http://basketball.realgm.com/wiretap/244575/NBA-Wants-To-Speed-Up-End-Of-Games Adam Silver says the NBA would like to speed up the end of games, with a focus on retaining younger fans who "have increasingly short attention spans." "It's something that I know all of sports are looking at right now, and that is the format of the game and the length of time it takes to play the game," Silver said. "Obviously people, particularly millennials, have increasingly short attention spans, so it's something as a business we need to pay attention to." The final 24 seconds of last week's game between the Rockets and Thunder took nearly nine minutes to finish. "When the last few minutes of the game take an extraordinary amount of time, sometimes it's incredibly interesting for fans, other times it's not," Silver said. "The short answer to your question is we are going to take a fresh look at the format, specifically in the last two minutes." Silver said the NBA's competition committee reviews such matters and takes them to the league's full board of owners. "It's something that we track very closely," Silver said. "In the league office we time out every game, we know exactly how much time each possession takes and, again, we can also look at minute-by-minute ratings, so we know at what point fans are potentially tuning out as well."
As someone who regularly stays up til 1:30 AM on consecutive nights to watch barn burners, I say about damn time. I do like FIBA's 2 hrs and done scenario. But there is some truth to built up anticipation when there are more timeouts, etc. Need some balance between 3.5 hr playoff snoozefests and the 2hr FIBA games. I like the rule FIBA has about not allowing timeouts when you don't have possession -- it adds to the intrigue. One rule that needs to go into play ASAP is disallowing timeouts to be called immediately after a timeout. But the biggest issue has been all these unnecessary reviews.
I don't mind the review but there needs to be a time limit. It is either obvious right away or just go with what was called on the court. Nothing will every be 100% right but if you can't tell from 5-10 seconds of replay, move on.
Maybe make the 20 second timeouts last 20 seconds. Make all timeouts in the final 30 seconds 20 second timeouts.
Ive been suggesting this for a while but to me a place you could drastically speed up the game is with free throws. Nothing worse than watching 30-50 free throws in a game My solution Players shoot their first free throw if they make it they get the two points and don't have to shoot the 2nd, if it's double bonus and they miss the first they get a 2nd free worth 1 point. This would drastically change the game and speed it up. Would love to see a stat showing how much time in a game is watching free throws
TBS Speeds up SEINFELD by 7.5% to Add 2 More Minutes of Commercials http://collider.com/tbs-speeds-up-seinfeld/
