Wing Men: How “3-and-D” Came to Dominate the NBA
The 3-point boom forever changed the job description for NBA role players, ushering in a world full of 3s and defense. But the latest trends in the game have paved the way for a new generation of wings to leave the 3-and-D label behind.Wing Men: How “3-and-D” Came to Dominate the NBA
The 3-point boom forever changed the job description for NBA role players, ushering in a world full of 3s and defense. But the latest trends in the game have paved the way for a new generation of wings to leave the 3-and-D label behind.
When the transaction tree is finally done splintering, you’ll be able to tell a decade’s worth of NBA history through the Damian Lillard deal. In two interlinked trades, the Trail Blazers said goodbye to a franchise icon, the Celtics rounded out the core that won an 18th banner and pushed the 3-point revolution to its extremes, and the Suns and Bucks both gave up key figures from their Finals matchup two years before. In total, four teams exchanged two first-round pick swaps, three first-round picks, and 10 players—including a former no. 1 selection (chosen ahead of Luka Doncic), a member of the NBA 75 team, the then-reigning Sixth Man of the Year, a recent champion, and another recent Finals participant.
Toumani Camara, a late second-round pick by the Suns just three months prior, seemed like a mere footnote. Even he thought he was a throw-in, a name on a salary sheet to make the trade math work.
“I didn’t really know the situation. I didn’t know who wanted me,” Camara says. “So it was very stressful.”
But Portland fought for his inclusion.
“We liked Toumani a lot,” general manager Joe Cronin says.
They liked what he represented, too. Cronin, a Blazers employee for nearly two decades, had lived through the club’s struggles to find forwards in the Lillard era. While the rest of the league loaded up on long, mobile, 3-point-shooting wing players, Portland cycled through a procession of more limited Moe Harkless types. He also looked out from the ground floor of a rebuild and saw a not-too-distant NBA future with those kinds of players all over the floor.
So while Cronin took swings on young guards with star upside with his first two lottery picks, he otherwise put a heavy focus on forwards of all shapes and sizes: The Blazers selected two, Kris Murray and Rayan Rupert, ahead of Camara in the 2023 draft, and then re-signed Jerami Grant to a lucrative five-year contract and matched an offer sheet on Matisse Thybulle that summer. Jabari Walker, another big-bodied forward, had been plucked from the second round the year before. This past offseason, they gave up two firsts and two seconds for Deni Avdija, a recent top-10 pick himself. Even Dalano Banton, a point guard, is 6-foot-8.
“What we see here,” Cronin says, “is us preparing ourselves for when we are going to be hopefully really competitive, that we have those wings and those types of players throughout our roster—to where we have an abundance of it.”
Portland, at 17-29 on the season, still has a lot to figure out, but Camara figures to be a part of the future—no matter what shape that takes.
If you were to cast an NBA-logo-like silhouette of the prototypical “3-and-D” wing, you might use Camara, whose 6-foot-8 action-figure frame is both strong enough to stand up to power players and nimble enough to move with dynamic ball handlers. But he fills in the picture with quiet intensity (a key defense mechanism against star players’ bravado and foul-drawing tactics), toughness (he leads the league in charges drawn), and the ability to learn quickly (the southpaw has already made more 3s than last season, in about half as many games).
Camara, a native of Belgium who split his years of college eligibility between Georgia and Dayton, showed promise in his first training camp with the Trail Blazers following the 2023 trade and turned heads with his defense throughout his rookie season. This season, not only has the 24-year-old been a mainstay of Chauncey Billups’s starting unit and the go-to defender against any opponent’s no. 1 option, but he’s also vaulted himself onto the short list of the best young 3-and-D players in the entire league.
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“It’s either you have a guy like that, or you’re looking for one,” Billups said earlier this season. “He’s the type of player that everybody wants.”
That leaguewide demand is never more evident than in the lead-up to the trade deadline, when every team with contending aspirations is scrounging for shooting or defense, and hopefully both. The Lakers dealt for Dorian Finney-Smith just before the end of the calendar year. Cam Johnson is getting Thibs minutes in the daily rumor mill. Last year, the acquisition of P.J. Washington, an XL-sized version of the same player type, helped spark the Mavericks’ run to the NBA Finals.
