The Last Two Minutes of NBA Games: A History of Racism, Money, and Boredom

With the National Basketball Association playoffs underway, there comes a renewed focus on the most tedious part of basketball: the last two minutes of a game. Fouls, commercials, time-outs, more commercials, substitutions, replay reviews, even more commercials—it's a seemingly endless slog, one that feels longer and longer each year.

"I'd like to be a little more forward-thinking about the attention span of the people we're trying to capture right now," former NBA coach and current ESPN and ABC commentator Jeff Van Gundy told VICE Sports. "I don't even know why we just don't play 48 straight minutes. These guys are some of the most highly conditioned athletes in the world. Let's go. Let's play. Let them get into a rhythm."

Forty-eight straight minutes? Sounds pretty good for viewers, but not so great for the record books and the advertising-funded television networks that Van Gundy works for. Of course, angst over basketball's last two minutes is nothing new. In fact, there has been a recent, remarkable shift: Once upon a time, those same 120 seconds weren't considered too dull.

They were considered too exciting.

Remember when everyone agreed that "you only have to watch the last two minutes of an NBA game"? Complaints about the last two minutes are almost as old as basketball, but it took African-American domination of the sport to make those minutes especially compelling—and to make that excitement a bad thing.

The last two minutes had their first crisis in the late 1940s. Commercials and replays weren't a concern, but fans from that era certainly were familiar with a parade of fouls. "Donnybrooks," the Los Angeles Times called the ends of games in 1948. With no shot clock, teams played keep-away at the end, producing frantic scrambles and whistles.

That year, the National Collegiate Athletic Association decided to solve the problem by allowing teams to waive a free throw in the final two minutes and just take the ball out of bounds, a rule the NBA mulled as well. But this didn't stop the fouls, so the next year the NCAA made violations occurring in the last two minutes function as technicals. This proved even worse.

"That durned rule ruined us," University of Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp fumed after St. John's University turned a five-point lead into an 11-point win by keeping uninterrupted possession for the last two minutes. "You can't win when you're behind."

By mid-season, some conferences abandoned the rule and began tinkering with alternatives, like having a jump ball after each made free throw in the last two minutes. Soon, anarchy reigned, with every conference doing its own thing. A New York Herald Tribune story headline from 1950 asked, "Which Rules Tonight?" One critic was certain that unless the college game found a way to standardize the rules, "the basketball fan is going to throw up his hands with an 'Aw, nuts' and go out to a movie, or maybe stay home and look at television."

The NBA was tinkering with the last few minutes as well, trying to cut down on the fouls. For a while, players were allowed no more than two fouls per quarter, but this didn't fix anything. The league also tried mandating jump balls between the shooter and fouler after every made free throw in the last five minutes, a plan successful enough to last about four years.

In 1954, the NBA dropped the jump balls and adopted the shot clock, and the last two minutes in college and pro games began to look a lot different. The NBA sped up, and college gradually slowed down. In a 1968 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament game, for instance, North Carolina State beat Duke University 12-10. One of the referees, Otis Allmond, complained to the Washington Post that "nobody does anything for 38 minutes and all the action comes in the last two minutes." He said he only blew his whistle about three times all game, lamenting that "with the do-nothing game, that one call can win or lose it." At one point during play, he added, "I got caught in front of the TV camera and Bones McKinney, one of the television men, and I chewed the fat for a while."

Not all games were like this. The previous year, University of California, Los Angeles coach John Wooden had told the Post that most coaches "think too much of college basketball" to stall. Even so, Wooden advocated for a shot clock and staged a "freeze" of his own to protest the practice. Some coaches wanted a shot clock just for the last few minutes, while yet more said that was the only time it shouldn't be allowed: "In the last two minutes," Coach Al Kyber of American University said, "stall ball is part of the game." Georgetown's Jack Magee went further. While acknowledging that the stall might not be "for the run-of-the-mill fan," he insisted it was one of many strategic elements the pros lacked, and to put in a shot clock would be "to take something away from the coach. The premium would be placed on recruiting rather than coaching."

Changing the college game, Magee added, would be tampering with "the American way of life."

