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Four! New league hopes to reinvent the game
If you've stumbled into UCLA's Pauley Pavilion over the past few weeks, you may have noticed a thinly populated full-court game going on most afternoons. No, the Bruins haven't been scrimmaging shorthanded because of a round of player suspensions. These are shakedown games for the 4BL, the latest in a spate of pro basketball leagues (IBL, ABA 2000, NBDL, NRL, etc., etc.) to take hopeful shape on drawing boards or leap fearlessly off them. The 4BL -- or "Four-Ball," as its founders call it -- is an attempt to address the roughness that has plagued the NBA and alienated its fans. The concept is simple: Reduce the number of humans who collide with one another by one per team, and play becomes unshackled and full of air. The plan is for the 4BL to start up in the summer of 2002, with franchises in cozy arenas in four big cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco), before gradually rolling out in another eight cities over the following four years. League founders hope to attract young male fans who find such dog-days-of-summer offerings as baseball and soccer to be antidotes for insomnia. An offseason schedule, single-entity ownership, low ticket prices, more scoring, smaller venues -- if this all sounds like arena football, well, the league's braintrust is flattered by the comparison. The 4BL management team includes ex-pros Reggie Theus and Brian Taylor. But their high priest is Rob Ryder, who is equal parts hoopster (like Taylor, he played for Pete Carril at Princeton) and impresario (he has served as basketball supervisor on such films as Blue Chips and White Men Can't Jump). His hybrid pedigree is reflected in the product he's trying to bring to market -- half traditional basketball, half show. To my mind, the most inspired of the 4BL's many wrinkles is its plan to speed the game up. At every turn, the league will try to get players off the free-throw line and the ball back in play. Teams victimized by a foul will have the option of simply inbounding with a freshly reset 24-second clock. If a player is fouled in the act and does choose to go to the line, he'll shoot one free throw worth two points. If he's fouled while casting from beyond the arc, that foul shot will be worth three. And if he somehow scores while being fouled, the "and one" will count automatically, no free throw required. Most radically, the 4BL envisions a power play similar to hockey's: After a team commits its third foul in any one of a game's four 12-minute quarters, the offending player will have to leave the court. The offended team will then get the ball out-of-bounds with a fresh 24 and a chance to play four-on-three for one possession. As soon as the defense gets the ball back and crosses halfcourt, the penalized player will rejoin the action, on the fly. In test games, an offense with a man advantage is scoring roughly 70 percent of the time, about the same rate at which a free-throw shooter scores. "What would you rather do, spend 30 to 40 seconds watching a guy shoot free throws while everyone else stands around?" Ryder asks. "Or watch four guys attack three with the ball in play?" Ryder is trying to split two defenders here: reinvent the game while insisting he's a b-ball purist who only wants to resuscitate its essence. I agree that the pro game could use some serious revision. My question about the 4BL is this: If you reinvigorate basketball by unfettering offense, whither defense? Because without defense, pure basketball has been diminished by half. Even Ryder admits that the 4BL won't be friendly to ballhawks. Transition defense will be much harder to play -- 20 percent harder, in fact -- and I'm not sure that's a good thing. The helpside defender, coming over to bail out a teammate whose man has beaten him, may be the bane of fans who want to see lots of scoring, but serious hoopheads worship at the altar of team defense. Dean Smith, told the basics of the 4BL concept, instantly pointed out that there would be too much open space for there to be any advantage in trapping or pressing -- two exciting and effective ways for a trailing team to catch up. Pauley Pavilion is an auspicious laboratory, given all the basketball history that has been made there over the years. Four-Ball is at least half right; you could take the elements that address fouling and free throws and leave the rest of the game alone, and have an improved product. As the 4BL goes forward, I'll wish it well. I just hope it isn't robbing defensive Peter to pay offensive Paul. Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, which will be published in January 2002 by Warner Books. Send comments to thehooplife@aol.com.
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