The greatest winners write the NBA’s history, but it’s the workaday role players who live through it. Like constituents adhering to a local ordinance, they contort their games—sometimes even their identities as players—in order to adapt. And for the past decade and a half, for a generation of wings, that’s meant a world full of 3s and defense.
When Danny Green was drafted in 2009, “3-and-D” wasn’t yet part of the NBA dictionary. The shortening of the 3-point line in the mid-1990s legitimized the shot, but the players who embraced the long bomb were often ghettoized as specialists, and the coaches that encouraged shooters were radicals. By and large, the goal of hoisting from deep wasn’t necessarily to harness the extra value of the 3, but to draw attention away from the stars, most of whom were parked at the basket.
“Pop wouldn’t play me unless I played defense. It wasn’t about offense,” says Green, who played the majority of his 15-year career under Gregg Popovich in San Antonio. “And then, if you want to stay on the floor, you’ve got to be a threat. Playing with Tony and Manu and Timmy, they don’t need me to dribble the ball. So what else am I going to do?”
Green didn’t realize it at the time, but he was caught in a profound shift in his position—one that had begun several years earlier and was driven, counterintuitively, by a fixation on paint points more than the 3-point shot itself. Mike D’Antoni, whose “Seven Seconds or Less” Suns opened the floodgates for modern offense, has said that his decision to put more shooters on the court in Phoenix was more about what was happening in the lane: He wanted to remove the traffic jam around the rim to get layups.
“If you watch college basketball, my God, for years, I thought the object of the game was if you could get 10 people inside the three-second lane and whoever can score, gets the win,” he told Thinking Basketball in 2022. “And it’s like, how can you get ’em out?”
When Stan Van Gundy became head coach of the Magic in 2007, he took shooting up a notch by putting four long-range threats on the floor to give Dwight Howard more space on the blocks. But Tom Thibodeau’s suffocating defenses, first in Boston and then Chicago, soon made scoring at the rim look like the Battle of the Bastards. By packing the paint with defenders, Thibs ushered in a mini-revolution that spread quickly throughout the league—and in doing so, created a need for role players with the exact skills that have come to define “3-and-D.”
Wing players became more mobile: Zach Lowe, then of Grantland, wrote in 2013 that being a wing in a Thibodeau defense required “smarts, effort, and crazy athleticism—the ability to move from the 3-point line to underneath the basket and then back out to the 3-point line within the same 15-second half-court sequence.” They also needed to shoot 3s on the other end, both to keep pace in a league ever so slowly embracing the math advantage and to make opposing paint packers pay for leaving them to join the mosh pit at the rim.
In our search for the origin of 3-and-D, we asked a wide range of NBA personnel who they considered to be the patient zero of the trend. Most nominated Bruce Bowen, the ace defender and corner-3 extraordinaire of the Spurs dynasty’s first wave, as the godfather of the 3-and-D wing. But many also pointed to this time period, just before the tipping point of the 3-point boom, and these Bulls as the epicenter. Throughout his five-season run in Chicago, Thibodeau had several players who fit the broad description, including a young Jimmy Butler, but another player cited several times was Keith Bogans, a defensive grinder who took more than three-fourths of his shots from 3 in 2010-11, his lone season in Chicago, and somehow started all 82 games while averaging the ninth-most minutes on the team.
The term wove its way into the zeitgeist in the ensuing years—helped in no small part by Shane Battier, something of a role-playing celebrity, who unlocked the Heat’s small-ball lineups, and the Spurs, with Green and Kawhi Leonard flanking their established core, who made consecutive Finals against Miami’s Big Three. Indeed, the first usages of “3-and-D” we found in newspaper archives were in reference to Green and Leonard, in previews of the 2013 Finals.
But the trend that Green helped spark didn’t sink in for him until three years later, when the double big bang of Golden State’s success and an anomalous spike in the salary cap led to major paydays for wings with even whiffs of 3-and-D potential. Kent Bazemore, Allen Crabbe, and Solomon Hill—all reserves with some 3 or D to their games—cashed in on a combined $193 million.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a 3-and-D guy,’” Green says. “Then it became a thing. Next thing you know, everybody started to fill that lane.”
