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Monday, November 28, 2011
Why is there no mercy rule in basketball?
Of all the sports that directly link talent to outcomes, basketball is the one that does it the best. Baseball probably does it the worst.
This means that luck is more involved in a baseball game than in a basketball game.
And yet, I only see mercy rules in baseball and not the other sports. If a team take a 10-0 lead after 4 innings in baseball, a not inconsequential reason for that was purely luck. It’s very possible for two evenly matched teams to be 10-0 at the halfway mark of a baseball game.
In basketball, it’s very unlikely that halfway through, you’ll have two evenly matched teams have a score of 80-20.
So if you have a high school game that ends 100-2, and it was 25-0 after 98 seconds, chances are you have two very mismatched teams.
Why then is there no mercy rule in basketball? Whereas in baseball, you might be asking mercy for bad luck, as a 10-0 score can be caused by back luck, in basketball, you are asking for mercy because of a mismatch on talent from the outset.
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