With more NBA action taking place beyond the three point line, this description likened it to the exurbs:

This is some wild stuff happening between the circles. Minnesota’s Jaden McDaniels is guarding Steph Curry nose-to-nose more than 40 feet from the basket, no space between them, two guys sharing a shirt. The other eight players on the court might as well be in another galaxy; this dance in the exurbs is its own game. The player who has the ball is somewhere behind McDaniels, far outside his sphere of interest. His mandate appears settled: He will go where Curry goes, and he will turn his attention to the ball if, and only if, he sees it in Curry’s hands.

The idea invoked is that the dribbling is taking place on the outskirts of a region. Forty feet out is a long way from the basketball and closer to the half-court line than the hoop.

But continue the spatial analogy. One issue is that some announcers say a three-point shot is from “downtown.” From Hunter S. Thompson:

My grudge against Brent Musburger has been smoking on a personal back burner for many years — since the early 1980s in fact, when Brent was covering the NBA Finals for CBS-TV, and it involves the word “downtown.”

That is when Musburger changed the language of sports forever when he kept repeating this ignorant notion that any basketball player firing off a long 3-point shot is shooting from “downtown.” (Celtics announcer Johnny Most might have coined the “downtown” trademark in the 1960s, but it was Musburger who beat it to death.)..

Downtown is where you score — not somewhere out in the wilderness, where people are far apart & not much happens. You don’t fire a long jump shot from Downtown, you fire it into Downtown. The Real definition of “Taking it downtown” is to suddenly drive to the basket & into a cluster of 7-footers who seem to have you sealed out — like Iverson launching himself at Robinson & Duncan & dunking it over them. To think Otherwise would be to think like a Baseball Writer, or like Brent Musburger.

Thompson did not like the term and he points out that it makes more sense to say downtown is right where the basket is. If downtown is at the center of the city and the region, why would taking a three-pointer be from downtown?

If the basketball court is likened to American geographic categories, how about downtown is under the basket, the city is the paint, the suburbs span between the paint to just outside the three-point line, the exurbs are between the normal three-point shots and the half-court line, and rural areas are in the backcourt. That is probably too many categories but it more accurately applies categories Americans use.