I came across this article from 2008 http://www.nba.com/analysis/rules_history.html
I came across this article from 2008 http://www.nba.com/analysis/rules_history.html
Last edited by JBDuke; 05-23-2017 at 07:07 PM. Reason: removed copyrighted material
It would be a radical change, but probably would change the game less than when they added the three-point shot.
Pickup games almost everywhere are played to some set number.
I would modify the Elam Ending by putting the ending in place at the end of regulation. Then, play the game to "winning score plus two" and give the winning team the ball first at halfcourt. Keep the 24-, 30-second clock. If the game is tied, start it with a jump ball.
There would still be a big incentive to have the lead at the end of regulation. Having a big lead would be even better so taking 20 seconds off the clock before starting your offense would be less appealing. It would also provide an incentive for the losing team to keep the game as close as possible. It might lessen the debate of whether the winning team should foul when they are on defense with a three point lead. Plus, the game would never be over until it was over.
The bucket that seals the game would be more like a "walk-off" hit in baseball rather than a buzzer beater. "Walk-offs" are also exciting and there would be one every game.
the idea is to not have another end-of-clock scenario, which changes the flow of play a good deal.
frankly i like that the game divides nicely into two halves better than the nba/HS 4Qs. I appreciate that they're trying to maintain that uniqueness while also changing other things. I DO like 1-1...and am not a huge fan of the change overall, but i'd be more upset if they ditched halves.
April 1
This wouldn't work. the whole point of the proposal is to take away the foul to stop the clock scenario. Your proposal would be the worst of both worlds, where you still have to play the last 2 minutes with fould fest like we have now, and then add another possession to it.
Elam has three main points:
- Foul-fests in futile attempts to overcome a lead are awful experiences for the fans.
- Intentional fouling rarely results in a changed outcome. So, the pain is pointless.
- The Elam Ending would solve the problem -- by making the goal the number of points scored and get rid of the game clock (but not the shot clock).
OK. Lots of people on this thread hate #3. I am skeptical but would like to see it tried somewhere.
My main interest in this post (#10,003 on DBR, but who's counting?) is point #2. Here's the excerpt from the Zach Lowe ESPN story:
"...in 397 of 877 nationally televised NBA games from 2014 through the middle of this season ... [t]he trailing team won zero of those games, according to Elam's data.Elam 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. 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. The trailing team won zero of those games, according to Elam's data.
That undersells the effectiveness of the strategy, of course. Elam's sample doesn't include most NBA games. There were a lot of instances in which fouling teams came from behind to tie games, but lost later.
Still: The process was ugly, and it rarely upended outcomes. It didn't seem worth it to Elam. "Comebacks are just so startlingly rare," Elam said. "And the method teams used to get there was so artificial and unsightly." He would devise a better way.
The "foul-fest strategy" worked ZERO times out of 397. Is that really true? Then, maybe we should shoot the losing coach who tries this strategy if it is painful to watch and doesn't change the outcome. I wonder if Elam's data are correct, and what the comparable data are for college hoops.
Sage Grouse
---------------------------------------
'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
I highly doubt it's true. Kansas-Memphis in 2008 and Duke-UNC in 2012 come to mind as examples of where the intentionally foul strategy worked. If I can think of 2 famous games off the top of my head, I'm sure there are tons (probably hundreds) of others in the same timespan.
This is a good split. I hate #3, and I challenge #1 in that several rules changes have been implemented to lessen the effectiveness of fouling as a strategy over the years. Therefore it is shorter and less frequent. This is a good thing; Problem Solved.
For #2, we have some dubious stats of games with "at least one deliberate crunch-time foul". How many times are you allowed to foul before we use the dreaded term "foul fest"? There are "intentional" fouls throughout any given game. Perhaps a team is pressing late in the game, and a guy gets loose and goes one-on-one, and the defender fouls to prevent the layup - that seems like a basketball play to me, not a so-called "deliberate crunch-time foul". I will theorize that a team can foul 2-4 times at the end of a game without wrecking it. Maybe six fouls or more is too much. The stats need to be adjusted accordingly. Like other posters, I call BS on some cooked-up numbers. Perhaps the rate of fouls per minute is a better metric to measure.
