Adam Silver Needs To Relax After Floating The Idea Of The NBA Changing From 12 To 10 Minute Quarters

David Dow. Getty Images.

I'm not sure if it's recency bias or what, but this season more than ever it feels like people are bending themselves over backwards trying to figure out "how to save the NBA" when in fact as I've blogged many times this season if you were actually watching the NBA every night you'd see that it's a wildly entertaining product pretty much every single night regardless of the matchup.

(cue the "all they do is jack 3s!!!" response)

Limiting 3PT shooting attempts, changing the court, making dunks 3 points, it's all a bit overkill and frankly, all of those ideas stink. 

But we don't need to go back and forth about that for the 1000th time on the blog. Instead, what I'd like to focus on is what the Commissioner himself said today about some potential changes he'd be interested in entertaining a conversation around

I know, 6:20 is a tad long, but if you're interested in this sort of thing I recommend giving it a listen. 

When it comes to the idea of changing quarters from 12 minutes to 10 minutes, that tells me that Silver continues to miss the point when it comes to the quality of his product. It's not a 3pt shooting issue (as he later explains), and it has nothing to do with games being 48 minutes long compared to 40. As he says in the clip, nobody in arenas is asking for the games to be shorter, it drastically changes records and league history, and frankly even watching on TV it's not even a huge deal. 

I get the idea of thinking outside the box and looking at every angle on an ongoing basis to help push the league forward, but this is going a tad too far for my liking. If you want to be more like FIBA or entertain bringing some of their play to the NBA, there are plenty of ways to adapt that game to the current NBA format. Bring in the FIBA level of physicality, bring in the rules where players can touch the ball on the rim, things like that help your product, and don't screw around with something that doesn't need to be adjusted.

The pace of the actual gameplay isn't even remotely an issue right now, so I'm not sure what this even solves? If you want games to be shorter, there's a much easier solution to that problem than changing how long quarters are. How about you figure out the review process? That is MUCH more of an issue where games continue to stop and reviews take forever. It completely ruins the flow of the game.

What does that all stem back to? The biggest problem in the NBA that Adam Silver and the league office refuse to address or fix: Their officiating.

If we're talking about changes, let's start and stop there. Not only do refs singlehandedly ruin the flow of games and impact results because they get their in their feelings after a bad call, but their horrendous decisions/calls are what spark all the reviews in the first place, which makes games take longer. Solve the ref problem and everything else drastically improves.

If the thinking is that maybe shorter quarters and shorter games would lead to more players actually playing, I'm not sure I buy that logic either. I'd also say the same thing when people talk about cutting down the number of games in a season. No team is going to change their process of player availability at this point. Teams are going to selectively rest and load manage players whether the season is 82 games or 60 games. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed in my opinion. To me it doesn't matter how many games there are during the regular season, teams are always going to care more about health for a playoff run and making sure their stars make it to that part of the season in one piece. So making games 40 minutes compared to 48 minutes does nothing to reverse that.

I don't want to tell Silver how to do his job, but I think anyone who watches the NBA on a nightly basis will tell you nobody gives a shit about how long quarters are. Enough of that bullshit and get back to solving these problems

1. The officiating issue

2. The League Pass and the game accessibility/blackout issue

That's it. There's no need to do anything about 3pt shooting, you don't need to redesign the courts, you don't need to change the point value of certain shots, you don't need to make games shorter, just take care of those two things and call it a day.