Ever since the birth of the NBA, the league has made use of 12-minute quarters, making the world’s most popular professional basketball league an anomaly of sorts – very few other leagues have quarters that last that long, as FIBA rules only mandate 10-minute quarters in a basketball game. But it looks like the league may be considering shortening the game by four minutes overall, as the Boston Celtics and Brooklyn Nets will be playing a 44-minute preseason game with 11-minute quarters Sunday.
For the meantime, this will be done on a purely experimental basis – it’s going to be a one-time deal for the NBA, at least for now. But a recent NBA coaches meeting included game length as one of the main talking points, and some present did suggest that the league shorten games a bit.
“We have looked at everything that we do and are taking a fresh look at all the different things we do,” said Rod Thorn, NBA president of basketball operations. “One of the things that keeps coming up is our schedule and the length of our games. … Our coaches talked about it, and a lot of them seemed to be in favor of at least taking a look at it. We talked with our competition committee, and they were in favor of taking a look at it.”
In all, NBA games average about two hours and 15 minutes, timeouts included, and if the NBA would switch to 44-minute games over all 82 games in a season, this would result in about seven games less worth of minutes. But what would this mean for the game’s marquee players, meaning the likes of LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and the injury-prone Derrick Rose, for instance? Does this mean less minutes proportionate to the shortening of the game? According to Thorn, that’s something the NBA doesn’t know yet. “But the probably is that they’re going to play a bit less,” he hinted in conclusion.