Is Randy Wittman’s View on Shortening NBA Games Correct?
By David Ramil
Randy Wittman doesn’t believe shortening NBA games is the answer. Is he right?
On Sunday, October 19, the NBA experimented with a 44-minute game, allowing the Boston Celtics and host Brooklyn Nets to play four 11-minute quarters, thus reducing the game by a total of four minutes. It’s a hot topic and there’s hardly a consensus as to whether this option – or any other solution – might improve a game that is viewed as too long.
Washington Wizards head coach Randy Wittman offered his take on the shorter games to the Washington Post. Simply put, he wasn’t supportive of the idea:
"There’s nothing wrong with the game. If you want to eliminate things to make it a quicker game, eliminate a timeout. But you’re not going to do that because who makes money on timeouts? So I don’t know why we want to mess with a good game, but we won’t mess with it in a manner because you might lose some money. It makes no sense to me."
Wittman also pointed out that a historically-favorite pastime of fans – comparing players from different eras – would be eliminated because stats would be invalidated by either shorter games or a shorter season.
"I think you’re going to lose that love of what everybody likes to compare. Wilt Chamberlain to Howard. Michael Jordan to LeBron James. You’re not going to be able to do that. And it’s kind of funny, Michael Jordan’s an owner now. But he’s absolutely [right]: If you love to play the game, you want to play 82. He said he’d probably find a game somewhere else if [he] was only playing 66."
I believe Wittman is absolutely correct in his assessment.
Hardly anyone would argue that the actual 48-minute length of the game or the season is too long. Rather, the issue is that the overall game could last nearly 2.5 hours, an extended amount due to the excessive number of fouls and/or time-outs called during a game. Officiating a game is an evolving process that doesn’t seem like a viable solution to reducing a game’s length. New points-of-emphasis are implemented at the start of a season and, ultimately, officiating is subjective. Every referee calls a game differently and that’s never going to change.
And, as Wittman observed, time-outs are the league’s money makers, breaks in the game that, as evidenced by the new television deal set to begin in 2016, generate billions of dollars.
The solution probably isn’t any one change that could magically benefit the league, its players or the fans. But Wittman is right in pointing out, as he did to the Post, that players of yesteryear had much more difficult travel accommodations and scheduling wasn’t an issue. While he dismisses this observation as him being just “an old-time guy,” his points are valid. Injuries are an unfortunate part of the game and always have been; franchises do whatever possible to alleviate the stress on players but you can’t prepare for unforeseen accidents.
Wittman also brings up that in-game rotations might not be as affected by a shortened game as you’d expect:
"I’m going to play a 44-minute game, a 40-minute game, I’m going to play my main players the same amount of minutes. It ain’t going to fluctuate."
This might seem like a rough, poorly-expressed answer but the underlying meaning is on point. The goal of every team (except maybe the Philadelphia 76ers) is to win; playing your best players as often as possible gives you the best chance to do so. Wittman adds that “fringe players” are most likely to suffer from a shorter game and, given the league’s investment in the NBA’s Development League, this would appear to be a counterintuitive solution.
Wittman isn’t the most polished speaker and he represents – along with Lakers coach Byron Scott and a few others – a breed of old-school players-turned-coaches that don’t embrace change easily. But shortening games isn’t the right answer, at least not now.
Overall, it’s important to keep an open dialogue and everyone’s opinions bring something of value. Throughout the league’s history, the players and fans have largely been dismissed for the overall goal of making as much money as possible. Wittman’s points are just part of the equation. One can only hope that ultimately everything will add up to an answer that equals a solution beneficial to all parties involved.