As you explain that you've heard about another solution to what seems an intractable problem, you can see the eyes begin to roll: "Oh, great. Responses today from league officials and team higher-ups tend to follow the same pattern. "We couldn't do it in the NBA, but it could be fun in the D-League." (Cuban verified the email in an exchange with last week.) "It's actually a great idea," Mark Cuban emailed Elam in 2012.
I knew it would be hard to gain favor."Ī few higher-ups - including NBA GMs and TV announcers - replied that they liked the idea, but it would never fly. In 2007, Elam starting sending his proposal to every connection he had in the basketball world. (This is not dissimilar from how Danny Biasone chose the length of the 24-second clock.) He tinkered with more mathematically complex methods of calculating the target score, even some that would vary from game to game, but ultimately found that basic worked better. He chose seven points because it amounts to about 1/16th of a typical team's per-game scoring output, just as three minutes amounts to 1/16th of an NBA game.
Most games would end in baskets - exciting! They would have to play real two-way basketball, and play it really, really well over a condensed period. A trailing team could never use that strategy under Elam's system they would be giving away points to a rival that needed only seven to win. The start-and-stop hacking at the end of close games isn't basketball. He loves basketball, and he would like to see more of it. Utah must outscore the Clippers 15-6 to win. 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. The team that reaches that target score first wins. 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. 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. (Others have suggested letting teams pick their foul shooter as a way of dissuading opponents from grabbing Dwight Howard types.) None of them presented trailing teams with a better alternative to fouling.Įlam landed on something more radical: eliminate the game clock from crunch time.
He knew about the most common solutions: harsher penalties for intentional fouls, or allowing hacked teams to take the ball out of bounds instead of shooting free throws. "And the method teams used to get there was so artificial and unsightly." He would devise a better way. "Comebacks are just so startlingly rare," Elam said. Still: The process was ugly, and it rarely upended outcomes. There were a lot of instances in which fouling teams came from behind to tie games, but lost later. Elam's sample doesn't include most NBA games. That undersells the effectiveness of the strategy, of course. The trailing team won zero of those games, according to Elam's data. Elam found at least one deliberate crunch-time foul from trailing teams in 397 of 877 nationally televised NBA games from 2014 through the middle of this season, according to a PowerPoint presentation he has sent across the basketball world. Oklahoma City's win was remarkable to Elam because the Thunder's deliberate fouling worked.Įlam has tracked thousands of NBA, college, and international games over the last four years and found basketball's classic comeback tactic - intentional fouling - almost never results in successful comebacks. The final 20.9 seconds of regulation lasted 10 minutes and three seconds in real time.Įlam, a Mensa member, has devoted most of his spare time since 2004 to solving the slog of NBA crunch time. The Thunder, trailing the entire fourth quarter, fouled twice in the last 30 seconds to prolong the game before Westbrook's leaning 3-pointer tied it with 7.1 seconds remaining. Nick Elam, a 34-year-old middle school principal from Dayton, Ohio, watched it with annoyance - and then excitement - for very different reasons. If fans remember Oklahoma City's improbable comeback in Orlando last Wednesday, it will be as the capstone of Russell Westbrook's wild, screaming, relentless MVP case. NBA watching The Basketball Tournament's innovative approach to crunch time
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