^Plus, WRT #4, would you rather have four games on your home court and only have to travel twice, or would you rather travel three times and play game 7 at home?
Home field/court/ice advantage is a myth.
With no free throws comes no penalty for players who can’t make free throws. When I say bigs, I’m talking about the 6’10’’+ guys like Dwight Howard and DeAndre Jordan that shoot ~50% from the free throw line. You have to pull those guys out in the last two minutes of a game because they’ll get fouled and kill your scoring going 1/2. That changes the game to a shooters game. Without Jordan in, the Clippers are an entirely different (and much worse) team. I think the hack-a-whoever is a legit strategy. Teams should have to make free throws to win games.
No free throws just ends up forcing the ball in the middle and waiting for a guy to bulldoze his way through defenders in the paint. That’s great if I want to watch a fullback, but that’s a different game. This turns into every team picking up a 3rd down back for the last two minutes.
#4: Travel 3 times, game 7 at home. Home team wins 79% of game 7’s. That might be becuase they’re the higher seed and are supposed to be better, but I believe that number is significantly different than the expeccted 50-60% which could infer some causality to the correlation.
^You do realize that the Hack-a-Shaq strategy doesn’t work in the last two minutes, because if you foul somebody who doesn’t have the ball, then they get two shots plus the ball. Therefore, there’s no advantage to forcing Shaq to make free throws.
And I see your point about the Game 7, but if you get four out of six games at home, that’s still a pretty big advantage. And I would think (never having played basketball after 7th grade) that it would be bigger than having Game 7 at home.
That’s why I think you should get to take the free throws and keep the ball. It’s the only sport I know of where the losing team actually has an advantage at the end. Teams shouldn’t have to make free throws to hold the lead and win games if they have outplayed the opponenet for the last three quarters. They should just keep having to play the same game. The end of basketball is more a bad game of horse than a sport.
this should be done at halftimes?
http://deadspin.com/heres-a-story-about-an-nba-player-farting-and-putting-h-1617203633/all
im gonna go witj JR SMITH