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Go Ahead And Get Excited About 3-On-3 Basketball In The Olympics

It almost certainly won't be as cool as it could be, because the IOC is like that. But let's dream on it for a minute.
Photo by Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

Olympic 3-on-3 basketball is objectively a very good idea, and one that could and should be a blast to watch. But It is also presided over by the world's foremost authorities in rapacious buzzkillery, and therefore it is probably also doomed. My colleague Aaron Gordon—who you'll meet in a bit—knows more about the IOC than I do, but he is not writing this, and I am. And I, an idiot with dreams, am telling you to go ahead and get pumped about Olympic 3-on-3 basketball. I am not saying Aaron is wrong, because he probably is not wrong. I am saying you might as well dream about how cool this could be, at least until we find out what it will be instead.

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And friends: Olympic 3-on-3 could be cool as hell. The game as it exists has less to do with actual raggedy pick-up basketball; if it did, rules would require each team to have one player who never passed and clapped his hands constantly and another guy wearing Timberlands and jeans. It's a sort of upstanding gloss on And 1-style streetball, played on an outdoor half court, and (spoiler) by teams of three. As it exists now, it's something of a backwater; the U.S. teams feature a few D-Leaguers and swaggy Wisconsin rotation guy Zak Showalter are in the player pool, but as it presently exists it's otherwise dominated by opportunistic ex-Ivy Leaguers and players from the outer reaches of NAIA anonymity. This all makes sense, given that this version of the game has been a part of FIBA for less than a decade, and debuted as an international competition in 2012.

FIBA President Patrick Baumann told the Associated Press that he hopes the game will develop its own stars, as opposed to borrowing professional players from the NBA; he mentioned the players in the basketball scene at Manhattan's Rucker Park, and told the AP that he hopes "to see them in the Olympic Games two years down the road." And while that could be fun, during the time between now and when 3x3 becomes whatever it's going to be—and we won't even know for sure whether it will be a part of the Tokyo games until the IOC announces its slate of events on June 9—we might as well dream a little bigger. It would certainly be easier for the people in charge if the 3x3 player pool was limited to amateurs—they are easier to push around, and there are no collective bargaining agreements to work around—but we are not bureaucrats and should not dream like bureaucrats. We might as well imagine the words "Olympic Gold Medalist Jamal Crawford."

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Or Damian Lillard, or Zach LaVine, or Kenneth Faried, or whatever rattles your saber. There are players in the NBA whose brilliance is evident in NBA games, but which could be multiplied gloriously in a setting that allows them to improvise and show out and generally get weird. James Harden would be an infuriatingly great 3x3 player, but he's already infuriatingly great as a member of Team USA. But providing a platform for Jamal Crawford's international campaign of crossover-based diplomacy or Damian Lillard putting the entirety of the court in play for three-point attempts would let players who are already excellent and excellent-to-watch be both more so, and more fully themselves.

"Jamal…LOOKIN' AT IT…" Photo by Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports

It's not terribly difficult to imagine a world in which veteran members of Team USA would rather play 3x3 than in some more familiar facsimile of actual games—crucially, 3x3 games do not have coaches—but it's just as entertaining to dream of an outcome slightly to the left of that. As a dialect of basketball, 3x3 is still figuring itself out; letting the best colloquial basketball players on earth figure out its slang would be good not just for this nascent sport, but honestly for this entire anxious and joy-deprived universe. And if it has to be amateurs, then let it be the next iterations of Lonzo Ball and Malik Monk and Jonathan Isaac—players who can play the five-on-five game, but seem like they'd be twice as fun in a game without coaches or plays or refs. While 3x3 figures out what it is, there is a moment of openness. It probably won't be homesteaded by over-the-head Iverson crossovers and ankle-vaporizing Jamal Crawford crossovers, but that's no reason not to imagine it.

It is also, unfortunately, not terribly difficult to imagine a world in which the IOC and the general venal flubbiness of the people that run Olympics ruin all this. My colleague Aaron used a beer line—well, two beer lines—at a beach volleyball match to explain to me why I should not get excited for the streetball-style 3-on-3 basketball event that is expected to be added to the Tokyo Games in 2020. Beach volleyball is reliably one of the biggest and best party events at every summer games; at past Olympics, crowds have been buzzed and rowdy and shirtless wherever and whenever possible. Given that the 2016 Olympics were held in Rio, which is arguably the world capital of buzzed beachfront shirtlessness, the beach volleyball event should have been extremely lit.

Instead, Aaron said, it was only fitfully so. The P.A. blasted burps of wan techno into every interstitial moment and incessantly prompted chants and cheers. A spirit squad and video screens tried to get people to chant "Monster Block" after even less-than-monstrous blocks and everyone mostly kind of squirmed. The beer line, which was really two beer lines—one to get a ticket, one to exchange the ticket for a beer, both of them long and slow and at times difficult to distinguish from one another—was somehow the biggest vibe killer of all. Because those beers were impossible to get without a pair of near-Soviet line-waiting experiences, the crowd couldn't even get a buzz going. It wasn't that the event was lame, Aaron added. It was that Olympic organizing types did their hamfisted utmost to smother and leverage and wash out everything that should have been fun about it.

And yes, halfcourt three-on-three games played by less-than-elite players can be both manic and dull, as you probably already know if you have ever participated in one. A version of that squelched by sound effects and branding and IOC-style avarice could very well be excruciating. But there is no reason to get on that beer line just yet. Right now, with 3x3 still somewhere short of reality, it can be whatever we dream it to be. And if you're not dreaming of Jamal Crawford putting dudes in the spin cycle while the And 1 announcer screams "oh baby" and runs in place, I humbly submit that you try to dream a little bit harder.