Regular Season Games Are Diminished By The MLB Ghost Runner—And A Possible Target Score In NBA OT

The Kings and Clippers played the seventh double-overtime game of the NBA season last Friday night.

But that’s not what those who stayed up late on both coasts watching the game will remember about the Kings’ wild 176-175 win, which was the second-highest scoring game in history behind the Pistons’ 186-184 triple-overtime win over the Nuggets on Dec. 13, 1983.

The enthusiasm expressed on Twitter harkened back to the days when people were abuzz on Twitter over good things and seemed to be shared by those on the court, with Russell Westbrook — who made his Clippers debut — chalking a “crazy” game up to both teams being well-rested off the All-Star Break.

“From a fan’s standpoint, I can see how this game would have been a lot of fun to watch,” Kings head coach Mike Brown said.

Whether from the couch or the arena/stadium, it’s always fun to watch something extraordinarily rare or unprecedented. So of course the NBA might want to ensure last Friday night’s marathon display of offense never happens again.

Per Bleacher Report, the NBA is considering implementing a “target score” — also known as the “Elam Ending” — for overtime games. The concern appears to be broadcasts that blow past the allotted window as well as workload for players. Six players were on the court for at least 40 minutes last Friday while Westbrook played more than 39 minutes.

Alas, this seems to be the NBA’s attempt to match Major League Baseball by eliminating the remote possibility of witnessing a uniquely memorable occurrence during an otherwise mundane regular season game. The Kings-Clippers marathon took place 11 days after MLB’s Joint Competition Committee voted to make permanent the rule that’s placed an automatic runner at second base at the start of every extra inning since the COVID-wracked 2020 season.

While the idea in 2020 — to finish the game as soon as possible and minimize interaction in the middle of a pandemic — was noble and understandable, it’s an overreaction in more normal-ish times. Fangraphs’ Jay Jaffe noted the average extra-inning game was a shade more than 11 innings in 2019, when only 2.3 percent of games lasted 12 innings or more.

At least that’s more regularly than a double-overtime game in the NBA, which also only happened seven times last season — fewer than one half of one percent of all games.

Eliminating the possibility, however slim, of seeing an epic multi-overtime game is another way of minimizing a regular season that’s already drastically shrunk in terms of importance. The NBA is well into the era of “load management,” in which players take regular nights off. Just four players participated in all 82 games last season, down from 21 players during the previous full season in 2018-19.

And the idea of chasing regular season greatness appears to have evaporated with the 2015-16 Warriors, who set a record with 73 wins but lost to the Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. Just five teams have won at least 60 games over the last five full regular seasons and no one is on pace to do so this year.

The Major League Baseball regular season, once the most meaningful long-distance race in sports, is trending towards irrelevance as well. The playoff field expanded to 12 teams lat year, when the 111-win Dodgers were eliminated in the LDS while the 86-win Phillies won the NL pennant. And just 15 players have played in at least 160 games over the last two seasons, down from 23 during the 2018-19 seasons.

Implementing the ghost runner for the long term is another way of removing meaning from the regular season and a blow for those who like to trek to the ballpark or turn on the TV in hopes of seeing something they’ve never witnessed before.

The longest game in baseball history, the 33-inning International League marathon between Pawtucket and Rochester in 1981, was the subject of the book “Bottom of the 33rd” in 2011. A line score display commemorating the game is painted at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket. GoogleGOOG
searches for “Brewers White Sox 25 innings” and “Mets Cardinals 25 innings” will yield dozens of longform stories looking back at the two longest MLB games of the last 100 years.

Now that the novelty has worn off, is anyone going to remember how an extra-inning game ends in 2023 and beyond? The Kings-Clippers slugfest might inspire a 3,000-word feature in a couple decades, just as the record-setting Pistons-Nuggets game did at ESPN.com in 2005. Is anyone going to remember a random game determined by the Elam Ending? Almost certainly not, but at least there won’t be any double overtime games ending beyond the scheduled broadcast window.