24-second shot clock rule

POP icon Sir Elton Hercules John (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight) remembers when rock was young, he and Suzie had so much fun. At least that’s what the 67-year-old John said in his 1972 hit song “Crocodile Rock.”

I, too, remember when I was young. My friends and I had so much fun playing basketball.

In the mid-fifties and sixties, we played by the rules adopted by the International Basketball Federation (FIBA), the world’s basketball-governing organization, where backcourt violations were not in existent and there was no time limit to make a field goal attempt until the FIBA adopted a 30-second shot clock in 1956, requiring teams to attempt a shot within 30 seconds of gaining possession, and the shot clock to be reset when the ball touched the basket’s rim or the backboard (later disallowed) or the opponents gaining possession.

It was only in 2001 that the FIBA reduced the shot clock to 24 seconds – which, until now, is being utilized.
Still, that came a long, long time after the American pro basketball league, National Basketball Association (NBA), had instituted the 24-second shot clock rule.

It was exactly 60 years ago on October 30 that the NBA implemented a major rules change that would radically revolutionize the world of professional basketball. That rule was the 24-second shot clock and the man credited for its creation was Danny Biasone.

Biasone, the owner-president of the Syracuse Nationals (the harbinger of the Philadelphia 76ers) at the time, convinced his fellow NBA club owners to adopt a shot clock for games starting with the 1954-55 season, when stalling and slowing down games became a common form of strategy.

It eliminated the common stalling tactics that were being deployed, sometimes as early as the third quarter, by the team that was ahead in the game because there was no way for its opponent to catch up other than to commit a foul.
The shot clock curbed the end-of-game fouling and ensuing avalanche of free throws that made for a dull game.
Biasone was turned off by a dreadful game played on November 22, 1950 between the Fort Wayne (now Detroit) Pistons and Minneapolis (now Los Angeles) Lakers at Minneapolis.

Without a shot clock, the Pistons edged the Lakers, 19-18, in what stands as the lowest final game score in NBA history until now. In the fourth quarter, the Pistons outscored the Lakers, 3-1.

In 48 minutes of game time, only eight field goals were scored (four by each team) in 31 attempts, including 18 by the Lakers, who were powered by man-mountain George Mikan’s 15 points on 4-for-11 field-goal shooting and 7-for-11 tries from the free-throw line.

The Pistons were chiefly responsible for the stalling tactics, holding the rock for minutes at a time without shooting (the team attempted only 13 times during the game) in order to keep Mikan at bay.

The Pistons’ boring performance led the St. Paul Dispatch to write “(The Pistons) gave pro basketball a great black eye.”

Maurice Podoloff, the NBA’s first commissioner, said: “In our game, with the number of stars we have, we of necessity run up big scores.”

Ironically, six weeks after the ugly Pistons-Lakers contest, or on January 6, 1951 to be exact, the Rochester Royals (the predecessors of the Sacramento Kings) and Indianapolis Olympians (now defunct) played a six-overtime game with only one shot taken in each overtime period. The Olympians won, 75-73, at Rochester.

Then came Biasone to the rescue. He experimented using a 24-second version during a scrimmage game in Syracuse.

According to the Italian-born Biasone, “I looked at the box scores from the games I enjoyed, games where they didn’t screw around and stall. I noticed each team took about 60 shots. That meant 120 shots per game. So I took 48 minutes – 2,880 seconds – and divided that by 120 shots. The result was 24 seconds per shot.”

Together with his general manager Leo Ferris, Biasone thus developed the 24-second shot clock.

The shot clock prevented the teams from holding the ball without any restrictions and forced them to attempt a field goal within 24 seconds of gaining ball possession. The rules change also would mean a faster game and higher scoring.

True enough, the NBA game became faster and the offense perked up with the introduction of the 24-second shot clock during the 1954-55 season. The league’s scoring average leapfrogged to 93.1 points per game (from 79.5 ppg) and the clubs combined to hit .385 from the field (up from .372 the previous campaign).

From 150.7 field-goal attempts per game in 1953-54, the two teams combined for 172.8 floor shots in every game during the next season.

The 24-second shot clock made its NBA debut on October 30, 1954, with the Rochester Royals beating the Boston Celtics, 98-95.

Ironically, Biasone’s Syracuse Nationals were the biggest winners in 1954-55, securing the NBA title with a 4-3 decision over the Fort Wayne Pistons in a seven-game Finals that saw the home team emerge victorious each time.

Biasone died in 1992 but he will always be remembered as the creator of the 24-second shot clock rule. In 2000, Biasone was posthumously inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame under the contributor’s category.

It took 47 long years for the FIBA to realize that his idea of a 24-second shot clock was a sound one.

Nine years after Biasone had crossed the Great Divide did the FIBA finally adopt the rule for the international game.
Biasone must be laughing in his grave.