Monday, October 20, 2014

It's Free Throws,not game minutes, that is the elephant in the room

    Brooklyn Nets' Coach Lionel Hollins  said it best, shortening  game minutes won't stop teams from riding their best players. Hollins also correctly analyze that shorter game means shorter minutes for bench players.
    In my opinion 44 game minutes  will have damaging effect on stars players. My reasoning is like this 
"in the past Coach B would sub out player D at 6 minutes mark, because the were 6 more minutes in the quarter. Now  at 6 minutes mark there will be only 5 minutes left, this will drive Coach B to keep Player D on the court for one more minutes. The reason is Coach B will want to maximize  his advantage  in a shorter quarter"
    The real issue that NBA has to  look at is free throws. A player can take more than 10 seconds  to do a free throws. If there is 30 free throws in a game, that means  the game is at least 5 minutes longer. Moreover  there is another upside that NBA can get.
    Soccer is the most popular sport in the world. The equivalent of free throw in soccer is penalty kick. Player  who purposely look for a contact in order to get a penalty is generally scorned at by a lot of fans,except of course his team's fans, and will get negative labels from the media.
  I believe NBA shouldn't sacrifice non-star players for the sake of fitting networks' time slots.

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