from Amazon
Monday, June 20, 2011
Rationalizing irrationality
Klosterman (and why does Grantland have no place for comments? that is a horrible, terrible decision):
I’m obsessed with a specific rule in the NBA. I’m obsessed with the fact that — following a timeout, late in any game — teams can automatically move the ball to half court. Within the grand scheme of professional basketball, it’s a relatively minor rule. But it’s also the craziest rule in American sport. There’s nothing else like it — it’s the only statute that suggests time and space don’t matter. A team calls a timeout 94 feet from the basket, and it suddenly gets the ball 47 feet from the goal. It would be like the rules committee in baseball deciding that any runner on first base can automatically advance to second if there are two outs in the ninth inning, or like if the NFL decreed that touchbacks inside the two-minute warning instantly moved the pigskin to the 50. So many of our collective memories about classic NBA games exist only because of this bizarre rule: Michael Jordan does not hit “The Shot” against Cleveland if the Bulls can’t move the ball to half court, because there’s no way MJ covers that much real estate in 3.2 seconds.
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One could argue that all sports rules are arbitrary, but this one actively breaks the accepted limitations1 of the game itself; its employment has nothing to do with anything that happens in reality. Time stops, and the ball just moves itself. It is the near-literal manifestation of the sports-based political platitude “moving the goal posts” (which, we are always told, is improper and should never be done).So what do we make of this? If an irrational rule makes the game better, does that justify its irrationality?
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