Basketball’s overtime is the greatest by far

Over the last few days, my two favorite basketball teams have competed in games featuring… Over the last few days, my two favorite basketball teams have competed in games featuring dramatic overtime finishes.

On Saturday, Pitt survived not one, but two potentially backbreaking circus shots from Miami freshman Guillermo Diaz to finish off the Hurricanes in double overtime and extend the nation’s longest winning streak.

The outcome was not so joyous for my beloved New York Knicks on Monday at Madison Square Garden, however. After Stephon Marbury hit three free throws and Penny Hardaway stole the inbounds pass, Allan Houston drained a game-tying three-pointer with six seconds left to go in regulation. The Knicks had come back from 20 points down and forced overtime only to drop the game to the Dallas Mavericks, 127-121.

Both of these games proved yet again that overtime basketball is the most exciting extra-time format in sports. The natural dramatic tension captured in a last-second shot is unmatched, and the short overtime periods and quick possession changes force teams to continue to try to make plays, rather than playing for a tie, as in regular-season hockey, or for a field goal, as in regular-season football.

One need not look any further than the extra-time formats of basketball’s contemporaries to see why the NBA and college basketball have things so very right when it comes to overtime.

Any sport with the potential for a tie is automatically eliminated from contention for best overtime format. Draws are boring; they automatically eliminate the feelings of unabashed joy and heartbreak that result from a win/loss resolution, and anyone who watched the Steelers-Falcons game in 2002 knows that they leave a brooding sense of confusion and disappointment in the air for all parties involved. This gets rid of NFL football, regular-season NHL hockey and regular-season professional soccer right off the bat.

Playoff hockey and football both have sudden-death scoring formats, and each league faces serious problems with its respective format. The NFL decides possession on a coin flip, and all too often, the team that randomly wins possession wins the game, without the other team getting a chance to score.

The constant ebb-and-flow of a hockey game eliminates the NHL from having the same possession problem that the NFL does. The problem in playoff hockey is attrition. These guys play full 20-minute overtime periods, with full intermissions between each period. Fear of losing usually causes teams to sit on the puck in overtime, and by the time someone finally whips the puck past the goalie for the game winner, both teams look more winded than Dom DeLuise and Louie Anderson in a three-legged race. Ultimately, most of the late overtime goals in hockey are results of goaltenders being exhausted rather than skillful shooting.

Both of these games could easily benefit from imitating basketball’s overtime format. The NFL would be better served to play a seven-and-a-half-minute quarter, with the leader at the end of the quarter the winner. This would nearly ensure that each team gets an offensive possession, and it would encourage teams to play for the end zone rather than settle for a field goal, making the game more exciting to watch.

The NHL has the right idea by letting the game continue until there is a winner, but it needs to scale things down a bit. Gary Bettman, if you’re listening, here are a few tips: first, cut the playoff overtime periods down from 20 minutes to the regular season standard of five. Then, get rid of those horrible intermissions that kept me up until 3 a.m. back in 2000 when I should have been studying for that Advanced Placement European History exam. Finally, scrap the sudden-death format. If a team scores, finish out the period until one team has more goals than the other when the clock hits zero.

And then there is baseball. Slow, stubborn, antiquated baseball. Baseball has extra innings; play until the home team has its last at-bat. A problem with this system is that it gives too much of an advantage to the home team. But the larger problem for extra-inning baseball is that baseball is a game that refuses to put a time limit on itself.

Baseball remains in limbo somewhere between the stupidity of sudden death and the complete lack of a clock. The constant plate posturing and match-up pitching changes in extra-inning baseball are excruciatingly painful to watch, but a time limit is impossible without the possibility of a tie.

What baseball should do, in the case of nine completed innings, is put a 30-minute time limit on the game. This way, batters will step up to the plate and, gasssssp, bat instead of adjusting their batting gloves and scratching their crotches for five minutes each. And managers will have to be much savvier with their pitching moves. If no one has scored at the end of thirty minutes, baseball should follow the example of the late-round World Cup shootout.

Since all that Major League Baseball wishes to promote in the first place is the long ball, it should decide its games with a home-run derby contest. Each team brings its five biggest guns to the plate, each of whom takes pitches from his respective batting practice coach. Ten strikes each; team with the most homers wins. This, of course, is a horrible way to decide any athletic contest, but then again, any sport in which John Kruk can lead the league in a major offensive statistical category can’t really be called an athletic contest, can it?

So, I take my hat off to basketball for its overtime format, and I look forward to many future game-tying shots, profanity-laden tirades and shouts of jubilation as the clock ticks down.

Michael Cunningham is a senior staff writer for The Pitt News, and he still hates Reggie Miller for, well, the entire mid-’90s.