There was a time when a three-pointer was considered a useful accessory to basketball rather than its central organising principle. Coaches wanted the ball inside, guards were expected to penetrate or feed the post, and a shot taken several feet behind the arc could earn a player a disapproving glance from the bench. Then Stephen Curry arrived and began doing something that looked, at first, almost unreasonable, he treated the entire length of the basketball court as shooting range.

Curry did not invent the three-point shot. The NBA introduced it in 1979-80, and players such as Reggie Miller and Ray Allen had already demonstrated how devastating an elite long-range shooter could be. What Curry changed was something considerably larger. He transformed the three-pointer from a specialist weapon into the foundation of an offensive philosophy, forcing coaches, defenders and an entire generation of players to rethink what constituted a good shot.

The scale of the transformation becomes clearer when Curry's 2015-16 season is examined. The Golden State Warriors guard made 402 three-pointers, becoming the first player to break the 400 mark in a single NBA regular season. He did it while shooting 45.4% from beyond the arc and averaging 30.1 points per game, numbers that helped make him the league's first unanimous MVP.

Yet the number 402 does not fully explain Curry's revolution. It was the nature of those attempts that mattered. Curry was not merely standing in the corner waiting for a pass. He was pulling up off the dribble, shooting after screens, releasing the ball before defenders could recover and launching from distances that had previously been regarded as tactically unnecessary. In 2015-16, he attempted 11.2 three-pointers per game, with NBA tracking data showing that a substantial portion of his offence came from pull-up threes.

That changed the geometry of the game.

A defender could no longer simply retreat towards the paint and invite a guard to shoot from long range. Against Curry, the opposite was often required: defenders had to meet him far beyond the conventional three-point line. The consequence was profound. When Curry moved several metres beyond the arc, his defender moved with him, creating space elsewhere on the court for cutters, screeners and teammates.

This became particularly destructive alongside Klay Thompson and within the Warriors' motion-heavy attack. Golden State could use screens, hand-offs and constant movement to create situations in which Curry was either free to shoot or capable of attacking a defender who had been forced to close out from an uncomfortable distance. The three-pointer was no longer simply the end of a possession. It became the mechanism through which the entire possession was designed.

That principle spread.

Teams increasingly embraced the mathematical argument behind the modern offence: a three-pointer is worth 50% more than a two-pointer, so if a player can make enough threes at a respectable percentage, the shot can be more valuable than a mid-range attempt. The result was a gradual disappearance of the long two-pointer from many offensive systems, replaced by attempts at the rim or beyond the arc.

Curry's influence can be seen in the numbers. In the 2015-16 season, NBA teams averaged far fewer three-point attempts than they do today. By 2024-25, the league average had reached 37.6 attempts per team per game, compared with 35.1 in 2023-24 and 34.2 in 2022-23.  The three-point revolution had moved from being a Warriors experiment to becoming the NBA's operating system.

Perhaps the most revealing evidence came from teams that never played like Golden State. The Houston Rockets, under Mike D'Antoni and later Mike D'Antoni-influenced systems, pushed the philosophy to an extreme: attack the rim, draw fouls and shoot threes, while largely abandoning the mid-range jumper. The Rockets became one of the clearest examples of how Curry's success had altered the strategic conversation even beyond his own team.

But Curry's influence extended further than statistics and playbooks. He changed what young players were encouraged to practise.

Children who might once have been told to establish themselves close to the basket began practising deep three-pointers. Coaches at every level began incorporating more spacing, ball movement and perimeter shooting. The idea that a relatively small guard could become the most feared offensive player on the floor without relying on physical dominance became increasingly believable.

That mattered because Curry's greatest contribution was not simply proving that a player could shoot from 30 feet. It was proving that such shooting could be weaponised against an entire defence.

Defences consequently evolved. Teams began switching more screens, trapping high pick-and-rolls and assigning their best perimeter defenders to Curry-like threats. Centres were increasingly asked to defend in space. Big men who could not survive away from the basket became harder to accommodate, while versatile forwards and centres who could switch and recover became increasingly valuable.

In other words, Curry's offence produced a defensive revolution of its own.

The ripple effects can be seen in the modern NBA's shot profile. By the opening weeks of the 2024-25 season, the league was taking 41.8% of its field-goal attempts from three-point range, a figure that would have been the highest rate in the 46-year history of the three-point line if maintained.  That was not simply a statistical curiosity. It was evidence of how thoroughly the game's assumptions had changed.

And Curry himself continued to embody the evolution. His shooting was never merely about volume. In his historic 2015-16 campaign, he shot 45.4% from three despite taking 886 attempts, according to NBA statistics. His efficiency made the supposedly reckless shot selection look rational.

That is the crucial distinction between Curry and the many players who followed him. Plenty can shoot from deep. Far fewer have possessed the combination of accuracy, speed, ball-handling and range that allowed Curry to make almost any defensive coverage feel inadequate.

His legacy, therefore, cannot be reduced to the record books. Curry did not merely make more three-pointers than his predecessors. He changed the question coaches ask when constructing an offence. Instead of wondering whether a team should shoot more threes, the modern coach is often asking how to create better threes, and how to make the defence pay when it takes them away.

The revolution is now so complete that its most radical idea has become ordinary. A player pulling up from several feet beyond the arc no longer necessarily shocks anyone. A centre standing outside the three-point line is no longer automatically regarded as abandoning his responsibilities. A team attempting 40 threes in a game can be pursuing conventional wisdom rather than tactical madness.

That is Curry's enduring achievement. He did not simply move the three-point line farther away in the minds of NBA players. He effectively made the court bigger.

And once he did, basketball could never quite become small again.

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