The NBA will be exploring shortening the length of games during Saturday’s preseason game between the Boston Celtics and the Brooklyn Nets. Instead of playing 12 minute quarters and having three mandatory timeouts, Saturday’s contest will have 11 minute quarters and two mandatory timeouts.
While the NBA won’t implement any shortened games during the regular season, the exhibition match will allow the league to see how a shortened game will affect the flow and quality of play. Shortened games could provide a couple of benefits to players over the course of a season, mostly by shortening the minutes that NBA players have to play over a grueling 82 game schedule (and playoffs for about half the league), which could help reduce injuries as well.
Somewhere, Kobe Bryant is calculating how potential reduced minutes could affect where he ends up on the all-time scoring list while Gregg Popovich is probably pushing for regular season games to be shortened to two ten-minute halves so he can cut Tim Duncan’s minutes to eight minutes per game.
