You Should Only Get One Timeout In Basketball

There are two kinds of sports: movement sports and anticipation sports. In movement sports, the pleasure of watching comes from lengthy stretches of action that absorb your attention with a smooth rhythm and beautiful motion. In anticipation sports, the excitement is build-and-release—you have a good sense of when, exactly, you need to focus closely on what's happening, and the rest of the time you spend gaming out scenarios for what might go down. Soccer, hockey, and cycling are among the movement sports. Baseball, football, and tennis are among the anticipation sports. I'm not saying one type is better than the other, just that each has its own particular style.

But what happens when you try to force a movement sport to go against its DNA and become an anticipation sport? You get something flawed and unnatural, annoying and unpleasant. You get the final minute of a basketball game.

The fun of basketball is all in its movement. Five players of varying sizes and skillsets work in shifting geometrical patterns to find the optimal way to achieve their clearly-defined goal. It's about getting open, or sticking to your man, or making the right pass at just the right moment. Few things are as exhilarating as two teams trading uninterrupted attacks back and forth on a court. When the play does stop, for a free throw or a toss from out-of-bounds, it's explicitly because one of the participants violated the intrinsic order of the game. Without these mistakes, basketball would flow perfectly.

We're currently in the middle of the month that's packed to capacity with high-stakes basketball on TV, and chances are, this coming weekend will contain the most basketball you'll watch of any all year. But with this intense action layered across several channels, it's easy to notice a trouble spot in the game as designed—the climax can drag out forever. Late in a basketball game, losing teams are incentivized to break with the order of the sport by committing fouls and allowing their opponents easy opportunities for points. Jittery referees, particularly at the college level, feel pressured into carefully reviewing every interesting decision on replay. And coaches who've cleverly held onto their many timeouts use them all to turn the game into something more like football—you prepare to run a play, see if it succeeds or fails, then prep for another.

This is a very old complaint, but the rise of official reviews and the greater accessibility of games all across the country means that, anecdotally, college fans especially feel more annoyed than ever by endless late-game deliberations that suck all of the drama out of the moment. Personally, I felt myself near the breaking point back in January, when Michigan beat Northwestern 80-76 in overtime. The final minute of this game took 21 real minutes thanks to overzealous replay review, four timeouts, and a whole bunch of free throws.

“They’re calling us back to the court,” Michigan coach Dusty May deadpanned at his postgame presser. “We’ve got a couple more reviews.”

This game genuinely made me question if I liked watching basketball. A close overtime contest is supposed to be as thrilling as it gets, right? Why did it feel like I was serving jury duty?

A few days later, a couple of games on the same night restored my faith. There was this final sprint between Florida and South Carolina, where both teams refused to use their final timeout.

And then there was Texas A&M's one-point win over Ole Miss, whose ending also would have caught you by surprise if you were bracing for a few more stoppages.

This is what basketball is supposed to be: Players making plays, or not, under pressure. Everything else is just interference. As I watched the end of Michigan State and Wisconsin on Saturday afternoon, I found myself longing for a sport that stripped away all of that noise and left just the basketball part of basketball.

There are three options for streamlining the game. The most dramatic would be removing all incentives to foul your opponent near the end. It sounds nice, but I've become a little more agnostic about the Elam Ending, where the clock is turned off late and replaced with a target score, because it would be such a major renovation to how basketball has always been played. We'll put it on hold for now.

The second option is to completely trash, or at least severely limit, official reviews. I am sick of squinting at frame-by-frame replays, so I would love to axe these. But Lauren, you say, won't that undermine sports betting by making it easier to claim that the games are fixed by bad calls? Well, I guess we'll have to get rid of gambling, too! But this will take some time.

The third option is by far the simplest: You should only get one timeout.

Seriously: Why do coaches need any more than that? There are already too many timeouts specifically for TV. Do they need their own, too? For what purpose? Oh, you need to prepare your players for the game situation? Do it beforehand. Do it at halftime. Do it at one of the eight commercial breaks you're already given. These guys know how to play basketball. If a coach needs to give them any more prep, it's a skill issue. Literally!

I am 100 percent serious about this. One timeout feels reasonable to maintain some of that hold-your-breath-before-the-buzzer-beater feeling that a lot of people do savor in small doses. Any more of them would be redundant. Let the players play, and let the fans watch. And because I respect your time so much, this blog is now over.