What 24 Seconds Can Teach Us

The NBA of the early 1950’s was not the popular sport of today. It was a slow tedious game that was boring to watch. The 24-second clock changed all that and provides us with a lesson in improvement.

Teams in the early 50’s would get a lead and then hold the ball, passing endlessly forcing the other team to foul just to have a chance for the ball. Imagine the finish to a game today where every play in the final minute is a foul, only extended for the entire game. That was professional basketball in the 50’s.

Realizing professional basketball was at risk of losing all fan interest; Danny Biasone, the owner of the Syracuse Nationals began experimenting with a shot clock. He watched a number of games, selecting ones he enjoyed for a deeper dive. Analyzing the box scores he noticed teams in those games averaged about 60 shots each.

Doing a simple calculation that will probably look familiar to anyone in Continuous Improvement he took the available time in a game-48 minutes (2,880 seconds) and divided it by the desired number of shots or demand of 120 and came up with 24 seconds. His hypothesis was teams taking shots on an average of every 24 seconds produced interesting games.

Biasone effectively developed a Takt time estimate and as it turned out, 24 seconds per shot was the optimum time.

Time has borne out the validity of the 24-second clock. If it hadn’t further experimentation could have been used to refine the number much like what has been done in the NCAA where they started with a longer shot clock at 45 seconds and have refined it to 30 seconds for college level play.

We are often faced with similar challenges in CI where something is not working and we need to fix but the answer isn’t apparent. Experimentation and prototyping, starting with a best guess hypothesis is often the fastest and ultimately most successful way to go.

By the way, the first year of the 24-second shot clock, the Nationals won the NBA Championship.