Dumping Them Out: Basketball is Broken

Welcome back to another episode of Dumping Them Out. The time of the week where I sometimes aimlessly, sometimes pointedly, dump my thoughts out into a blog. When I first started this blog nearly 3 years ago I wanted to call it Sunday Sentences. But I was told that my thoughts weren't interesting enough, and nobody would read them. So then I changed it to Dumping Them Out and added a bunch of Boob GIFs between my thoughts. Then it was good enough to be published. I learned an important lesson about blogging that day. Which is that quite literally any person with a halfway basic understating of the English language, and can execute a Google search for "Boob GIFs", can easily do this job.

Now that I've been watching college basketball for a few weeks, and am once again a college basketball expert, I think I'm qualified enough to give this take. The sport of basketball is clearly broken. The whole thing. I don't know how basketball has allowed itself to get to this point. I don't know how basketball fans have come to accept certain things as part of their sport. I started to see some people finally speak up last weekend at the conclusion of the Arizona-Oregon game. When in the final minute, Arizona perfectly executed the "foul up 3" strategy. Which is both an objectively smart strategy, and an objectively awful way to end a tightly contested basketball game.

But fouling up 3 is only the tip of the ice berg. It's the symptom of a way bigger problem, that for some reason nobody else sees as a problem. Basketball as a whole just accepts fouling at the end of games as good basketball strategy. The way the rules are written, it's obviously the smart thing to do. But it's insane to me how the first 95% of all basketball games are played one way. The way basketball was designed to be played (i.e. the offense tries to score and the defense tries to stop them). But when it gets down to crunch time, the most important time of the game, the game just changes completely. The team who's trailing stars fouling as soon as the ball is inbounded. Instead of having to run an offense, the team who's leading has to win a free throw contest. It sucks to watch. The last minute of the game is stretched out into 20-minutes of real time. There's maybe 5 seconds of action at a time between whistles. CBS makes millions of dollars in commercial breaks in 1-minute of gameplay. Sometimes it all culminates in a thrilling buzzer-beater finish. But more often than not, the game just kinda peters out. And even when we do get that exciting finish, the road to get there is painful.

Basketball has been that way for so long that people don't even question it. It's so engrained into the sport that I'm the one who comes off sounding like a fucking idiot for pointing out how backwards it is. But if you take a step back and think about what's actually happening, I don't know how you could see it anyway else. There's no world (in any sport) where committing a foul/penalty should be beneficial for your team. If that is the case in your sport, then there's something wrong with your sport. There's no way fouling at the ends of games is what the inventors of basketball had envisioned. It's a loophole in the rules. A loophole that people figured out many decades ago, but nobody bothered to nip it in the bud, so eventually it became the norm.

With a game clock that counts down to zero, I'm not sure how they could prevent this from happening. If basketball instituted harsher punishments for late game fouls to make fouling when trailing not worth it, then games would just end with the winning team in a four-corners offense, passing the ball around and running out the clock. That sucks too. I sometimes wonder if basketball could implement a continuation rule the way soccer does. If an offensive player is fouled as he's passing the ball, but still completes the pass. Or if he's fouled in the process of successful dribbling out of a trap. The offense shouldn't have to stop their possession if they're able to hold onto the ball. That doesn't necessarily fix the free throw contest problem, but it at least forces the defense to actually make a play, instead of just lightly grabbing their opponents waist and getting a whistle. 

But if the goal is to stop basketball games from turning into a different sport at the end of the game (which I think it should be), then there actually is a great solution. The Elam Ending. They use in the TBT basketball tournament. With 4 minutes left in the clock, a target score is set that's 8 points higher than the leading team's current total (ex. if with 4 min left in the game, it's Duke 75 - North Carolina 65… the clock turns off and the first team to 83 wins). With the Elam Ending, there's no free throw contest. The winning team has to close out the game by running an offense and playing actual basketball. But the Elam Ending has problems too. It eliminates the traditional buzzer beater. Walk-off baskets are still very much in play, but not having literal buzzer beaters is a tough swallow. It also occasionally results in walk-off free throws.

Which isn't the most thrilling conclusion to a game. But I still think the Elam Ending is the best solution. The #1 thing I'd love to see basketball get rid of is fouling as a viable strategy. It's just so fundamentally backwards. It drives me crazy how we all just accept it as smart basketball, and don't view it as a blatant problem with the rules that needs fixing. The last couple minutes of basketball games can be so brutal to watch. But at this point, that's what basketball is. I don't think it's ever going to change. It's one of many things that happens in basketball that doesn't seem to be in the spirit of competition. More than any other sport, basketball is ripe for loopholes. For example, there are still high school basketball teams (in states where shot clocks still don't exist) who will hold the basketball for entire quarters to shorten the game. 

Then you have other things like offensive players intentionally going out of their way to initiate contact for and-one opportunities. That seems backwards to me too. The act of taking a charge on defense is pretty silly as well. It's weird that defenders are encouraged to plant their feet and get steamrolled by a driving player to draw a foul, instead of attempting to make a play on the ball. But they have to, because if a defender even slightly grazes the ball handler's arm, he's going to the foul line. There are way too many fouls in general. Just because a defender exists within 10 feet of the rim when someone makes a layups, doesn't mean you have to give an and-one. Refs could call half as many fouls as they do, and the game would be perfectly fine. The sheer number of whistles is absurd. I'm sorry, I know I'm just yelling at a cloud at this point. But every year at this time when I get locked into basketball, I can't help but notice all these things that seem like glaring issues. Idk. Maybe I just don't like basketball. Or maybe I'm the only who likes basketball, and actually wants them to take the necessary steps to improve their sports. Somebody has to do it. Fix your sport basketball. I promise you can make it better.