A few days ago I was channel surfing and ended up watching the final tedious few minutes of a basketball game. It was at the point where the losing team was doing the intentional foul thing in a last-ditch effort to make a comeback. “Does that ever work?” I muttered. Now I have an answer:
Nick Elam, a 34-year-old middle school principal from Dayton, Ohio…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.
What a waste. Elam has a provocative proposal about how to fix this, but it’s far too radical for the NBA to consider. After all, the league’s boffins won’t even consider changing the intentional foul rule or limiting timeouts. If they can’t bring themselves to make modest changes like that, what are the odds of ever doing something serious about the final two minutes of basketball games, which are widely considered the most tedious 20 minutes in all of sports?
On the bright side, at least basketball’s final two minutes are still better than soccer’s tie-breaking shootout—which is basically just a fancy way of flipping a coin. Personally, I’d make them keep playing until the players start collapsing on the pitch—and then leave them there until somebody finally scores a goal. Maybe that would motivate them.
