Adam Silver Says NBA Will Consider Ways to Shorten Games

Adam Silver has been proactive in his attempts to enhance the quality of the NBA's product during his time as commissioner, and he indicated on Thursday that the competition committee will examine ways to speed up games when the offseason rolls around. 

Speaking to reporters in London prior to the Denver Nuggets' 140-112 throttling of the Indiana Pacers, Silver explained why the league wants to take a "fresh look" at how long it takes for a game to be completed, according to USA Today's AJ Neuharth-Keusch: 

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It’s something that I know all of sports are looking at right now, and that is the format of the game and the length of time it takes to play the game. Obviously people, particularly millennials, have increasingly short attention spans, so it’s something as a business we need to pay attention to. ... When the last few minutes of the game take an extraordinary amount of time, sometimes it’s incredibly interesting for fans, other times it’s not.

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While it doesn't appear as though the NBA has plans to tinker with the 48-minute structure of games, Silver explained the league tracks the number of timeouts used at the end of games "very closely," per Neuharth-Keusch. 

"In the league office we time out every game, we know exactly how much time each possession takes and, again, we can also look at minute-by-minute ratings, so we know at what point fans are potentially tuning out as well," Silver said, according to ESPN.com's Tom Hamilton. 

Discussions regarding reduced timeout usage in the final two minutes have been ongoing for years, but the league has yet to make any substantive changes to the rulebook. However, the NBA did experiment with a 44-minute preseason game between the Brooklyn Nets and Boston Celtics in Oct. 2014 that included two fewer television timeouts. 

Placing restrictions on teams' ability to call timeouts late in games would seem like a non-starter for coaches. However, the NBA could, in theory, tinker with the mandatory timeout structure if it deems fans' disengagement as a serious problem.