EDITOR’S CORNER
There is a basketball tourney somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think, which has become the first notable competition to adopt the Elam Rule, or just “Elam,”
What’s Elam? Besides being “male” backwards, it is a symptom of our society’s continuing passion to Just Get It Over With.
If you’re a sports fan, or even if you’re not, you’re probably aware of the never-ceasing drumbeat to speed up play in football, baseball and, for all I know, chess.
Nick Elam is a middle school principal in Dayton, Ohio. That means he is used to dealing with the most unpredictable entity on the planet—a seventh grader.
Principal Elam is also a basketball fan. When he watched the end of an Oklahoma City-Orlando NBA game he got out his stopwatch and found it took them 10 minutes and 3 seconds to play the final 20.9 seconds of the game.
Why? The team that was behind, in a time-honored strategy, kept fouling, hoping their opponents would miss free throws. A miss not only gives that team the chance to cut the deficit after a rebound and quick bucket at the other end, it also stops the clock, preserving precious seconds.
So the principal—no doubt in between dealing with chili dogs being flung about the cafeteria and the 65 daily bureaucratic rules he gets from the Buckeye Education Association—came up with a plan.
At the first dead ball after the 4-minute mark (or 3-minute mark in some versions) in the fourth period of a basketball game, turn off the clock.
Not stop it. Turn it off. And leave it off until the next game.
Then, add 7 points to the score of the team that’s ahead. If they’re tied you still add the 7 points.
That new number determines the game winner. First team to hit, or go over, that number, wins.
Got that? If the Spurs lead the Rockets 90-85, the “magic number” becomes 97. There’s no clock. First team to 97 wins.
It’s kind of like blackjack, except you’d still win if you were at 18 and drew the king. 28’s great.
There are plenty of detractors, of course. You can be sure the basketball purist who still wants the game to be played with a peach basket nailed to a barn wall, hates Elam.
Also do fans who won’t get to make a restroom break about the 1:30 mark of every NBA game, knowing when they get back the clock will have ticked down all the way to 1:27.
But, I suspect, there are many more who think the game could be speeded up by simply “letting them play.” Imagine an official taking this attitude:
“So he judo chopped you in the neck and the ball went flying. Pick it up and keep going. You’re getting paid more this game than a middle school principal in Ohio makes in 10 years I’m not blowing a whistle.”
I actually heard a well-respected baseball announcer say something of the kind the other night after a 4-pitch walk in which every one of the four pitches were apparently millimeters outside, or inside, the little box widget which is supposed to delineate the strike zone.
“You know, if they are really serious about speeding up the game, they might tell the umpires to call more strikes. Then guys will start swinging the bat.”
Not “expand the strike zone.” Just call more strikes no matter where the ball is.
Say, maybe the NBA could say “first team to score more points than the combined final of a soccer game wins on the spot.”
That would really speed up things.
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