An all-star idea for overhauling basketball
The new scoring format for the NBA All-Star Game on Sunday at the United Center hints at a great idea for making basketball much more fun to watch.
The exhibition will be, in effect, four games in one. Each of the first three quarters will start with the score 0-0, and the winning team after 12 minutes will earn $100,000 for a designated charity. For the final, untimed quarter, the starting score will be based on the cumulative score of the first three quarters, and the first team to reach a target score equal to 24 more points than the leading team started the quarter with will be declared the winner of the overall game and earn $200,000 for a designated charity.
Sounds complicated, but it’s really not. The FAQ at the league’s website offers this clear example, “If the cumulative score of the first three quarters is 100-95, the final target score would be set at 124 points.”
Why 24? It was the number the late superstar Kobe Bryant wore at the end of his career, and, happily, it’s similar to the target score you might find at a pickup game at your local gym.
The advantage to the untimed, pickup game format — used in the vast majority of informal basketball contests ever played — is that it eliminates tedious, strategic, end-game clock management that includes repeated deliberate fouling and the calling of numerous timeouts. And, as in untimed baseball games, the format means that no team is out of it until the game is over.
The NBA would do well to experiment with target-score games and the idea of multiple shorter games in the place of single long games.
The first half of a typical NBA game is mostly ground-pawing. Even the third quarter often feels like merely a warm up for the final stanza, when huge leads can vanish as the teams buckle down for the sometimes thrilling conclusion. Games are sprints disguised as marathons. Watch the highlight reel and the last five minutes or so and you’ve missed nothing, which may be part of the reason the league is experiencing a TV ratings slump this season.
Replacing single games consisting of four, 12-minute quarters with, say, three untimed games up to 40 points (gotta win by 3!) would make for a vastly improved fan experience both in the arena and at home.
Keep the 24-second shot clock so the game doesn’t bog down. Two timeouts per game per team. Shoot to see who gets the ball first.
That’s basketball as it’s meant to be played.
Nevah say ‘Ne-vah-da’
Every four years, voters in Nevada caucus to choose a presidential nominee and during the run-up, people all across the country mispronounce the name of the state.
As we approach next Saturday’s quadrennial caucus, don’t forget that natives say “Ne-vad-a,” with the short a vowel sound. A good way to remember the correct pronunciation is to think of your dad gambling at Caesar’s Palace.
Or instead remember the object lesson provided in 2016 by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. “Heroin overdoses are surging and meth overdoses in Ne-vah-da,” he said during an October campaign speech in Reno “Ne-vah-da,” he repeated. “Nobody says it the other way. It has to be Ne-vah-da, right?”
Wrong. He ended up losing the state to Hillary Clinton by nearly two and half percentage points. Hah-hah.
Vindman, Yovanovitch and Kravis deserve Presidential Medal of Freedom
On her (or his) first day in office — heck, in the inaugural speech — the next Democratic president ought to drape the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, both of whom paid a heavy professional price for not enabling Trump’s effort to use public money to extort a foreign government for his private political gain..
Both testified against Trump during the House impeachment inquiry. Vindman was recently stripped of his job as director for European Affairs for the United
States National Security Council and marched out of the White House, while Yovanovitch had earlier been recalled from her position as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine evidently because she was standing in the way of the Trump administration’s corrupt scheme.
At the same time, the next Democratic president should confer the honor on Jonathan Kravis, the assistant U.S. attorney in Washington who resigned as a federal prosecutor Tuesday after higher-ups in the U.S. Justice Department overruled his team’s recommendation for a stiff sentence for longtime Trump friend Roger Stone. Stone was found guilty of making false statements, obstruction and witness tampering related to a congressional investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and the prosecution team was recommending a prison sentence of from seven to nine years.
Trump tweeted about the “miscarriage of justice,” in Stone’s case, and shortly thereafter, came word from Attorney General Bill Barr’s office that the sentencing recommendation was “extreme, excessive and grossly disproportionate.”
All four line prosecutors resigned from the case almost immediately, and all deserve praise. But Kravis, the only one to quit altogether, has earned the Medal of Freedom (even though, admittedly, Trump thoroughly debased the honor earlier this month by awarding it to vicious conservative radio gasbag Rush Limbaugh).
Trump’s response to the resignations was predictably splenetic and paranoid. He tweeted, “Who are the four prosecutors (Mueller people?) who cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9-year prison sentence to a man that got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam, and shouldn’t ever even have started? 13 Angry Democrats?”
Maybe U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will also find herself festooned with a medal on that happy Inauguration Day. She’ll pass sentence on Stone, and is certainly aware of Trump’s ominous interference in the process as well the federal sentencing guidelines that resulted in the seven- to nine-year recommendation.
Duty demands that Jackson, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, ignore the effort by Trump and his lackeys to minimize the crimes of the oleaginous Stone, even though she knows — don’t we all? — that Trump will ultimately pardon him no matter what sentence he gets.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was “The State of the Union speech is perhaps the greatest example of a meeting that could have been an email,” by @ProperlyZuri.
The poll appears at chicagotribune.com/zorn, and you can receive an alert when it’s posted by signing up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune.com/newsletters.