I will also posit that many games that we might agree are "foul fests" in the last two minutes were also unwatchable slam-dancing rock fights between teams with inept offenses during the first 38 minutes. (I'm looking at you, Coach John Chaney, no matter how much I miss you and love you. That goes for you too, Huggy Bear. Tom Izzo, Frank Martin - you guys are on the list too, but I won't miss you, and I won't ever love you neither).
Therefore #3 is an attempt to fix a problem that doesn't exist or is at best overblown. Some have compared the #3 solution to pickup, where games are played to 11, 15, 21 or whatever the local rules are. I don't think these people have played very much, or haven't thought it all the way through. Case in point: there is a lunchtime pickup run in my neighborhood that I play sometimes if I have a day off, a doctor's appt, or I'm "working from home" (nudge nudge wink wink). Once in a while, on Fridays, holiday time, etc. there might be more than 20 guys in the gym. If you lose that first game, you know you're not getting back on the court no matter what happens. If you want to see a "foul fest", just wait until the game gets to "next basket wins" on those days. The phrase we often hear is "no autopsy, no foul."
I stand by my original assessment:
1. Make your free throws.
2. Get out of my yard.
Thinking about it some more, I think you;d have to just have the whole game played that way for this to work.
Because with this rule change people are just going to treat the last 2 minutes before the 36 minutes mark like they do now the last 2 minutes of the game. They will do whatever they can to gain an advantage for that first to 7+lead scenario.
I am also highly skeptical of data implying that fouling NEVER works. In fact, it took me about 5 minutes to Google "NBA game winner buzzer beaters" and find two NBA games from March 2017 (Phoenix-Boston and Oklahoma-Orlando) where a trailing team came back to win after their opponent missed a free throw in the last 30 seconds of the game.
That being said, I suspect that most "foul-induced comebacks" occur when a team is only trailing by a couple points. Personally, I find it painful when the final minute of a nominally competitive game takes 10+ minutes of real time because a team repeatedly fouls in the hopes of increasing their chance of winning from 0.1% to 0.3%. The Elam Ending certainly removes the incentive to foul intentionally, so I am curios to see how it works out.
Another option might be to have some form of automatic clock runoff for "excessive fouling". For example, you could run 15 or 20 seconds off the clock if a trailing team commits more than X defensive fouls in the final Y seconds of a game. Perhaps the clock runoff would only occur when the fouling team trails by a certain threshold (more than 3 points?). This would speed games along while allowing some (limited) fouling to enable a comeback (and you would avoid situations where there are 9 fouls in the final 1:01 of a game which never got closer than 5 points).
Do we run off the clock if the leading team fouls too? Up 3 with 10 seconds left foul on purpose - they can make 2 fts but you just caused the game clock to go to zero. - it doubles down on the incentive of the leading team to foul on purpose to avoid a 3pt shot - now they both avoid the 3pt attempt and literally end the game.
Coach K's stall ball tactic would then involve deliberate fouls to maximize the time used in each opponent's possession. The free throws that we give up would be no more damaging than the layups we give up now to avoid stopping the clock with a foul...
The first eleven Elam Ending games are in the books and you can watch replays on ESPN3.
The recaps and most of the boxscores are here, but I wish they had play by play and that we had some measure of how much additional game time was played:
https://www.thetournament.com/news/c...-stars-stripes
https://www.thetournament.com/news/u...lls-just-short
https://www.thetournament.com/news/s...s-bdb-over-atl
https://www.thetournament.com/news/c...harlotte-elite
https://www.thetournament.com/news/r...d-half-big-win
https://www.thetournament.com/news/p...n-philly-dimes
https://www.thetournament.com/news/b...enter-jamboree
https://www.thetournament.com/news/c...l-spot-tbt2017
https://www.thetournament.com/news/t...am-tbt2017-bid
https://www.thetournament.com/news/t...ad-streets-win
https://www.thetournament.com/news/p...dvance-tbt2017
It does sound like the format resulted in some interesting finishes.