The 3 was now the main attraction, and it wasn’t just Steph Curry and the Warriors firing away. In the four seasons from 2007-08 to 2010-11, 3-point attempts had flatlined, at around 18 per team per game; they’ve climbed virtually every year since, including by nearly three 3s a game in the season following the 2016 free-agency bonanza—just shy of the largest leap since the shorter 3-point line was instituted.
Shooting became a prerequisite for nearly every player on the floor. And guarding not just the increasing number of long-range threats, but also the ever-widening canyon of space between them and the basket, became an impossible task. Switching proved the best recourse, both to cover the most ground and to limit the decision-making and processing required to keep up with the pace of play. The Warriors set the standard on this side of the ball, too—and the Rockets, with D’Antoni as coach, unabashedly followed with their own, more hardcore version—utilizing an array of athletic forwards with long wingspans and enough heft to switch onto any type of opposing player.
Teams have since iterated on the model: Dallas and Denver yoked up their frontcourts with power forwards big enough to play small-ball center but skilled enough to maintain modern spacing; Boston, thanks to the Jrue Holiday trade, deploys plus shooters and defenders at every position; and Oklahoma City is ushering in a new era of thievery with wings who create gobs of steals. But the key tenets persist: length to clutter passing lanes; diligence in preparation and the intuition to react on the fly; foot speed, sure, but also the hip mobility to shuttle with drivers; a quick shot release; toughness and physicality.
The one skill that doesn’t show up in the blueprints is emotional IQ. It’s easy for a defensive specialist to play the villain; if the offensive superstar is the protagonist of a game, the primary defender is, by process of elimination, the antagonist. But players, coaches, and executives all agree that while competitiveness is essential, the ability to strain out the emotion and ego and maintain focus on the task at hand is a critical component of the best defenders.
“It’s a long game. It’s a long season,” Cronin says. “It’s hard to be full throttle 82 times against the best players on earth. And you got to have the right demeanor and wiring to navigate that. Also the right level of self-confidence to take some losses as far as in your one-on-one battles. These offensive players are so good, there’s a lot of nights where they’re going to do what they do. And it’s [about] not getting discouraged and just having that mentality: ‘I’m going to make this as hard as possible on them’—it may not always come out with the stop, but [you need] that ability to move on to the next play.”
It’s no coincidence that a vast majority of the best 3-and-D players were second-round picks or undrafted altogether—players who, by and large, had to fight their way onto rosters. Green, who was drafted in the middle of the second round, says that it’s even helped that he was a role player in college.
“At a certain point in your career, they ain’t bringing you in to do anything new,” says Green, who has won three titles with three different teams (including two back-to-back). “They know what you do. You know what you can do. You can make your money doing that.”
A half decade ago, Jerami Grant was as close as you could find to the platonic ideal of a 3-and-D player. Grant was a second-round pick, just like Camara, now his Trail Blazers teammate, yet more of a work in progress—a super-athlete with a wingspan as long as Victor Wembanyama is tall, but young and raw offensively. As a rookie the 6-foot-7 forward played all over the floor, including at center, for a Sixers team knee-deep in the muck of the Process.
“Whatever I needed to do to get on the court, whether it’s defense, rebound, block shots—whatever it was, I was going to do it,” he says.
Over time—and two team changes—Grant became a reliable 3-point shooter and a worthy foil for the big wings dictating the title race. In Denver’s bubble run to the 2020 Western Conference finals, he was the primary defender against Donovan Mitchell, Kawhi Leonard, and LeBron James. But instead of reprising that role with the Nuggets, then a budding title contender, Grant made the surprise decision to sign a free-agent contract with Detroit, fresh off a 20-win season, in part to break out of the 3-and-D mold.
“I wanted to see what I was capable of,” he says. “I put a lot of work in, and we had some disagreements in terms of what I thought I deserved and stuff like that. But that’s beside the point. I think I wanted to see what I was capable of, expand my role, and see what I could do.”
