NBA Might Speed Up The End Of Games Because Of Crappy Millennial Attention Spans

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NBA commissioner Adam Silver says the league has its eye on speeding up the end of games, with a focus on retaining younger fans who "have increasingly short attention spans."

Silver, speaking Thursday before the Denver Nuggets' 140-112 rout of the Indiana Pacers at London's O2 Arena, said the NBA started studying the issue last year -- specifically, the number of timeouts that are allowed in the final two minutes -- and will review it again at the end of this season.

"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," Silver said. "Obviously people, particularly millennials, have increasingly short attention spans, so it's something as a business we need to pay attention to."

One such slow finish came last Thursday when the Houston Rockets hosted the Oklahoma City Thunder in a marquee Western Conference matchup televised nationally on TNT. It took nearly nine minutes to play 24 seconds of game time.

"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," Silver said. "The short answer to your question is we are going to take a fresh look at the format, specifically in the last two minutes."

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