There Was a Reason This Dallas Star’s 3-Pointers Weren’t Hitting in Denver

The 3-point shot of Dallas forward Grant Williams felt slightly off all morning in practice on the new, brightly painted Denver Nuggets court. Turns out, it wasn’t his shot at all that was the issue. It was a wrongly measured 3-point line. The line’s curvature was painted too far back on the blue-and-yellow floor that Denver will use for the NBA’s In-Season Tournament that made its debut Friday night. In the time between shootaround and the game between the Mavericks and Nuggets, the line was repainted to the right distance. “I’m like, ‘There’s no way this is supposed to be this far,’” Williams said of his morning shootaround, per the AP. “Everything was short.”

Williams went out in pregame warmups and he was back on target. He said there was still the faint remnant of the other 3-point mark. “You could tell the line is still kind of marked on the court, so it’s going to be kind of weird,” Williams said. “But we’ll make it work. Sometimes, imperfections happen, so you’ve got to adjust.” For the record, the NBA 3-point line is 23 feet, 9 inches except from the corners, where it’s slightly shorter. Denver’s line was repainted as the league orchestrated a leaguewide court design scheme to accommodate a new wrinkle this year: The aforementioned In-Season Tournament, in which teams will play for an NBA Cup. (More details about the rules and the format are here.)

In a release, the league said it’s the first time that any NBA team has played on a fully painted court without wood-grain details. The Nuggets and Mavericks are in a group with the Los Angeles Clippers, New Orleans Pelicans, Dallas, and Houston Rockets. Each conference has three such groups. The six group winners make the quarterfinals, along with a pair of wild-card teams (the two best second-place finishers from the groups). Quarterfinal games are Dec. 4 and 5 at higher seeds; the semifinals are Dec. 7 in Las Vegas, and the title game is Dec. 9 in Las Vegas as teams compete for the cup.

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