The History of the Shot Clock

A shot clock is used in sports to speed up the game. It is mostly correlated with basketball. It is used as a timer. The offensive team must attempt an official shot before the clock expires or they will be charged with a violation and will lose possession.

The idea of the shot clock has been given credit to Howard Hobson. He was a coach at the University of Oregon and eventually at Yale University. The first game in which the shot clock was used was in a 1954 scrimmage game. The NBA was soon to follow the trend. Danny Biasone was an advocate for the shot clock and helped develop it, too.

Many people credit the NBA's wide popularity range to be a reaction from the installation of the shot clock. The NBA attendance was dwindling and television coverage was very poor. This was because of the stalling methods teams would perform once they were ahead. Therefore, when a team was ahead, they could continuously pass the ball around without any penalty assessed. This slowed the game down, as the opposing team was forced to foul just to get the ball back, making the game a free throw shooting contest. This yielded very low scoring games in which resulted in bored fans. On November 22, 1950, the final score of a basketball game between the Fort Wayne Pistons and the Minneapolis Lakers was 19 to 18.

Just a few weeks after the game mentioned above, the Rochester Royals and Indianapolis Olympians played a five overtime game. However, a total of ten shots were taken, one for each team per overtime.

Biasone said the twenty-four seconds was not random. He said he observed box scores and looked at games he enjoyed. He noticed each team took about sixty shots. This resulted in 120 shots per forty-eight minutes. When he divided the 2,880 seconds by the 120 shots, the result was 24 seconds for each shot.

At the beginning of the shot clock era, many teams struggled. They got nervous about the clock, and often times forced up shots to avoid violations. As the games and experience went on, though, teams were able to get a hang of how much time they were allotted. In the last season of the pre-shot clock era, the average points per game average was 79 points per game. In the first season with the shot clock, the average was up to 93 points per game, and reached 107 points per game during the fourth year.

Wikipedia, Shot Clock