Millennials and their short attention spans have the NBA considering rule changes
As America’s traditional pastimes, baseball and football, suffer from aging fanbases and disinterest from younger sports fans, one sports league has stayed ahead of the curve — the NBA.
The pro baskeball league and its stars are wildly popular on social media, and its fans’ average age has stayed steady over time, suggesting that as older fans move on, younger ones are filling the ranks, according to The Washington Post.
But in order to maintain that popularity, the league may have to change the game to cater to its audience.
That’s what NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday, speaking in London before the Denver Nuggets and Indiana Pacers played in the league’s fifth annual game in the United Kingdom, per ESPN.
In particular, the league is thinking about making adjustments to the final two minutes of each game. In basketball, the final 120 seconds of game quite often drag on for nearly 10 minutes as coaches call timeouts to draw up plays and players foul each other. According to the Chicago Tribune, the final minute on the game clock takes an average of 6.3 minutes to play in the NBA.
That trend has definitely drawn the attention of Silver and his office. And despite the fact that the average NBA game is significantly shorter than the NFL or MLB, he told ESPN there is still room for improvement. After all, the average attention span is down to eight seconds, which is worse than a gold fish, according to an academic study.
“It's something that I know all of sports are looking at right now, and that is the format of the game and the length of time it takes to play the game," Silver told ESPN. "Obviously people, particularly millennials, have increasingly short attention spans, so it's something as a business we need to pay attention to."
Perhaps the easiest way to do that would be to limit the number of timeouts teams can call in the games final moments. Current rules allow each team to call two timeouts in the game’s final minute, one full 60-second timeout and one 20-second one. During those times, TV broadcasters often cut away to air commercials.
"It's something that we track very closely," Silver told ESPN. "In the league office we time out every game, we know exactly how much time each possession takes and, again, we can also look at minute-by-minute ratings, so we know at what point fans are potentially tuning out as well."
The league has already been experimenting with other methods to shorten games, including reducing the full game time from 48 minutes to 44 minutes, per the Washington Post. And it’s not as though the league has shied away from making rule changes in the past to generate excitement and interest, from the introduction of the 3-point line to rules that limit intentional fouls.
"The short answer to your question is we are going to take a fresh look at the format, specifically in the last two minutes," Silver told ESPN.
This story was originally published January 15, 2017 at 4:23 PM with the headline "Millennials and their short attention spans have the NBA considering rule changes."