A miserable parade of free throws ruins the finale between the Celtics and Cavaliers, and here’s how the NBA can fix this problem

The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Boston Celtics 115-111 on Sunday in what should have been, and easily could have been, exciting fashion. With his Cavs trailing by five points with just over three minutes left, Donovan Mitchell proceeded to rattle off three 3-pointers and 11 points over the next two minutes. But instead of ending the game on that high note, we were subjected to the all-too-familiar and downright torturous conclusion of seeing 17 free throws made in the final 34 seconds, which, in real time, lasted almost half an hour.

It was the last piece of evidence admitted in the case against traditional timed basketball finishes. Or, put another way, in the case for the Elam Ending, which eliminates the running clock four minutes into the fourth quarter. From that point on, the game is played with a target score of seven points higher than the leading team’s total.

For example, if Team A is beating Team B 104-100 with four minutes left, the clock stops and the game becomes a race to 111 points.

From an entertainment standpoint, it’s a no-brainer. Not only does it guarantee a winning shot, but more importantly, it removes any incentive for the trailing team to commit an intentional foul, as more free throws would only provide the winning team with an opportunity to get closer to the final total.

We’ve seen the end of Elam in a couple of NBA All-Star Games and has been used for years in the Basketball Tournament, created by Jon Mugar. Who explained the logic behind Elam’s ending? to James Herbert of CBS Sports before his NBA appearance at the 2020 All-Star Game.

“Yeah [James] Naismith invented the game 130 years ago with Elam Ending and someone came along 130 years later and tried to implement the timed ending, it would be like the biggest, most massive flop of all time, with players hitting each other, it was all going to work. the free throw line. Fans would storm out after a game and say, ‘This is the dumbest thing ever,'” Mugar said.

Why the NBA should implement the Elam Ending

Now listen, I love to hyperbolize. I’m quite prone to applying the label “the dumbest thing in the world” to things that are, in fact, not the dumbest thing in the world. But in this case, choosing to suck all the life out of what should be tremendously exciting endings to basketball games with a parade of 14 free throws over 15 seconds that end up taking 20 minutes to play is, in basketball terms, literally the right thing to do. dumbest that ever existed.

Someday the NBA, and the world in general, will realize that “that’s the way it’s always been done” is no reason to continue doing anything. We used to have cars without seat belts. That was nonsense. We put on our seat belts. That was smart. Let’s also put the end of Elam.

That said, I realize that so-called traditionalists are highly unlikely to accept, much less implement, an idea as seemingly radical as the end of Elam any time soon. But for now, is it too much to ask to legislate this intentional foul when three stupid things are missing from the end-game equation?

Have we forgotten that this is all about entertainment? All of this. Owners, players, coaches, executives, trainers, shoe companies, television networks, and literally everyone who reaps financial rewards from the NBA basketball business do so solely on the basis of entertainment. And there are few things more entertaining than a game-tying three-pointer in the final seconds.

After Payton Pritchard hit a deep 3-pointer to cut Cleveland’s lead to one with 17.2 seconds left, the dirty play began. Boston fouled Cleveland, who Elam Ending would eliminate, and after Darius Garland made both of his free throws, Cleveland fouled his own (intentional) so Boston didn’t have a chance to tie the game with a three-pointer.

And so the parade continued, back and forth, intentional foul after intentional foul, whistle after whistle, until finally, with no more time to manipulate, Pritchard was forced to miss a free throw on purpose. He shot a bullet from the front of the rim in hopes of getting his own rebound. It almost worked, but he was called for a violation for crossing the line before the ball made contact with the rim.

This is how the game finally ended, thankfully, with a series of tricks: intentional fouls and intentionally missed shots in hopes of manipulating the outcome of a game that should have (and easily) could They have ended in a much more dramatic way.

After Garland’s two free throws with 14.2 seconds left, the Celtics had three more possessions with a shot to tie the game with a three-pointer, only they never had a chance to shoot a three-pointer. Fans who pay big (and often obscene) money to watch these games were stripped of that climactic conclusion and instead subjected to a free throw contest.

How the NBA could easily legislate late-game fouls

It would be very easy to get rid of this garbage. The league has successfully legislated a ban on fouling (when defenses purposely commit fouls to stop fast breaks) in the pure interest of entertainment, and it was the right thing to do. The league has largely done the same with failure, which is now punished, or at least not rewarded, relatively consistently.

The next change has to be recovering the three-pointer that tied the game. We still see them because coaches are programmed to fear the worst-case scenarios, which in this case would be a four-point play. But those who can resist their own paranoia know that fouling (before the shot, of course) with a three-point lead in the final seconds is almost always the smart play from a competitive standpoint.

That’s why the league has to take an unwise move. It’s not my job to figure out how to do it, but it’s actually pretty simple. With less than 24 seconds left in a three-point game, if you foul the ball outside the 3-point line, whether on the shot or on the ground, that’s three free throws.

If you commit a foul away from the ball and manage to manipulate the “hacking a player” rules that are supposed to already exist to prevent that from happening, the offensive team, just like in soccer, has the right to reject the foul . and taking the ball out of bounds instead of taking free throws.

He fouls twice in a row without the ball and it is a technical foul, which is a free throw plus possession. That’s all you need to stop teams from fouling when they’re up by three and give fans the exciting finishes they deserve for the money they’re paying.

This is a problem that the NBA must solve

Basketball is the only sport where, at these specific, crucial points in games, actions that are supposed to be detrimental to a team’s goal of winning (such as fouls and missed free throws) actually become in blessings. In football, if you are down by six points with one second left on the clock, the defense cannot take away your opportunity to throw one more pass into the end zone in hopes of tying the game by committing a penalty. All it will do is move the offense. intimately to the end zone.

In football, if a penalty is given but the referee sees that the offense had an advantage, the referee will signal the foul but play will be allowed to continue to a natural stopping point so as not to punish offenses that have gained an advantage. and, more importantly, not stopping an entertaining moment cold.

This is, and has long been, a unique and significant problem in basketball. It’s time to fix it. Elam’s ending would be a panacea, but until then, it’s very simple: if you are losing three with the ball, you will have a chance to tie the game.

The NBA needs to make sure this happens by punishing intentional fouls the same way it does fouls. The ending of this Boston-Cleveland game was an embarrassment, plain and simple, and the league should be embarrassed by how long it’s taking to even acknowledge the problem, let alone take simple steps to fix it.