If that was the case, then the NBA just kept getting less and less American. The first instance of the modern complaint about the end of professional games came in 1960, when the Boston Celtics' Bill Sharman complained that things had just gotten too easy: "There's really nothing for the fans to get excited about until the final two minutes of a close game. But if the teams scored only 50 or 60 points a game, then a basket would mean something again." To people who learned the game before the shot clock and fast break, modern scores just didn't look like basketball numbers. Even though they featured Bill Russell, Sharman's Celtics were giving up 116 a night. The game had evolved dramatically. It was "just run-and-shoot, run-and-shoot, run-and-shoot," a critic wrote in 1967. "An occasional slowdown, or a 40-35 game, would be nice for a change."

But if it was true—as a columnist agreed with Sharman—that scoring had made the pros such a "colossal bore" that "a man can't get steamed up until the final minutes of a game," it took until the 1970s for this complaint to harden into conventional wisdom. The game was dull and easy, and would only get worse, as shown in a Hartford Courant columnist's 1971 attempt to describe the sport's future: "Seems the television networks refused to carry the game, even the pros, because advertisers wouldn't buy time unless their commercials were shown in the last two minutes which is all any viewer would watch anyway."

What could be killing the sport? As the 1970s began, the NBA was 60 percent African-American; by the end of the decade, that figure had grown to 75 percent. The "last two minutes" meme grew in tandem. All the while, the league's popularity declined.

A Trenton Evening Times piece in 1980 listed bullet points describing reasons for the game's decline. One said, "There is a sameness to games, i.e. the old, 'all you have to do is watch the final five minutes'" canard. A couple spots lower was the suggestion that "Pro basketball is too black." Likewise, Sports Illustrated wrote in 1978 of critics who "maintain that there is a basic flaw in the structure of the game and that the casual viewer can enjoy the essence of any NBA contest simply by watching the final two minutes. Still others feel that the growing preponderance of blacks on the court is a factor."

Couldn't these writers see the connection? And how could journalists not see what they were doing in using this cliché? "Part of it has to do with who's writing about it," says Ron Thomas, who wrote a history of the NBA's first black players and covered the Golden State Warriors for the San Francisco Chronicle at the end of the 1970s. Rather than seek to appreciate the differences between the speedy pro game and the pre-shot-clock college game, some writers were simply bewildered—and they, like some viewers, employed racial stereotypes to explain the difference.

Thomas's first year covering the NBA, 1979, was the peak year for both this bromide and general hand-wringing over the league, which involved many other bits of conventional wisdom. A New York Times piece that year listing the league's ailments sounds an awful lot like a series of racial dog whistles: "selfishness"; "disdaining defense"; whining that "salaries aren't astronomical enough"; and a of play that is "coasting and complacent." Incredibly, the piece singled out Julius Erving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—two Hall of Famers; two of the iconic players in league history; two African-American men—for lack of effort.

Naturally, the writer concludes, "we can be pretty sure that this dull period we are going through now will be over by the last two minutes of the playoffs."

When Atlanta Hawks' owner Bruce Levenson was caught last year opining that whites might not want to attend a predominantly black sport, he was shoved out of the league. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, plenty of people openly thought the same way. Team owners could justify racism because the bottom line was the most important thing, and they needed racists' money. When Dallas's ABA team released four black players in 1972, a team official said, "Whites in Dallas are simply not interested in paying to see an all-black team and the black population alone cannot support us." In the late 1960s, the St. Louis Hawks used to inject a white player into the starting lineup exclusively for home games. Before Ted Stepien bought the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1980, he promised, "half the squad would be white… White people have to have white heroes." He tried to squash a subsequent controversy by insisting his statements were merely "in a context of marketing." (Stepien also explained away anti-Semitic remarks by noting that he "has a Jewish lawyer.")

Meanwhile, one owner told Sports Illustrated in 1979 that "the teams are too black," adding, "people see them dissipating their money, playing without discipline. How can you sell a black sport to a white public?" In the book Playing for Keeps, journalist David Halberstam notes that some potential sponsors shied away from the NBA, fearing they would alienate white consumers.

