Editor’s Note: CNN’s On the Road series brings you a greater insight into countries around the world. This time we travel to Azerbaijan in the lead up to the European Games to explore the culture of sports in the country sitting on the Caspian Sea.
It’s a variation on the sort of informal street basketball played all over the world – and now 3x3 is one of the star attractions at the first-ever European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan.
But what, exactly, does the game involve?
As its name suggests, it’s a pared-down version of the traditional five-a-side version, needing just three players on each team.
That pared-down nature extends to the playing space, half the size of the court required for a full game and using only one hoop rather than two.
The popularity of 3x3 has rocketed since the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) chose it as an alternative form of the game to be played at the 2010 Youth Olympics in Singapore.
Where it started
Its large-scale roots, though, go back further than that: American organization Hoop It Up organized a major competition back in 1989, while similar events were held in the U.S. during the early 1990s.
After making the decision to promote 3x3 for Singapore, officials worked on the compilation of a set of rules that could be applied just as well in international competition as they could in pickup street games.
The result is a sport that just won’t stop growing – FIBA estimates that around 250 million people around the world enjoy 3x3, with more and more continuing to join a sprawling network of organizers, leagues and players.
Azerbaijani athlete Amil Hamzayev, whose achievements in 3x3 include winning the FIBA European Championship for Small Countries twice, is one of those players.
The 24-year old tells the official Baku 2015 website that one of the biggest challenges of playing 3x3 is the effect of weather conditions – a hazard unknown, of course, to players of the indoor game.
“I’m excited to represent my country in front of our national crowd,” Hamzayev – who names American legend Michael Jordan as his favorite basketball star – says.
How it works
A word or two about those 3x3 rules: they’re nice and easy. Baskets scored from inside the arc bring a point, while those scored from outside bring two.
Games are played over a single period of 10 minutes and won by the first team to score 21 points or the team with the highest score at the end of the 10 minutes.
If the scores are tied at the end of the 10 minutes, overtime is played and the winner of the game is the first team to score two points.
And that’s the only thing about 3x3 that doesn’t appeal to Hamzayev.
He would rather see the victors needing three, necessitating more than one basket – but he admits he would have been all at sea without basketball.
“I would probably have finished naval college and become a ship’s captain by now,” he says.