Commissioner Adam Silver hasn’t been shy to make drastic changes to the NBA’s rules and format, but one idea he floated earlier this year does not appear to have the support of the league’s players.
In an anonymous NBA players’ survey conducted by The Athletic, players overwhelmingly voted against cutting games to 10-minute quarters, a move that would reduce game time from 48 minutes to 40 minutes. Silver floated a pivot to 10-minute quarters when asked on The Dan Patrick Show in January about the “wildest thing” the league has considered.
Of the 153 players to vote on whether they liked Silver’s idea of cutting the quarter times, 78.4% voted “No” compared to 13.1% who voted “Yes” and 8.5% who were “Undecided.”
Silver said the shorter game time might appeal to “modern television habits.” The NBA’s declining ratings were a central topic at the time of the interview. (Viewership was down double-digits through the first two months of the season but finished down 2%.)
He acknowledged, however, that he is “in the minority” among those in the league office in favor of a shift. Silver said he understands a change in game time would affect statistics and records.
To Three or Not to Three
Some pundits, including Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal, have blamed the rise of three-point shooting as a reason for the declining viewership earlier in the season. “Everybody’s running the same plays,” O’Neal said in November.
Even LeBron James, who is in his 22nd season, has expressed his displeasure with the league’s reliance on threes in this era. “Our game—there’s a lot of fucking threes being shot,” James told reporters in December.
The Athletic’s survey showed players are fairly split in terms of their opinion on the three-point revolution. When asked whether analytics have been good for the NBA, 38.3% of 154 players said it was “Bad,” 28.6% answered “Good,” while the remaining 33.1% were “Somewhere in the middle.”
NBA teams averaged 37.6 three-point attempts per game this year, the most in NBA history, and 7% more than last year (35.1). The defending champion Celtics shot 1,351 threes last year, which, at the time, was the second-most attempts by a team in history. They followed that up by breaking the record this year.
Silver said in January on The Herd with Colin Cowherd that he is aware that there are “very similar offenses” in the NBA. However, he doesn’t want to make any drastic rule changes yet.
“I don’t want to sort of knee-jerk move the three-point line. We’re going through a process now, seeing how these players are adapting to the new rules, and figuring out whatever changes we should make,” Silver said.
He said the simple solution of moving the three-point line farther back may “clog” the paint with players. “That’s not such attractive basketball, either,” Silver said.
