The NBA 3-point contest balanced on Stephen Curry’s fingertips in Atlanta in 2021. His last money ball climbed toward the rim while Mike Conley waited with 27 points. Then the net snapped, and the small crowd inside State Farm Arena found its voice. Curry finished with 28. No defender touched the shot, but the round had squeezed him all the same.
The net barely snaps before the hand reaches again. Pure accuracy cannot carry a shooter who leaves his best chances sitting on the rack. Fingers close around leather. Knees load beneath the ball. Somewhere between the pickup and the next wrist flick, a beautiful jumper must become a repeatable piece of work.
The quiet theft happens between shots. Every fan recognizes a clean follow-through; fewer notice the extra turn that delays the next attempt. A smooth jumper can hide a clumsy pickup. How much work does he waste before the ball reaches his shooting hand?
The timer changes the skill
Start the clock: 70 seconds, 27 balls under the NBA’s 2026 rules. Four racks carry ordinary balls worth one point and a final money ball worth two. The shooter chooses where to put a fifth rack loaded entirely with money balls. Two deeper attempts, each worth three points, interrupt the trip around the arc.
The timer behaves like a loan shark: every lazy reach adds debt, and the final rack collects. Speed gives the shooter room to finish, but the horn awards nothing for finishing early. Emptying every rack with time to spare ends the race against the clock. Accuracy still decides what that work earns.
Quick hands need reliable rhythm. The NBA 3-point contest tests three things in rapid succession: collect cleanly, repeat the motion, and deliver the valuable shots. Each demand exposes a different weakness. A frantic pickup can spoil the grip; an elaborate reset can leave an expensive ball untouched. Follow those details, and the familiar television spectacle starts showing its seams.
From the rack to the fingertips
10. Count the whole shooting cycle
JJ Redick reaches, raises the ball, and lets it fly in Toronto in 2016. The jumper looks familiar. His time allowance does not. After scoring 20 in the opening round, he enters a 30-second tiebreaker and finishes with nine. Devin Booker scores 12 and takes the available place in the final.
Every reach burns more of Redick’s clock. His hands must secure the ball and feed it straight into the next shot. In the NBA 3-point contest, the clock runs through the movements nobody applauds. The Splash Brothers supplied the evening’s glamour. Redick supplied the uncomfortable counterpoint: a beautiful NBA jumper can take too long to load.
9. Put the rack on your side
Before his 2015 victory, Stephen Curry studied film of previous winners and changed his approach to the racks. He presented his right side to the balls, refining the angle between collection and release. Curry put up 27 in the final. His preparation reached all the way down to the equipment beside his hip.
Watch the path from the rack into his shooting pocket. An awkward reach can pull the ball across the torso before the actual shot begins. A cleaner angle gives the hands a more direct route into their familiar work. Calling Curry’s touch a gift lets everybody off too easily. He examined a piece of the contest that the highlight reel usually ignores, then changed how he moved through it. Give the ugly little pickup its own replay.
8. Arrive with the feet ready
Karl-Anthony Towns scored 29 in the 2022 final, beating Trae Young and Luke Kennard, who finished with 26 apiece. A center carried off the shooting trophy. The guard-only picture of perimeter greatness deserved that humiliation. Towns gave tall kids a useful image: a big man winning an event built around distance and touch.
For the NBA 3-point contest, watch the first shot after a player changes racks. The feet tell you whether his hands can get to work. A trailing shoe that still needs to slide into place can make the ball wait upstairs. The body has to arrive ready for the shot the hands want to take. Towns’ victory settles no argument about one ideal stance; it makes dismissing a shooter’s chances because of his size look particularly foolish.
7. Connect the lift to the release
Curry’s knees straighten as the ball climbs. His arm extends while his body still rises, joining the lift and launch in a continuous motion. A 2014 ESPN analysis clocked that shooting action at roughly 0.4 seconds in a game setting. That figure describes a game shot, so it cannot rank his speed against every contestant at a rack.
Follow the ball past his forehead. His ball keeps moving through the rise instead of waiting through a pronounced pause aloft. Another shooter may need a different sequence to control the same attempt. The tell comes when that upward movement stalls. Curry joins the release to the rise already carrying the ball.
6. Keep the dip that feeds the shot
Watch Curry catch a pass and lower the ball before driving it upward. His knees bend into the movement. The shooting arm follows as his legs extend, keeping the ball connected to the body underneath it. That downward motion belongs to the shot; treating every dip as wasted time confuses a familiar rhythm with an unnecessary delay.
