Welcome To A Basketball World 30 Years From Now

An NBA four-point line does not exist just yet. But it seems inevitable, right? So we imagined a basketball world 30 years from now—20 years after the creation of the four-pointer. Welcome to 2048.

- Russ Bengtson

Antoine Walker is 72 years old now, fully half a lifetime removed from his 2012 retirement from basketball and a half-century beyond his selection as the sixth overall pick of the 1996 NBA Draft. But as he picks up the NBA game ball, spinning it in his hands, and toes the four-point line in Boston’s Red Auerbach Garden, you can still see the athlete beneath the veneer of years. He eyes up the basket 28 feet away and lets fly.

Walker is part of this story because the story doesn’t exist without him. Well, maybe it does, but he’s an integral part of it nevertheless. Back in the early 2000s, during one of his three All-Star media appearances, Walker was asked why he shot so many threes. “Because there are no fours,” he famously responded. At the time, Walker was attempting somewhere around seven or eight threes a night, and Hall of Famer Steph Curry hadn’t even started high school yet. His words would become prophecy.

Four-pointers are normal enough now, all an entire generation knows. They started as a BIG3 (remember the BIG3?) gimmick shot in 2017— kind of like how the three-pointer originated in the ABA before debuting in the NBA—and then became a league-recognized shot over a decade later in 2028. Curry, then in his final season at age 40, already the all-time three-point leader, found his familiar launching spot now worth an additional point. He not only surpassed Jamal Crawford’s four-point record (Crawford having retired five years earlier at 43), he passed LeBron James to become the NBA’s all-time leading scorer and won the inaugural Four-Point Shootout at All-Star Weekend, narrowly edging Trae Young and LeBron James Jr.