NBA to Experiment With 44-Minute Preseason Game

If you’re like me, then you know that the best thing about League Pass is those Wednesday and Friday nights where there are 10 or 12 or 13 games and you can just keep bouncing around to watch the last four minutes of each one.

One-possession game, four minutes to go. We all live for that crap, right?

Well, this Sunday, NBA is taking those four minutes away. Sort of.

Sunday’s preseason game between the Boston Celtics and Brooklyn Nets at Barclays Center will have a last four minutes. But it will also be just 44 minutes in length as the NBA experiments with a shorter game. 

“At our recent coaches’ meeting, we had a discussion about the length of our games, and it was suggested that we consider experimenting with a shorter format,” NBA president of basketball operations Rod Thorn said in a statement.  “After consulting with our Competition Committee, we agreed to allow the Nets and Celtics to play a 44-minute preseason game in order to give us some preliminary data that will help us to further analyze game-time lengths.”

Quarters will be 11 minutes apiece and a mandatory timeout will be removed from the second and fourth quarters. Each quarter will have two mandatory timeouts inside of seven minutes and inside of three minutes.

What the statement from the league doesn’t say is that the mandatory timeout being removed is the one that was inserted in order to recoup lost advertising revenue after the NBA returned from the 1998 lockout, one of the many factors that has lengthened games in the first place. The advent of replay is certainly another.

“I thought it was a unique experiment that was worth participating in,” Nets coach Lionel Hollins said in the statement.  “I’m looking forward to gauging its impact on the flow of the game.  Since there is a shorter clock, it affects playing time, so it’ll be interesting to see how it plays into substitution patterns.”

It’s not like we haven’t seen this before. FIBA games are 40 minutes and last right around two hours. And Hollins mentioning that the shorter clock will affect playing time would carry more weight if playing time weren’t already being affected by the fact that Sunday’s game doesn’t count.

A better place to try this out would be the D-League, which has become the NBA’s laboratory in recent years with changes to playoff seeding and free throws.

From a purist’s standpoint, the main reason why NBA games should remain 48 minutes is for the sanctity of the game’s history and all of its records and milestones. But it is obvious that as far as changes go, just about anything is on the table under new NBA commissioner Adam Silver.

However, if the league really wants to shorten games – or, perhaps, the length of the overall experience of attending or watching a game – here are a few suggestions:

1. When the ticket says the game starts at 7 p.m., start the game at 7 p.m., not at 7:11 p.m.

2. Pass a league-wide mandate limiting the length of pregame introductions to three minutes for both teams.

3. Continue to get players on and off the court quickly. This has not been perfect but it has gotten better.

4. Enforce the 10-second free throw rule.

5. Permanently abolish the first timeout in the second and fourth quarters. A wonderful fringe benefit will be game flow.

6. Prohibit the same team from calling consecutive timeouts.

7. After each team has taken its mandatory fourth-quarter timeout, make every remaining timeout no longer than 30 seconds.

8. Require any replay not occurring at the end of a quarter to be made via challenge, with each team receiving two. If the challenging team is wrong, it loses a timeout.