The NBA 3-point contest makes that distinction visible because the rack supplies the next ball at a predictable height. A shooter still has to bring it into his own movement pattern. Watch the bottom of the dip. Does he flow upward, or stop and start again? Cutting away a motion that helps him control the ball can produce a faster-looking miss. Curry’s jumper offers a better lesson in economy: preserve the movement that does useful work.
5. Let the previous shot go
Craig Hodges opened his 1991 semifinal round with 19 consecutive makes. Net, reach, release. Another ball climbed while the streak grew more absurd. The footage has the strange tension of watching somebody refuse to make an ordinary mistake. Every successful attempt raises the expectation for the next one.
Hodges gave the contest something better than manufactured suspense: repetition so precise that watching it became uncomfortable. His hands still needed another ball while the audience absorbed the previous make. A shooter who lingers over the flight has less time to begin again. The same trap follows a miss, when the rim invites an angry stare. Hodges’ streak endures through that uninterrupted task: complete the shot, find the next ball, and keep moving while everybody else counts.
4. Change distance without dragging it back
The blue balls wait on separate pedestals six feet behind the 3-point line. Each make earns three points under the 2026 rules, and the prescribed order forces shooters to deal with those locations along the route. A player steps back, adjusts to the extra distance, then returns to a conventional rack.
Step back in toward the rim. The NBA 3-point contest has just changed the shot on him again. His hands now have to send the ball toward a closer basket. Watch the lift and the finish of the arm on that next attempt. The deep make gets the replay. What follows shows whether he can leave that extra force behind.
3. Give the money rack room
Klay Thompson cleared all five balls from his final money rack in 2016, finishing with 27 and beating Curry. Those five makes contributed 10 points. The corner became the closing scene in a contest between teammates whose shooting already defined their shared nickname. This time, Thompson carried the trophy away from his fellow Splash Brother.
The shooter picks the money rack’s location. Leave it until last, and the opening racks dictate whether he reaches it with enough time to shoot properly. An ordinary rack can survive a little wasted motion with fewer potential points at stake. The money rack makes the damage louder. When the camera catches untouched balls after the horn, the loss comes into focus: valuable attempts never even reached the rim.
2. Leave the miss at the rim
Damian Lillard missed four straight corner shots before sinking the winning final ball in 2024. The repeated clangs made the finish tense. His last attempt turned a ragged closing rack into another piece of “Dame Time.” The sequence works as drama precisely because the misses keep threatening to swallow the ending.
In the NBA 3-point contest, an ugly miss can make a shooter itch to change something. We cannot know what Lillard told himself between balls. The task in front of him remained brutally simple. Reach again, raise the ball, and give the next attempt a chance. A player who starts rearranging his elbow or changing his knee bend must execute that new idea immediately. The clock offers no private corner in which to rebuild a jumper.
1. Make the speed pay
Joe Harris beat Curry 26–24 in the 2019 final. Brooklyn’s specialist took the trophy from a field containing the game’s most celebrated shooter. Nobody awards style points for how quickly a miss leaves the hand.
Once a player releases every available ball before the horn, extra speed has finished doing its job. The remaining argument belongs to the shots that fall. Harris’ win gives the event a satisfying cruelty: fame cannot add a point, and a gorgeous release cannot erase an empty rack. The scorecard never explains every movement behind the result, but it settles what those movements produced. A successful motion gets the shooter through the route while keeping his touch intact.
The last ball collects
At the next NBA 3-point contest, follow the hand as it reaches back toward the rack. The trophy’s final image may show a ball dropping through the net. Its explanation often begins with an earlier pickup, a planted shoe, or a reset that took too long. The horn kills every shot still sitting on the rack.
Read More: Victor Wembanyama Overwhelms Suns With 40 Points and Nine Blocks
FAQs
Why does the NBA 3-point contest favor quick releases?
A quick release helps shooters complete every rack before the horn. Clean pickups and steady rhythm keep that speed useful.
How much time do players get in the 3-point contest?
The NBA’s 2026 rules give each shooter 70 seconds to attempt 27 balls.
What does the money rack do?
The money rack holds five balls worth two points each. Players choose its location, so a perfect rack adds 10 points.
Does the fastest shooter always win?
No. Finishing early earns no bonus. Once every ball leaves the hands, made shots determine what the round produces.
Why do NBA shooters dip the ball before shooting?
A dip can connect the pickup to a shooter’s familiar motion. Removing it can disrupt the rhythm that controls the shot.