Joe Lunardi seems to like what it's done to the games for TBT. Obviously, I realize Lunardi is not universally held in the highest esteem...
Is it time for a different way to end basketball games?
http://www.espn.com/mens-college-bas...losing-minutes
I personally think it should be considered more seriously as well and more than just a gimmick. I can't recall how many times "casual" basketball fans lament me for watching end of games with a team up and the other one fouling constantly. "Is this game over yet?!?" I don't mind the drawn out endings as much, but it might broaden the appeal of end of games to have a system that does not incentive fouling, and there is something "fun" about every game ending with a made basket. (Yes, traditionalists will hate it and you can't win with D at the end I realize).
I thought it was worth trying to see what flaws or complexities emerge from a different type of game ending. Sounds like it worked well and teams played tough, smart basketball to the end of the game. I hate all the BS as the end of both college and NBA games. I'd be for trying this approach. I like the analogy to playground hoops's "Get to 15; win by two." Taking hoops back to its origins? Yes!
Kindly,
Sage
'At the same time I am not eager for a new game metric involving length of game -- we would need a whole new set of shortcuts'
Sage Grouse
---------------------------------------
'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
Apologies if this has been proposed by someone upthread (I haven't read some posts), but there is a fairly simple solution if the trailing team starts the (un)intentional fouling very early. After a certain number of fouls in the last three minutes (or two, or four), take away the three-point shot value from the trailing team. After a couple more fouls (or so), take away the two-shot value and let the trailing team only score one point per made basket.
I like it better than any other option, but then I would, wouldn't I?
Man, if your Mom made you wear that color when you were a baby, and you're still wearing it, it's time to grow up!
Before they shortened the shot clock, there was a mathematical formula somewhere on the web with which you could calculate when a basketball game was "over" (meaning that the trailing team's chances of winning approximated zero). Again, that was when the shot clock was 35 seconds, so it would have to be tweaked, and I'm pretty sure there has been at least one game that went counter to the prediction since then (didn't somebody come back from down 12 with something like a minute and a half left within the last few years?).
Anyway, what I was getting at was what if a computer was constantly crunching the numbers of this tweaked formula and then as soon as the chances of a comeback win reached less than, say, 1 in 10,000, the buzzer just sounded and the victory was awarded to the leading team?
Some games might only last 30 minutes of play. The longer a game lasted, the more competitive it would be. Nobody would have any idea when the game would end. "Good game last night between Kansas and Kentucky; went 39 minutes."
OK, so maybe I was just trying to see if I could come up with a stupider idea than the Elam proposal and it looks like I did, lol.
I think it was Bill James Safe Lead (from my notes):
Take the number of points team is ahead, and subtract three.
Add a half-point if leading team has ball, or subtract a half-point if not
Square the result - if that's greater than the seconds left in the game it's safe
<grumble> 9f </grumble>
-jk
Yep. That was it. Made during the 35-second shot clock.
And of course, a couple of exceptions:
1) Texas A&M, down 12 with 44 seconds left in their game against Northern Iowa, ended up winning. The rule says they should have required 72.25 seconds.
2) Nevada, down 25 points with 1:14 remaining, came back to win in double OT. The rule says they should have required 462.25 seconds (7.7 minutes), but they only required 74 seconds.
The latter is probably the most unlikely/nearly impossible come-back in NCAA basketball history. I know that Oklahoma State was down 31 to LSU at LSU and came away with the victory, but I think the lead reached 31 with well more than 10 minutes remaining. I'm not exactly sure, but it wasn't anywhere near as ridiculous as the Nevada game.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust