Not only did Major League Baseball shorten games through numerous rule changes, it did so by eliminating many boring moments from the sport.
Don’t you love that a pitcher can throw five signs off his catcher, get off the mound and walk for 20 seconds to get his bearings? Here is a pitch clock. Don’t you love it when a hitter has a 40-second routine with their batting gloves between each pitch? Well, he can only get one timeout per at-bat. Do you think pitching coaches and catchers go to the mound just to give relievers more time to warm up? We will limit these visits. Do you think there are too many pitch changes? Each pitcher must now face at least three batters, unless an inning ends. Do you hate at-bats in which putout attempts outnumber pitches? We will also limit them.
The changes reduce some strategies inherent to the sport, but above all they remove some blind spots from the game. The NBA should learn something and target intentional fouls late in the game.
Saturday night’s NBA Cup semifinal between the San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder hurt, turning what looked to be the best regular season game of the year for most of the evening. in unbearable work. This confirmed casual basketball fans who insist that the last two minutes of play can take 25 minutes in real time. What should have been the most dramatic part of a great match turned into a chore to watch.
In this case, the “three strikes” strategy was the main culprit. As the Thunder attempted to extend their window to tie or take the lead, fouling the Spurs and hoping for missed free throws, the Spurs responded in kind by fouling the Thunder when they had a three-point lead, not allowing the Thunder a 3-point attempt that could tie the game. If executed correctly and the free throws match, the strategy forces the trailing team to try to deliberately miss a free throw, hoping for an offensive rebound that gives a chance for two more points.
(A quick tangent: These deliberate misses can turn into the NBA version of the tush push, in that they are difficult to officiate correctly. While everyone knows a miss is coming, all players will try to gain advantages, whether through lane violations or catches under the glass. There are almost too many things for referees to watch for, making it extremely easy to overlook one element of a play, because this could have happened on Saturday.)
My colleague John Hollinger wrote in May that the three-fault strategy and its uneven application actually represent the best chance for the leading team to lose the match in regulation, thus leading to more uncertainty about the outcome instead of less. Even though some of the machinations make my head hurt, I trust John with these questions.
Yet while this can maximize the amount of time a game is in play, the nature of that time also matters. Much of that is spent with players pacing back and forth between the free throw lines, often with a few critiques checking the game clock, slowing things down even further. That doesn’t make basketball exciting. In fact, it is largely not basketball.
Ideally, you want players to try to score (and their opponents to try to stop them) during the course of the game, without relying on intentional fouls. The league has improved its end-of-game scenarios a bit by limiting the number of timeouts teams can take in the final three minutes. Since 2017-18, they can have a maximum of two.
This led to more back and forth at the end of matches. Coaches have also learned that it is easier for their teams to score against a defense that comes back in transition, perhaps without its preferred matchups, than against a defense that is primed and prepared. This scenario is what recently led to the end of LeBron James’ streak of scoring at least 10 points on December 4, with the final 2:40 of that game being played without a single whistle or timeout. The fact that it happened so quickly is part of what made this moment so exhilarating. Unfortunately, the Lakers and Raptors entered the final possession of this game tied at 120 each.
The problem is when there’s a three-point lead and the trailing team has the ball, or some variation of that. The simplest solution would be to use the End of Elamthat the league experimented with during the 2020 to 2023 All-Star Games — setting a target score after the third quarter, so that teams still have an incentive to try to score and prevent their opponents from scoring, period.
The free throw remains the most efficient way to score, so teams probably wouldn’t be in a position where giving up two free throws would be much better than trying to prevent a 3-point attempt. (For the mathematicians, the league was shooting 78.8 percent from the line before Sunday’s game, meaning two free throws average 1.58 points. At 36.9 percent on 3-point attempts, the average possession that produces a 3 is worth 1.11 points.)
Sadly, the league didn’t even respect Elam’s finish in the All-Star Game, so they’re not going to insert him into the games that matter. Such a drastic change would be akin to Major League Baseball placing a runner on second base to start extra innings, hoping to avoid games that push 16 or 17 innings and decimate pitchers. Adopting the Elam ending would be a fundamental change that would impact how and why points are scored. I understand the conservatism, although it would make the end of games more fun and would certainly limit intentional fouls.
The other main option is to penalize intentional fouls in some or all situations. To specifically eliminate the three foul problem, any intentional foul committed by a winning team in the final 30 seconds of the game would result in their opponent being awarded a free throw and retaining possession. This is how Hollinger imagined a possible interpretation of this philosophy:
“If the offense is in the bonus, a foul committed by the winning team by three points in the last six seconds (or eight or 10, whichever the committee deems appropriate) is equivalent to a shot and the ball is out of bounds.”
This seems simple enough, but it would leave the trailing team to intentionally foul while the leading team couldn’t, which isn’t entirely fair. If it wanted to, the NBA could say that any intentional foul, committed by any team at any time, would result in a free throw and a possession for its opponent. (This would have the welcome, if unintended, consequence of ridding the league of intentional off-game fouls on poor free-throw shooters throughout the game, the Hack-a-Shaqs of the world.) Would that put far too much power in the hands of officials who would have to determine when there is a legitimate play on the ball and when there isn’t? Maybe.
When changing a rule, you need to consider the domino effect and how teams will attempt to game the system in other ways. It is not easy to anticipate the repercussions, although the NBA has sufficient resources and employees to study any issue in depth.
To use a cliché often used in sport, the NBA must keep the essentials. Unintended consequences are likely in the event of a rule change, of course. But Saturday’s Spurs-Thunder game should have been a flawless gem, one of the best games of the season. We should have been able to see what Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama and their teammates tried to do to come out on top, preferably with a solid flow of play and a hard cap on timeouts.
Instead, we saw both teams trudging to the free throw line, capped by an intentionally missed free throw and an arguably missed call. Plus, the whole thing took forever: the last 9.8 seconds of the game lasted almost 12 minutes in real time.
This was a particularly notable example of something that happens regularly. Who wants that?
