NBA commissioner Adam Silver contrasts with his predecessor, David Stern, in being willing to muck up the system with radical changes to the product the National Basketball Association puts out.
Examples include his implementation of the NBA play-in tournament before the playoffs and his creation of the NBA in-season tournament, now known as the NBA Cup.
Long before those two things came to fruition, they were simply ideas, and the commissioner has another radical idea that, if it goes into effect, would change one of the rules of the game that has been in place since the very first NBA game was played in 1946.
“And I am a fan of four 10-minute quarters. I’m not sure that many others are. I mean, putting aside what it means for records and things like that, I think that a two-hour format for a game is more consistent with modern television habits.
“People in arenas aren’t asking us to shorten the game. But I think as a television program, being two hours… Olympic basketball is two hours, college basketball, of course, is 40 minutes.”
Silver admitted it would be a dramatic change and cited Major League Baseball making a dramatic change of its own recently to increase the pace of play, such as a pitch clock, trips to the mound, and the number of pick-off attempts.
Those MLB changes have led to shorter games and have been almost universally applauded, which likely plays a role in Silver, at least considering shorter NBA games.
The NBA is an outlier when it comes to having a 48-minute game, as essentially the rest of the amateur, professional, and international basketball worlds use 40-minute games.
He cited Olympic basketball (FIBA) and college basketball (NCAA), but other leagues also use either 10-minute quarters or 20-minute halves to reach 40 minutes. The WNBA is among them, as is the EuroLeague, which is viewed as the top basketball league outside of the NBA.
Sports fans, in general, and basketball fans, specifically, often cite many things when complaining about the NBA product. However, the length of games usually isn’t one of them.
Silver points out, though, that one of those most popular complaints—the load management of star players—could be indirectly affected by the shortening of games, as it means less court time for all players.
“Incidentally, if you went to a 40-minute game, with the minutes around load management and resting, it would be the equivalent of—I don’t know the exact math—taking like 15 games off the season,” Silver estimated.
“And I don’t think most fans would be disappointed if it was a two-hour presentation instead of a… our game is actually about two hours and 15 minutes now.”
Silver wasn’t far off with his estimation, as chopping eight minutes off an 82-game schedule reduces playing time by 656 minutes per team in a given season. That equates to 13.7 games off a current NBA schedule, which certainly would have a huge effect on rest and recovery time for players.
What Patrick and Silver didn’t bring up was if this potential reduction of time on the court would lead to a reduction of revenue generated by the league with fewer commercials.
Not the First Time
This isn’t the first time the idea of changing NBA quarter length has been brought up, but it’s the first time a commissioner has publicly floated altering them.However, that idea never became more than an idea, and the league has remained at 48-minute games and 12-minute quarters since its inception.
