Tonight, on the second night of NBA All-Star Weekend, it is All-Star Saturday Night time. Leading off the night with the Skills Competition, in which four big men (All-Star Al Horford, All-Star Andre Drummond, Rising Star Lauri Markkanen and Joel Embiid, who is both) take on four guards (Rising Star Jamal Murray, Rising Star Buddy Hield, All-Star snub Lou Williams and random inclusion Spencer Dinwiddie) in what is now becoming the regular format of the event. However, the Skills Challenge has been around since only 2003. The two events after it, the Three-Point Shootout and the Slam Dunk Contest, have much more pedigree and history than that.
The three-point competition was first held in 1986. At that time, the NBA's league-wide attitude to three-point shooting was unfathomably different to what it is now. In the 1985-86 season, the three-point line, which had only been adopted by the NBA seven seasons prior, did not have a lot of customers; the league leader in made threes that season was Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird, who made a mere 82 of them in 82 games. Only six players made more than 50 three-pointers that season, and NBA teams on average shot only 3.3 threes a game, making only 0.9 at a 28.2% clip. For comparison's sake, last season, 116 players hit more than Bird's mark of 82, 178 hit more than 50, teams attempted an average of 27.0 per game, and hit an average of 35.8% of them.