All the love for Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry and his three-point shooting reinforces one fact: Hoop fans dig the long ball.

No need to go to the mainland or roust the bucks for playoff tickets, though. Head on over to Blaisdell Arena on Saturday to check out the Harlem Globetrotters and their guard Shane “Scooter” Christensen, who’s capable of a really long throw: He recently sank three long-distance shots in Las Vegas, chest-shooting the ball from big buildings into a hoop on the ground below. It was all recorded on video.

“It was definitely for real; there’s no camera magic on that one,” said Christensen, a former star player at the University of Montana.

Two of the shots were from the brand-new T-Mobile Arena, off the balcony about four stories up. A third was from the neighboring Toshiba Center, an eight-story building. That presented its own problems.

“There was no way in heck I was about to go look over the lip,” Christensen said. In fact, he couldn’t even see the rim, located on the ground about 100 feet below.

“I could maybe see the top of the backboard, that was it,” he said “Luckily, my dad had the opportunity to come with me, so I told him, ‘Look, I want you to stand behind the goal … kind of right in line with the rim.’ So I’m actually looking at my dad, shooting a blind shot.”

For Christensen, 36, it was a matter of taking everything he’d learned from age 5, when he started playing basketball. “You got the same mechanics, the same form,” he said. “I’m not just out there chucking it. You kind of measure the goal, see where you’re at, take a couple of practice shots. Then you tell them to roll the cameras, and it goes down.”

Fans can expect similarly amazing feats when the Globetrotters play their double-header here in Honolulu.

Half-court hook shots, full-court “granny”-style heaves and backward, no-look lofts are standard fare for the players. They have a preternatural ability to put the ball in the basket: Check the Globetrotters’ website, harlemglobetrotters.com, for video of forward Zeus McClurkin dropping in a shot while flying along a zip line in Minnesota’s Mall of America.

Of course, shooting isn’t the only trick up the Globetrotters’ jerseys. Christensen also holds the world record for spinning the ball on his nose, at 7 seconds. He’d always been able to spin it on his fingers, a skill that helped him land his job with the Trotters 11 seasons ago, but he learned how to use his nose after watching then-teammate Michael “Wild Thing” Wilson do it.

“He was my teammate, and I might as well have bought a ticket every night to watch him do it,” said Christensen, who later refined the trick by learning to spin it from his nose onto his head.

Then there’s the dribbling, a specialty of Fatima “TNT” Maddox, one of three women on the Globetrotters.

“I aspire to be like Curly Neal (the most celebrated Globetrotter ballhandler), so you’ll see my sliding on the ground and some pretty cool basketball tricks I’ve been working on,” Maddox said.

Her story, like Christensen’s and other Globetrotters’, is one of perseverance and love of the game.

Maddox, 32, played college ball at Temple University under Hall of Fame coach Dawn Staley and two years of pro ball in Sweden after that. That was good preparation when the Globetrotters asked Maddox to try out, but something extra also made her stand out.

“At the time I was really working on my fundamental basketball skills. The basketball tryout was in traditional basketball, and it was men and women together, and I really held my own against the women, and the men as well,” Maddox said. “And then at the very end, they asked, ‘Does anyone here have any basketball dribbling tricks or cool dribbling drills?’ And I had picked up some growing up along the way, watching street ball and stuff like that. I pulled those off, and I think that kind of put me over the edge.”

Though she’s making her first visit to Hawaii, Maddox has already played against one of its most famous basketball products: President Barack Obama. She was part of a group of athletes who visited Washington for its annual Easter egg roll and was shooting hoops when he happened by.

“We were playing with the kids, playing a game where if you missed your shot you have to do pushups. Lo and behold, he misses his, and I’m like, ‘Oh no. We’re going to make the president do pushups,’” she said. “He was a great sport about it. Afterwards he took some three-pointers. He’s a pretty good shot — lefty.”

This is the Globetrotters’ 90th year on tour, and Maddox said they’ve rolled out a number of new tricks. She didn’t want to “spill the beans,” but one new twist is the demise of the Washington Generals, the Globetrotters’ longtime foil. After decades of getting pounded, pantsed and poster-ized, they’ve tapped out.

“Enough was enough,” Maddox said with a laugh. “Now we’re playing a team called the All-Stars, but in true Globetrotter fashion we’re kind of turning them into the Washington Generals.”