NBA fans look at their phones and, through them, the action on the court. (Getty Images)

Over the past five years, NBA decision-makers have toyed with all sorts of ways to speed up games and shorten the total amount of time it takes for two teams to play 48 minutes. Blow more horns to keep timeouts from running long! A 90-second pre-tipoff clock to cut down on time-wasting pregame handshakes! Literally cutting four minutes off the game!

Before Thursday’s meeting between the Denver Nuggets and Indiana Pacers at O2 Arena in jolly ol’ London, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver reiterated his league’s commitment to trying to shave every last second it can off of games, because … well, because today’s young people just can’t properly appreciate the truly bold and rich flavors of a timeout-filled tactical back-and-forth.

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From ESPN.com’s Tom Hamilton:

“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 said. “Obviously people, particularly millennials, have increasingly short attention spans, so it’s something as a business we need to pay attention to.” […]

“When the last few minutes of the game take an extraordinary amount of time, sometimes it’s incredibly interesting for fans, other times it’s not,” Silver said. “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 said the NBA’s competition committee reviews such matters and takes them to the league’s full board of owners.

“It’s something that we track very closely,” Silver said. “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.”

Tuning out, or staring at their phones, or displaying insufficient grit and gumption to Robert Sarver, or acting as unsolvable riddles to Brian Shaw. Y’know: typical millennial stuff.

NBA games don’t often drag on to the degree that many football or baseball games do, but the commish is right when he points out that, unless you’re talking about a tightly contested and well-played game between two solid teams, entertainment value can tend to wane the longer a game continues.

The league and its stakeholders have experimented with some strategies to speed things up in recent years: the aforementioned 44-minute preseason game, downsizing from two shots to one on shooting fouls, D-League tinkering with things like increasing the number of fouls a team has to commit before they’re in the penalty (thus reducing free throws) and an “advance” rule allowing teams one chance during the final two minutes of the fourth quarter to move the ball into the frontcourt (thus eliminating the need to take a timeout), etc. They have eschewed others, like adopting FIBA’s ban on live-ball timeouts or taking serious steps to eliminate the “Hack-a-Shaq” intentional fouling tactic rather than deploying half-measures.

Many fans and journalists would love to see the NBA continue to streamline its approach to replay reviews. The league insists reviews have gotten faster and more efficient since the institution of a centralized review process headquartered at the NBA Replay Center in Secaucus, N.J., before the 2014-15 season, but they still often seem to unnecessarily impede flow and gum up the game’s works.

At least two NBA head coaches — Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors and Stan Van Gundy of the Detroit Pistons, whose teams squared off in Oakland on Thursday — suggested Silver and company take a long look at the replay system if they want to shorten games. Kerr wouldn’t mind seeing reviews for “clear path” fouls disappear (“Those things are reviewed every single game and I don’t know a single coach who actually knows what the rule is”), while Van Gundy wants to scrap the system entirely.

“The issue is, the most important calls in our game are, ‘Was it a foul or not?’ And we’re not replaying that,” he said. “So, the hell with it on everything else. In my opinion, let’s just play if we’re not going to review the most important calls.”

The NBA’s not going to scrap replay reviews, now that they’re here; it likely won’t significantly curtail the number of situations that can trigger them, either. (Certainly not after shelling out for the flat-screen palace in Secaucus!) But the process can be trusted tightened, and other adjustments can be considered to pump up the pace, especially in the closing minutes.

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