As helpful as a 3-and-D skill set can be in winning basketball, the duties can be fairly rote. The job description is right there in the name: You shoot 3s, and you play defense. The other stuff—the creativity—is left to the primary ball handlers, the stars.
Teams have even begun streamlining the mechanics of those catch-and-shoot attempts so that the ball never sinks below the shoulders—the so-called no-dip 3. Shooters catch the ball high and begin the motion there, rather than starting low and finishing high, all in an effort to give themselves a split-second-better chance of beating a defender’s closeout. More efficient? Certainly. But fighting the fundamentals of the stroke you’ve had your whole life is hardly a romp.
So while the work is good if you can get it, being a 3-and-D player can be taxing, thankless, and even monotonous.
“There’s a reason why they draft who they draft, and they’re going to try to groom those guys to be what they want them to be,” Green says. “You’ve got to find where you fit in and, if you can, earn the right to get more shots. But, ultimately, you’re going to be within the boxes that fit around those superstars.”
Several players I spoke to said that they don’t even like the label “3-and-D” because it diminishes the scope of their impact.
“It’s a type of role that people like to put on players, but I really don’t care for it,” says Derrick Jones Jr., who served as the Mavericks’ primary wing stopper in their run to last year’s Finals before signing with the Clippers this past offseason. “I go out there and play the way I’m supposed to play. Playing defense and knocking down 3s—that’s not all I do.”
Teams work with players to develop other parts of their game, and players work with personal skills trainers on their own, but balancing the guardrails of a given role and individual growth in the heat of a season can be tricky. A rebuilding team has the luxury of experimenting without worrying about the impact on team results. Camara, for instance, has been used more as a roll man in recent games. But contenders are increasingly relying on their developmental pipelines, too, both to withstand the rigors of an 82-game season and to work around the abundance of aprons in the new CBA.
The Thunder, home to one of the most meticulous team cultures in sports, start each player with simple building blocks—professionalism and commitment to team concepts and growth. When that foundation is set, they then begin to layer on more advanced work.
“We try to have things that can serve both the team and the individual, and then it’s easier for the guy to commit to them,” head coach Mark Daigneault says. “And if that happens, then you can have an environment. And that can be pretty powerful.”
Ajay Mitchell, a high second-rounder in last year’s draft with the contours of a two-way wing, earned regular rotation minutes right off the bat after quickly applying a preseason note about using his chest more to defend around the rim. The Thunder also play virtually everyone on the roster, for multiple reasons: to be less predictable to opponents, to keep deep reserves engaged and ready to play at all times, and to build in-game familiarity among their players. So far, it’s worked pretty well: Even without Chet Holmgren for most of the season and Isaiah Hartenstein for prolonged stretches, Oklahoma City has the best record in the NBA (37-8), with the best point differential since the merger (12.3).
The Thunder, like every NBA club, have several players who fit the profile of a 3-and-D wing, but the team’s overall success isn’t defined by its 3-point shooting. Its real strength lies more in the manipulation and navigation of space—an array of drivers and cutters zipping in and out of the lane like TIE fighters, and centers who can step out to guard the perimeter and then recover to protect the rim in two bounds. The 3-point era sanded down some of the game’s best athletes and stuck them in the short corners, but OKC’s system feels alive. Bodies move; the ball pings around.
It isn’t just the Thunder, either. Research provided by The Ringer’s Zach Kram shows that 203 players averaged three or more assists per 36 minutes last season, an all-time high. The next seven seasons on that list are the seven other most recent seasons, including this one. Designated playmakers, it seems, aren’t the only ones making plays anymore.
Camara’s had 15 such games this season, including in the Blazers’ most recent outing against the Thunder. His 3-point shooting sits just below league average, at 35 percent, but he remains critical to the operation in Portland—on defense, certainly, and also when springing ball handlers with tight screens, cutting after a lane appears, driving off the catch, even making reads out of the short roll. Camara will likely need to become a reliable shooter, but 3s and defense may need to be only features of a more well-rounded skill set, not the endgame.
“I just read the game,” he says, simply, about his developing offense. “I mean, I don’t want to be a robot.”
