Thunder-Wolves thriller hijacked by Free-Trow Parade, which again shows why NBA should be serious about a solution

The last 10 seconds of a great one NBA basketball game, this time the Oklahoma City Thunder’s 128-126 victory over the Minnesota Timberwolves To take a 3-1 Western Conference Finals lead on Monday, they were ruined by an all too well-known and increasingly ridiculous rule that the competition refuses to repair.

You are not going to find anything new in the description of the next series, which reduced an exciting last few minutes from an NBA conference final game to 10 seconds of drying paint. You have seen this exact scenario hundreds of times when you follow the NBA. Team A wins with three points in the last seconds, so it makes Team B mistakes, deliberateTo prevent it from trying a potential game-typing 3-Pointer.

In this case the Thunder Team A. They had risen 126-123 afterwards Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Missed a free throw with 7.1 seconds to play. This should have been the most exciting part of a wildly exciting game. Everyone, from the fans in the Arena to everyone who watches on TV all over the world, should have been on the edge of their seats. Except that we all knew what would come. A deliberate error. That Lu Dort committed the initial incoming pass, and then again a tenth of a second later to send Naz Reid To the free throw line.

Reid makes both. Minnesota is a down. They are dirty. Also intentionally. More free throws. SGA makes both, and we are immediately back where we started, with Minnesota Down three, only now the clock is up to six seconds. The wolves do not have time -outs, so they have to take the ball over the full length of the court. Alex Caruso possible Anthony Edwards To take a few dribbles the field to kill three seconds, then mistakes. Deliberate. There is no doubt about it. It is literally recorded as a “taking error” in the play-by-play feed.

It is here that I will remind you that the NBA has rightly changed the Rulebook to punish “transition errors” that were deliberately committed to stop a quick break. Why? Because fast breaks are exciting and mistakes are not allowed to help the offensive team. There is no difference with these up-by-hot errors, which eliminate the possibility of a game type shot and, by extension, staff The offensive team.

Minnesota does not want two free throws here. It needs three points. In football you can refuse punishment, and maybe the same option should be available in basketball for you. Imagine that a football team with six points, in defense, was allowed to commit a penalty that forces the team to kick a field goal instead of trying a game-typing pitch to the end zone?

It wouldn’t happen. In football, if you commit a penalty, You are punished. All it does is to move the attacking team even closer to the end zone. You cannot take away their chance, regardless of how many ways you try to manipulate the rules. The same in baseball. If you have a one run’s lead with two out in the ninth inning, you cannot remove the last battle of the game. Are you walking the man on the board? You have to pitch for the next man. You walk enough boys and the equal run scores. You cannot help yourself by doing something that is generally designed to hurt you.

Why can’t basketball find this out? There are countless ways to tackle it. Again, these are obvious mistakes, which are already in the control book and are punished by granting two free throws plus possession of the team that is polluted. Maintain up-through errors in the same way, and you will never see one again. They will have disappeared, ottoman, so, and in 10 years from now on every fan in the world will only ask what the hell the NBA took so long to do this.

Or, as suggested above, give the team that has contaminated the option to refuse the fine. Put the original time back on the clock, remove the ball from the borders and two errors in a row take technical errors. Two shots plus the ball. Again, this crisis would be over the next day. No more on three mistakes that suck life from what the most exciting time of the game should be.

Or what about this? If the team that is three errors outside the 3-point line, whether on the shot or not, they are three free throws. The competition currently punishes intentional errors on bad free throw shooters within the last two minutes. Why would this be different? It is literally the same logic. The competition has decided that you should not send a player to the free throw line if it does not benefit that player, and by extension his team, to be there. That is the spirit of free throws. They are supposed to be rewards.

If you fall three, you will not be rewarded with two free throws. You will be punished. And so the fans, who were robbed on Monday of a potentially play-typing shot in the name of watching Edwards Marching back to the Free World Line, where he made the first and deliberately missed before the game ended in a desperate outdoor bounds that was possible in the most anti-limactic way.

Fascinating things.

This cannot be emphasized: these play -off games are the marketing possibilities of the selection framework for a competition that some people will tell that he is losing popularity, or at least have to fight for the eyeballs of modern fans with endless entertainment options within reach. And just when the tension should be set to possibly explode, does the game with one team that have been intentionally pollute and the other is deliberately missing?

This is just like the man in the park who keeps dribbling and firing shots from the board so that he can get his own rebound. It’s a gimmick. And it has no place in an NBA game, let alone a play -off game.

Now let’s tackle the hypocrisy in the game. The team that loses is Also Deliberately polluting to expand the game. The wolves did this on Monday, because every chasing team in basketball does in the last seconds. That is why Gilgeous-Alexander was in the first place on the free throw line. If thunder is punished for the deliberately polluting, why wouldn’t it be the same for the wolves?

It is a fair question, and it happens to have a clear answer. It is called the Elam end. The NBA tried it out in a few all-star games. If you are not familiar with the end of Elam, it goes as follows: on the four-minute sign of the fourth quarter, the clock is eliminated and the teams play eight points of the song of the team that are paramount to a target score.

In Monday’s game, the Thunder 113-109 had risen with four minutes to play. You exclude the clock and play to 121. This completely removes the pollution from the comparison, because every point that your opponent scores only pushes them closer to the winning song.

If you lose, you cannot fill in intentionally. You don’t even have to do. You don’t play against the clock. You only play to prevent the other team from scoring. The same as you win. You have no incentive to allow free throws. You just play defense on the one hand and try to score on the other. In other words, you play basketball.

What happened at the end of the Thunder-Wolves match on Monday, and what we saw from the games at the end of the games almost since it was played in Peach Baskets is not a basketball. It’s a gimmick. And it’s time to stop.

There are much easily implementable enforcement to make this possible. If the ELAM end is too radical for you, great. Institute one of the options I mentioned above. Or do something else. Everything else. Just go in a room and find it out. Because I insure you, nobody wants to view this. Free throws are like streaming service advertisements. You look at them because you are forced to do, and you skip them the moment it becomes an option. Note, nba. Before your audience, even if there is only a small subset of it, you start to skip.