A few people pushed back. Al Attles, head coach of the Warriors in 1979, was vocal about the misdirected criticism. "A lot of people use the word 'undisciplined' to describe the NBA," he told Sports Illustrated. "I think that word is pointed at a group more than at a sport." Head of the NBA Players' Association Paul Silas agreed, "It is a fact that white people in general look disfavorably upon Blacks, who are making astronomical amounts of money, if it appears they are not working hard for that money…. Our players have become so good that it appears they're doing things too easily, that they don't have the intensity they once had."

Meanwhile, the NCAA games that were so widely preferred could be atrociously dull, thanks to zone defense, over-cautious coaching, and a lack of a shot clock. The deployment of the two-minutes cliché surely in part grew as a way of deflecting attention from these problems.

Over the course of the 1970s, scoring in college basketball declined in every season but one, reaching a 30-year low by 1982. In 1979, Duke and the University of North Carolina played to a halftime score of 7-0. In the second half of a 1981 game against a much superior Kentucky team, the University of Notre Dame passed the ball 213 times in one possession. (Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps crouched along the sideline as the fans booed, encouraging the rhythmic back-and-forth with shouts of "I love it! I love it!") This was still the coach-oriented version of basketball, a game, as an NBC broadcaster would say in 1980, that offered a more "wholesome atmosphere" than the NBA.

With its well-paid, and since 1976 freely mobile, African-American athletes, the NBA was held to a different standard. When pro players had the nerve to discuss a strike in 1982, a Los Angeles Times writer scoffed: "The NBA needs a strike like it needs Donald Sterling … wait until this league begins carrying picket signs. Almost no one would pay attention until the last two minutes." Even after Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan revitalized the league's popularity, the last two minutes cliché refused to die, joining other racially-inflected critiques like "the pros don't play defense" and "NBA players can't shoot free throws." (Never mind that pro players consistently have shot about six percent better than collegians from the charity stripe for 50 years).

Of course, NBA games surely did get better at the end. Every sport works like this. As Thomas says, "we can sort of accept this increasing tension and increasing effort as you get to the end of the game in football and other sports, but for some reason people couldn't accept it in the NBA. So the rationale is 'they're not really trying.' And I think that had to do with the color of the players."

Van Gundy concurs that the phrase was always just "code for some racism."

"No one," he says, "that actually watched it and was at all intelligent about the NBA would be able to say that."

Watch an NBA game today, of course, and the last two minutes have a different problem. They feel endless. Last year, Deadspin found that the length of the average regular season game increased by six minutes between 1996 and 2013, while the average playoff game was 16 minutes longer (although this is partly because nationally broadcast games are always much longer than local ones).

Van Gundy wants to tinker. He suggests no timeouts in the last two minutes and greater foul penalties; a four-minute halftime; technical fouls awarding points automatically, instead of requiring time-consuming free-throws; foul shots counting for two points; and regarding replay reviews, he says, "I was all for replay, but after seeing all the implementation, I think they should permanently board up that replay center and get their money back."

Most fans could go for some of this. Could the league?

"No," he says.

The reason is obvious, but it doesn't always get the attention it deserves. While analyzing similar NCAA game length creep last month, the Wall Street Journal—of all places—neglected to discuss commercials. There are more of them slowing games every year. When the last two minutes were supposedly the best part, the NBA could barely get on TV; now huge broadcast contracts have made the last two minutes the game's biggest flaw. Even if coaches would concede timeouts, networks would never concede the commercial time.

"We're probably stuck with all these stoppages because of the money," Van Gundy says. "But we could make the game a lot better if the money wasn't the first priority." So long as it is, Van Gundy continues, the league should be creative. If there have to be free throws, he suggests, put in a commercial then: "No one cares about seeing a free throw shot. Put one up on the screen. I don't even care—it can be over the shooter."

Sadly, such ads would probably just come alongside the usual ones. Right now, NBA basketball is great, and so long as our appetite for it overwhelms the boredom induced by its sponsors, there will be more commercials. With apologies to Jack Magee, that's the American way of life. The league and its network partners are efficiently run machines. They know where the money is. Only want to watch those last two minutes, like they always used to say? "Be our guest," they might think. "That's our favorite part, too."