Every time a new sports format starts gaining momentum, the conversation seems to go in the same direction. People immediately ask whether it’s going to replace the traditional version of the sport. The NFL announces a professional flag football league and people wonder what it means for tackle football. Three-on-three basketball continues to grow around the world and people ask whether it can ever compete with the NBA.
I think that’s the wrong conversation.
The NFL shouldn’t look at flag football as competition. It’s another entry point into football. The NBA should think about 3×3 the same way. Every kid who falls in love with 3×3 is another kid falling in love with basketball. That’s not taking fans away from the game. It’s creating more of them.
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is assuming every new product has to replace an old one. I’ve spent most of my career studying consumer behavior, and that’s almost never how markets work. The companies that grow the fastest usually aren’t stealing customers. They’re expanding the market by reaching people who weren’t being served before. I think that’s exactly what we’re watching happen with some of these newer sports formats.
What caught my attention in the NFL’s flag football announcement wasn’t the league itself. It was the venue and the experience they were building around it. Smaller venues. Better sightlines. More interaction. More opportunities for sponsors. More opportunities for fans to participate instead of simply watching. They’re building around the way people consume sports today, not the way they consumed them twenty years ago.
Basketball has the same opportunity, and I would argue it’s even bigger.
I was at a 3×3 tournament recently and two of the standout players caught my attention. Neither of them had gotten meaningful minutes on their high school teams. In a traditional basketball setting, you probably wouldn’t have noticed either one of them. Here, they didn’t have a choice but to play.
I talked with one of them, and you could see what the experience had done for his confidence. He told me he felt great going into his upcoming high school season because of the success he’d had playing 3×3. That stuck with me. His basketball ability hadn’t suddenly appeared. The format had given him an opportunity to use it.
I saw versions of that all over the tournament. Kids who barely saw the floor for their JV or middle school teams were handling the basketball, defending different positions, rebounding and learning skills they might never be asked to use in a traditional game. When you only have four or five players on a team, there isn’t anywhere to hide.
That applies to the really good players too.
A big can’t just stand near the basket because he’s bigger than everybody else. Eventually he’s going to have to defend on the perimeter. Guards have to rebound. Everyone handles the basketball. Everyone has to make decisions, and everyone has to be in shape because there aren’t nine other guys sitting beside you waiting to check in.
That’s why I’ve become convinced that 3×3 may be one of the best development tools we have in youth basketball. Not because it’s easier. In a lot of ways, it’s harder. It forces players into situations that traditional basketball sometimes allows them to avoid.
But I think there’s something even more important happening.
Nobody falls in love with basketball sitting on the bench.
Kids fall in love when they touch the ball, solve problems, make mistakes, hit big shots and feel like they belong. Three-on-three gives them more opportunities to do all of those things in a shorter amount of time. More participation creates more development, but it also creates something the basketball business should care just as much about: more people emotionally connected to the game.
And I don’t think that stops with kids.
Some of my favorite basketball from the last Summer Olympics was the women’s 3×3 competition. It was fast, physical and incredibly entertaining. The format exposed everything. You couldn’t hide a weakness or specialize in one tiny part of the game. Everybody had to play everywhere on the court. It reminded me of the pick-up games in my backyard growing up.
Watching it, I kept thinking about how marketable it was.
That’s when the larger opportunity starts to become obvious. At the youth level, 3×3 can create players. At the elite level, it can create a different entertainment product. Neither one has to replace traditional basketball for 3×3 to be enormously valuable to the sport.
The same thing is happening elsewhere. Flag football isn’t replacing the NFL. TGL isn’t replacing traditional golf. These formats are expanding their sports by creating experiences that fit different audiences, schedules and lifestyles. They’re not asking fans to choose one version over another. They’re simply creating another doorway into the sport.
I think basketball executives should be looking at 3×3 through that lens.
The organizations that win over the next decade won’t be the ones that spend all their energy protecting the way their sport has always been consumed. They’ll understand that tradition and innovation can exist together. The goal isn’t to replace the game people already love. It’s to create more opportunities for people to discover why they love it in the first place.
That’s why I want 3×3 to succeed. Not because I think it’s the future of basketball or because I think it should compete with the NBA. I want it to succeed because I’ve watched what happens when you give a kid who rarely leaves the bench a basketball and tell him he’s going to have to play.
Sometimes he gets better.
Sometimes he starts believing he’s a basketball player.
And sometimes that’s how you create a basketball fan for life.
