too small to do anything else except shoot.

Basketball is supposed to be more than a contest of who can jump-shoot. “The way I learned it, the team that makes the most field goals and the most foul shots is supposed to be the one that wins,” said Navy Coach Pete Herrmann after his team did exactly that against North Carolina State on Saturday but lost. “I think what a lot of people can’t understand is why? Why did they need The Rule?”

The answer to that, according to members of The Committee, as it henceforth will be known, is that the three-point shot will open up the inside, because zones can’t back in on big men, and it will bring the little man back into the game. And, committee secretary and spokesman Edward Steitz said Saturday after the Navy-North Carolina State game, “the fans love it.”

First, there is no evidence that the fans love The Rule or hate it. Second, if the fans loved a trained seal, would The Committee pass a rule requiring one on each team? It often has been said that fans go to the Indianapolis 500 to see bloodshed. Should the race committee pass a rule requiring it?

As for the question of zones and little men, good little men always will have a place in the game. Tyrone Bogues and Spud Webb certainly have had no trouble finding a spotlight without a three-point shot. Johnny Dawkins, who is 6 feet 1, won the Naismith Award as the best college player in the country last season without benefit of a three-point rule. Steve Alford (6-1) and Scott Skiles (6-0) didn’t have bad years, either.

Finally, the zone. Coaches with great big men complain constantly about their superstar being double- or triple-teamed. Naturally, the coaches with the most talent don’t want to see zones because a good zone can hide a lot of physical deficiencies. The case for a three-point shot to discourage zones was much stronger before the advent of the clock. Smith held the ball against Virginia to pull Holland out of his zone. Holland refused to chase because he didn’t want to play man-to-man defense against Worthy, Perkins and Jordan.

The clock eliminates that stalemate. Smith has to find a way to beat the zone if that’s the way Holland wants to play. There is nothing wrong with that. Forcing a coach to be innovative to get the ball to his big man is not a bad thing to do. The zone gives the smaller, less-quick team a chance without radically changing the game.

“A good team will still find a way to beat a zone without The Shot,” North Carolina State Coach Jim Valvano said. “There is nothing wrong with the game the way we play it now. It’s a cliche, but why do you fix what ain’t broke?”

Steitz concedes that Division I coaches don’t like The Rule, but says the game isn’t played for them. That’s true. It’s played for people who enjoy basketball, and The Rule and The Shot won’t enhance anyone’s enjoyment of basketball.

Right now, The Shot doesn’t belong on the basketball court. It belongs in a game of H-O-R-S-E. Or with Raveling’s seal--in the circus.