Hardwood Paroxysm: How we’d fix the NBA

End the timeout scourge

By Miles Wray (@mileswray)

The story feels like a rough draft that was rejected by The Onion: rumor has it that the NBA is considering making free throws worth two points each, with one free throw per foul, in an effort to shorten ever-ballooning game durations. It’s a hilariously/tragically misguided premise: that the NBA would rather alter the fundamental competitive fabric of the game instead of simply cutting down on the overwhelming amount of flow-stopping commercial breaks.

For once, here is something the NFL is doing right: by assigning each team three timeouts per half, which don’t carry over from half to half, the simplicity of NFL timeouts is easy to comprehend, and adds inherent drama to the competition itself. If a quarterback has to call timeout early in the third quarter because the play clock is winding down and his team is not yet set up, the interruption carries consequences and dramatic weight. Now that team is limited to two timeouts for any potential closing-minute drive, when clock management is as important as any amount of athletic skill.

Compare to when an NBA coach calls timeout in the third quarter in order to “stop the bleeding” of the other team’s run. It doesn’t mean anything. NBA coaches have a seemingly endless amount of timeouts at their disposal, and so their interruption is just an interruption. The consequences of that early timeout on the end-game scenario are so small as to be nil.

Yes, the NFL has a debilitating amount of commercial breaks throughout the game. But consider: those breaks come between possessions (i.e., right after a punt), when there is a semi-natural break in the game anyhow. The NBA game is stopped at totally arbitrary points in the middle of flow — the schedule of commercials is dictated by the game clock, meaning that a ball going out of bounds is a simple in-bounds play or a three-minute break, depending only on where the game clock is. These un-natural breaks already function as time-outs for the coaches. They don’t need much more than that, and they’d stay in the game in order to give players a chance to rest. They’d simply no longer be charged to one team or another in a convoluted, unnecessary system.

So, if I were commissioner, the first thing I would do is give NBA teams two 30-second timeouts per half. Coaches can still “stop the bleeding” early in halves, but now that decision has a significant impact on that team’s ability to control the ball and clock at the end of the half. Even though there would be a break in the game, that break is now weighted with competitive consequences. In the closing minutes of close games, coaches will have to be smart and diligent with their timeout usage, instead of being able to blindly call timeout with each new possession — a factor that slows many a thrilling conclusion to a grinding halt.

This is, like, a painfully obvious way to improve the game. An NBA game could easily last 90 minutes if breaks were deployed responsibly, instead of constantly, as they are now. Come on.