A kid at our summer camp asked me a question last July that I honestly could not answer. We were running a late-clock drill, the kind where you put 8 seconds on the board and see who panics first, and this skinny eighth grader puts his hand up and goes, “Coach, why is the NBA clock 24? Why not 25, or 30?” I mumbled something about it being a nice round number. It is not a round number at all. I looked it up that night, and the real answer is way better than anything I could make up.
So here it is, for every coach ever stumped by a 13 year old.
The Night Fort Wayne Held the Ball
Go back to November 22, 1950. The Fort Wayne Pistons are playing the Minneapolis Lakers, who have George Mikan, the biggest problem in the whole league. The Pistons decide the only way to beat Mikan is to keep the ball away from him, so they hold it. For most of the night. They took a grand total of 13 shots and won 19-18, which is still the lowest scoring game in NBA history and probably the most boring.
And that was not some weird one-off. Teams with a lead would pass it around and around until the crowd started booing, because there was no rule saying they ever had to shoot. Around the same time, Rochester and Indianapolis played a six overtime game with about one shot taken in each overtime. Imagine paying for that ticket! The league had a real problem.
A Bowling Alley and a Napkin
The fix came out of Syracuse, New York. Danny Biasone was born in a small town in Italy in 1909, came over to America as a kid, and ended up owning a bowling alley in Syracuse along with a pro team called the Syracuse Nationals. Him and his general manager Leo Ferris wanted a clock that would force teams to shoot, but they needed a number, and the story goes that Ferris used to sit in Biasone’s bowling alley scribbling shot clock formulas onto a napkin.
What they landed on was really simple. A game is 48 minutes, so 2,880 seconds. Teams back then took about 60 shots each, so call it 120 shots a game. Divide 2,880 by 120 and you get 24! That’s it. I definitely did not know that after twenty years of coaching.
They tried it out in a scrimmage in Syracuse in 1954, and the NBA brought in the 24-second shot clock for the 1954-55 season. Scoring jumped from 79.5 points a game to 93.1 in a single year. And like something out of a movie, Biasone’s own Nationals won the championship that very first season. He made the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2000, eight years after he passed away.
The Rest of Basketball Took Its Sweet Time
Here is the part that surprises a lot of younger coaches, nobody rushed to copy him. FIBA went with 30 seconds in 1956 and only moved to 24 in 2000. Men’s college basketball had no shot clock at all until 1985-86, when it brought in 45 seconds, then cut that to 35 in 1993-94 and to 30 in 2015-16. The WNBA started at 30 and switched to 24 in 2006.
And high school? For most of my career there wasn’t one where I coached. The NFHS only opened the door for the 2022-23 season, letting each state decide whether to adopt a 35 second clock. So depending on where you live, you may possibly still be coaching without one. If you are, you know the feeling of watching a team sit on a six point lead with three minutes left. It’s legal, it’s smart, and it’s totally maddening.
Other Games Run on a Clock Too
What I really love about Biasone’s idea is that one number on a timer changed how the whole game behaved, and the same trick turns up in places that have nothing to do with hoops. Over in the UK, gambling regulators basically put a shot clock in reverse on mobile slots, because since late 2021 every spin there has to take at least 2.5 seconds and the autoplay and turbo buttons are gone. Open a UK site like TheOnlineCasino on your phone and every slot in there runs on that clock.
Behind the screen there is another clock ticking. Plenty of players find a casino through a review site, and somebody has to track which site sent them and pay the right commission. That is the job of iGaming software like MAP, which follows each click back to where it came from, works out the commission and holds the potential to catch fake traffic before anyone gets paid. Leo Ferris and his napkin would have loved it.
What the Clock Still Teaches
For coaches the shot clock is a teaching tool that forces decisions. A few things I have stolen over the years:
Put a clock on your drills, even if your league does not use one. Players who know they have 10 seconds left make quicker reads, and that habit carries over when it really counts.
Getting a good look with 6 seconds left is a skill you can practice, same as free throws, and a team that has repped it a hundred times stands a chance to stay calm in a perticular moment where the other team falls apart.
And respect the stall. Holding a lead is fair strategy, and your players will win more close games if they can defend it without fouling out of frustration.
Biasone’s aim was a balance somewhere between stalling contests and wild shootouts, and seventy years later that balance is still what good coaching is about. So the next time a kid asks you why it’s 24, well then, you are in luck! Tell them it came from a napkin in a bowling alley. They will remember that way longer than your out of bounds play.