The Basketball Tournament experiments with new crunch time rules

The strategy of intentional fouling late in games rarely has become an aesthetic burden, but The Basketball Tournament will try a new approach.

Intentional fouling by the trailing team, to stop the clock and extend a fairly close game, is common practice in the NBA and college basketball. The strategy never seems to accomplish much, other than creating a slow slog for fans to experience amid continuous parades to the foul line.

Rules could be expanded to eliminate or at least de-incentivize the idea behind intentional fouling, but that could be a slippery slope. There’s a plan out there to fix the drag of crunch time in basketball, and it will be used in a small setting this summer.

ESPN’s Zach Lowe has written a long piece featuring Nick Elam, a middle school principal from Dayton, Ohio, and his idea to fix crunch time in basketball games.

Elam’s research found that at least one intentional foul was committed in crunch time of 397 out of 877 national televised NBA games from 2014 through the middle of this season. How many trailing teams won those games? Zero. It’s far from a perfect science, but Elam’s data shows how fruitless intentional fouling can be.

Elam then settled on a fairly radical approach to expediting crunch time basketball.

"Elam landed on something more radical: eliminate the game clock from crunch time. Under Elam’s proposal, the clock would vanish after the first stoppage under the three-minute mark in the NBA and the four-minute mark in NCAA games. Officials would establish a target score by taking the score of the leading team and adding seven points — then restart the game without a clock. The team that reaches that target score first wins.In simpler terms: If the Clippers lead the Jazz 99-91 when Rudy Gobert hacks DeAndre Jordan with 2:55 left, the game then becomes a race to 106 points. Utah must outscore the Clippers 15-6 to win."

The Basketball Tournament is a $2 million, 64-team, winner-take-all, single elimination tournament entering its fourth year this summer. Founder and CEO Jonathan Mugar received the PowerPoint presentation Elam sent out laying out his idea, but was initially hesitant about it.

But this year’s edition of the Basketball Tournament will implement Elam’s rule over the final four minutes of every play-in game for teams competing for the final four spots. That will be 12 games in all, and Lowe further reported the games will be streamed.

Apparently, the NBA will be watching how Elam’s idea is executed in those games. Consider these quotes from executive vice president of basketball operations Kiki Vandeweghe.

"“You know what?” Kiki Vandeweghe, the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball operations, remarked to ESPN.com this week. “That is really interesting. Honestly, that is a really creative idea.”"

"“We will definitely watch it,” Vandeweghe said. “We’ll look at all of the data and see what comes out of it.”"

Next: NBA Draft Big Board: Post-tournament edition

Any idea to keep the pace of basketball games from bogging down late is worth exploring. I’ve been an advocate for specifics regarding time left and margin when it comes to intentional fouling in crunch time, but taking away the clock could accomplish the same thing.