These days when one considers the possible demise of a professional sports league, the cause usually has something to do with money (see: NFL and NBA lockouts). But during the early 1950s, the National Basketball Association faced a far more threatening problem: The games were painfully boring.
An obvious result off this problem is a lack of interest, which leads to dwindling attendance, which in turn reduces revenue for teams. D'oh, maybe it is about money after all! In this case, however, something needed to change in the game itself, not the way it was run from a business or marketing perspective. The NBA needed to shake things up.
But what to do? Teams had defaulted to a ball-stopping style of play, with excessive, time-wasting dribbling, passing and fouling which slowed down the game to a sea cucumber's pace. Once a team had a lead, there was no incentive to shoot, forcing the opponent to foul if they wanted the ball back. The freewheeling style of today's game would probably seem like a sport from outer space to NBAers of the early 50s.
No one was more frustrated by the league's self-destructing style than Syracuse Nationals owner Danny Biasone. His solution to the problem was elegantly simple: Watch a ton of games to see what he liked. When his completely unscientific survey was complete, he reasoned that the best games happened when each team took about 60 shots in a game. Thanks to some simple arithmetic, Biasone figured that if teams were forced to shoot every 24 seconds, they would hit somewhere around that 60 shot number every game, balancing out run-and-gun games and slow-down tactics.
The shot clock was adopted in 1954, and it's been so perfectly conceived that it's a fixture in the NBA to this day. The NBA's own article about the invention of the shot clock is called "24-Second Shot Clock Rescues League," so its importance cannot be understated.
So the next time you're watching an exciting NBA game, remember it might not have happened if Danny Biasone hadn't been willing to shake up the rules a bit.
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