Point Guard; "point" itself?

[Zitin, Abigail]

> I'm assuming, without evidence, that this was a positional reference
> to an area of the court behind and to the side of the free throw
> line, where the point guard (not yet so called) positioned himself
by
> default to begin the passing process that eventuated in getting his
> team a good shot.

Which makes sense, except that so far I have no evidence for this, and
database-searching for "point" is close to impossible. The evidence I
do have indicates that "point guard" preceded lone "point", which
leads me to assume that the latter was shortened from the former. Two
pieces of evidence support this reading, to my mind: (1) the fact that
Webster's Sports Dict., in 1976, defines "point" as "a player
position" rather than an area of the court (although this is muddied
somewhat by the fact that it defines hockey "point" in similar terms)
(2) the quotation posted by Fred Shapiro last night, from proquest:

1970 _N.Y. Times_ 3 Dec. 80  "We have no such things as guards,
forwards
and centers in our 1-3-1 offense," said Tom Wasdin, Jacksonville's new
coach, yesterday.  "At least we don't call them by those names.  We
classify our players by the kind of job we want them to do and when we
recruit, we look for point guards, wings and postmen.  "A point guard
is a
new name for the old-fashioned playmaker," the Dolphin coach
continued. "He's our quarterback, our key ball-handler, our most
consistent player and a good outside shot"

Nowhere in the article in question does it indicate that the point
guard is so called because he occupies an area of the court called
"the point". But this is negative evidence, and it only feeds
speculation.

So: which came first, the point guard or the point? The latter would
imply that lone "point" is indeed spatial; the former, that it is
functional. I would be most grateful for evidence supporting either of
these claims.

Abigail Zitin
OED