99% Invisible - 77- Game Changer

Episode Date: April 16, 2013

Regardless of how you feel about basketball, you’ve got to appreciate the way it can bring groups of strangers together to share moments of pure adulation and collective defeat. That moment when time is running out, the team is down … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When basketball was invented as an indoor sport that could be played during long New England winters, the basket was literally a peach basket. And that basket was quickly replaced by a metal hoop with a rope and net. But it was still closed at the bottom, so every time a player scored a basket, the game had to stop and someone pulled out a ladder and retrieved the ball. You could also sometimes knock it out of the hammock with a long stick. But it took over a decade for someone to come up with the brilliant idea of cutting a hole in the bottom of a net.

And it finally put an end to the practice of manually retrieving basketballs every time a goal was scored. That took a decade. Maybe it's a testament to how fun basketball is to play that the game can endure 10 years of such bad game design, regardless if someone not invented open-ended nets, basketball would sure suck the watch on TV. But it's a more subtle development that came decades later that made basketball the sports juggernaut that it is today. OK, I appreciate that not everyone listening is a sports fan. I'll learn from the radio program backstory, our reporter, Eric Manell.

But what's your feelings about basketball aside for just a few minutes and listen to the raw human emotion in this? Five seconds for go. Tied at 90. Trimovic, step back. Jump, prayer. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah This in basketball is called a buzzer beer. The game-winning shot may just as time expires, it's exhilarating, it's heartbreaking, it's

a moment of pure anxiety that millions of people can share as one. And the fact that a 48-minute game of basketball can still be one in its final microseconds, thereby keeping you on the edge of your seat, chewing your fingernails to bits until the final buzzer, that my friends is what we call good design. Yeah, it is good design, but it's not the way basketball was originally designed. In fact, the drama of the game clock really only became relevant after the advent of another clock, the 24-second shot clock. This is the story of how this smaller, less visible clock.

Shot clock winding down. Oh, it's a 24-second violation. Created a reaction to this clock. Outside for BAM. Let's go! Goddamn it! BAM with a triple-on glass! There was only a second on the shot clock!

For the uninitiated, a shot clock is the smaller clock that you sometimes see counting down in the bottom corner of the TV screen. In the NBA, when a team gets the ball, they have 24 seconds to make a shot or it's a violation and they lose the ball. But this hasn't always been the case. In the early 1950s during Pro Basketball's infancy, there was no shot clock. Nothing forced a player to actually shoot the ball.

And if a team was winning and they wanted to keep their lead, they could literally hold on the ball for 10 minutes. That means you could turn off the game and listen to this entire podcast and then go back to the game and not miss a thing. I mean the game stunk, it was boring, it was stupid. This is Dolph Shays. He's in the NBA Hall of Fame, a former player and coach whose career spanned two eras of basketball before the inception of the shot clock and after.

He says this problem of players running time off the inception of the shot clock and after. He says this problem of players running time off the clock by just dribbling the ball around can really be summed up in a 1950 game between the Fort Wayne pistons and the Minneapolis Lakers. It was a big game near the end of a season and the Lakers they had like a dynasty at that time and so the pistons who were ahead decided to have a slowdown meaning run time off the clock. Well, the game ended up 17 to 16 as the final score.

The final score or something like that was in the teens. Actually, it was 19 to 18 go pistons. And of course, the crowd was booing. I mean, that it became a real forest. It was such a joke that in 1953 NBC decided to forego coverage of the NBA championship. They thought the game would be too boring. Finally, it became a crisis so basketball needed a rule change.

1954, Enter Danny Bison, owner of the Syracuse Nationals the team Dolph Shays played for by zone had crunch some numbers and he believed that some simple arithmetic could save basketball. And Danny by zone said look I have this formula. Why don't we try it out. By zone figured that the best games of basketball, the ideal games, had team scoring 80 or more points each. A score that Bison figured was high enough to retain the audience's interest. Right, so Bison started tracking how many shots the team needed to make to score a requisite

80-something points. Each team averaged 60 shots per game and there's two teams that means 120 shots and the game was still 48 minutes long and 48 minutes equates to 2880 seconds so you divide the number of seconds in a game by the number of shots. 120 and you get 24 24 seconds per shot. And to hold a player to that standard, you need a 24 second shot clock by zone invited a bunch of League of Officials to Syracuse to watch a practice game using the shot clock. Our Mandolk Shays played in that game. Everybody felt the 24 seconds, let me it was a team's sense of time had become compressed.

The old game didn't seem slow to the players, but with this new clock, everything felt rushed. And the owners loved it. They thought, wow, this is going to be great. Even in these practice games, there was a new sense of suspense. The owners felt it, and the players learned to love it, too. The clock became official in the 1954-55 season. Other changes in the pro game is limiting the offense of team to 24 seconds of possession with the basketball. If that offensive team does not try a shot in that space of time, it loses possession of the ball. Immediately, the scoring went up.

Shay is passing behind his back to Seymour who puts it away. The pistons are up against one of the longest sports jinks they've never beaten the Nats on the Syracuse court. This is audio from the 1955 NBA Finals, known then as basketball's World Series. It's the first year at the clock was instituted. Chase's team, the Syracuse Nationals, made it to the finals that season. His shot is off, but Chase gets the rebound. It's only 10 seconds remaining. The Shots Park did play an important part in our winning,

because with the old rules, the piston probably would have held the ball for most of the second half. But because of the shot clock, we were able to claw away back and finally win it in a last couple of seconds. Roses, one hand, it clinches it. That's the story of basketball's World Series. Syracuse proves unbeatable for a fourth away on its home court. The next year, the NBA Finals were broadcast on television for the first time. Team scored almost 30 points more game those next few seasons.

And shortly after that, attendance jumped by 40%. So let me just list for you the reasons I actually like watching basketball. You can turn on a game of basketball in between commercial breaks of something else and still feel like satisfied that you saw something happen. It is the fastest paste, hands down. Like in a baseball game, you're not guaranteed to have that. And I love baseball, don't get me wrong, I love baseball. But there's a lot of sitting around in baseball.

But if you go to a game of basketball, you're almost certain that something is going to be happening is so fast pace. I mean, that's wonderful, right? a lot of sitting around in baseball. But if you go to a game of basketball, you're almost certain that something is going to be happening is so fast pace. I mean, that's wonderful, right? And I love how athletic basketball players have become. I mean, the things you see LeBron James do are like out of this world. It's mind-blowing what he can do with a ball.

And even the worst guy on the court now is like a crazy athlete in ways that I never thought like human beings could be. The players have to be stronger and faster because they have this set period of time, they have 24 seconds to get the job done. But like before doing this story, I never would have thought that like the one thing that really made me love the game that made the game worth watching was some guy in Syracuse 60 years ago with a pen and paper and some long division.

He is the reason that this game is thrilling, this one little innovation. Not only did this game so much better, but made the players better themselves. Like it created better athletes. It pushed human potential to a totally different limit than ever would have been possible before. You know, it's all thanks to the shot clock. He scores!

Get him, he scores! He scores! And the buzzer! It'll have to be reviewed, or reviewed. For us, for God's sake. We're gonna take a look at it, But I'm going to Eric, there is yet one more thing that Abaskable does, a pretty good job with. I also really love half-time shows. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Eric Menel, based on his original story from the great, great radio show Backstory with the American History Guys. He had some help from Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute

of Architects in San Francisco. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, all of us are on Twitter, Instagram and Spotify, but to find out more about this story including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible. You must go to 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. For PRX. you