Mexico City: 2016 FIBA 3×3 World tour is the fifth season of the world tour, the top event on the 3×3 professional circuit. The 2016 edition of World Tour starts on Saturday in Mexico City and will visit an unprecedented eight cities overall with 7 Masters leading up to final at Abu Dhabi on October 27-28, 2016.
The event is inspired by several forms of streetball played across the globe and is considered as the number one urban team sport worldwide. Organized by FIBA, the matches during the event see two teams of three players face off on a basketball half-court, and any such competition was played internationally at the 2010 Youth Olympic Games in Singapore and since then has got an annual FIBA 3×3 World Tour and national-team world championships to support it.
During the course of the event, twelve teams will compete against one another over two days in the Perisur shopping mall to secure the only ticket on offer to qualify for Abu Dhabi.
In the past editions of the World Tour, A number of players and teams in action in Mexico this weekend have made World Tour history. While Jonathan García was on the San Juan (PUR) team which won inaugural 2012 edition of FIBA 3×3 World Tour, Saskatoon (CAN) finished second overall in 2014 edition of the event, and NY Harlem (USA) were third overall last season.
Current champions of the World Tour, Novi Sad Al Wahda (UAE) have not qualified for the Mexico City Masters but have already pocketed their ticket to three other Masters (Utsunomiya (JPN), Prague (CZE) and Beijing (CHN).
The top-two placed teams from each pool of the event advance to a standard knock-out round which starts at the quarter-finals stage. The winner of the 7 stops, (Mexico City, Utsunomiya, Prague, Lausanne, Debrecen, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro) plus the best teams in the World Tour standings at the end of the season (between 5 and 11 depending if a team has won more than one stop) qualify for the FIBA 3×3 World Tour Final at Abu Dhabi in October 2016.
To increase the crowd connect there has been addition of two contests in this competition format and are (viz.): Dunk and Shoot-Out Contests.
In the first of the two contests, Dunk Contest will have three dunkers compete on the second day of the event. Each finalist has three attempts and 75 seconds per dunk with the first successful one considered the valid one. They all make two dunks and the two dunkers who get the best grades from the jury qualify for the final round where they compete with three more dunks. There is no time limit for the last dunk of the final.
On the other hand, Shoot-Out Contest qualification takes place on the first day and the final on the second. A maximum of one player a team participates in the qualifying round where players shoot ten balls from the top of the arc in the shortest amount of time. The best four qualify for the final where the players shoot three racks of five balls worth one point from three different spots behind the arc and one rack of three ‘moneyballs’ worth two points from the end line (11 metres) against a 60-second shot-clock.
The two contests are supposed to add more competitiveness to the event.