Half-court 3-on-3 basketball has been officially added to the competitions of the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
The IOC put it in a 2012 letter discussing its interest in 3-on-3, a large part of the impetus is to focus more on the amateurism of sports and get the event away from being "somewhat of an exhibition for the American NBA."
“We have spent many months weighing up this proposal, and our final call was to include the appropriated version of basketball into the 2016 Olympic program,” IOC president Thomas Bach explained to international sports news cameras at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.
“This is a trial program and one that asks a lot more of both administrators, hosts, staff and players. However, keeping with the spirit of The Olympic Games, we have decided to include the 3-on-3, half-court variant”