We Have Won A Battle Against Timeouts But The War Has Just Begun

imagine this with bloody stumps and shears

The NCAA announced a not-quite-official suite of rules changes in men's basketball that, in the words of John Gasaway, have left twitter speechless in the wake of "a rather disconcerting overabundance of wish fulfillment." Well, most of twitter.

MURDER MORE TIMEOUTS NOT ENOUGH TIMEOUT MURDER MUUUUURDER THEM

— mgoblog (@mgoblog) May 15, 2015

The rules changes fall into three main categories plus some miscellaneous minor fixes. Those are:

A VITAL CHANGE TO THE SHOT CLOCK DOT SARCASM FONT. The shot clock will be 30 seconds as college basketball seeks to combat the scourge of possessions without a turnover.

I've seen a lot of speculation on Michigan boards that such a change will hurt Michigan's offense disproportionately. It is possible. I downloaded Hoop Math's data on late clock shots (ie, shots in the last five seconds of the shot clock) and there is a surprising large spread through D-I. Wisconsin puts up 18% of their shots late; Iowa State is at just 4%.

As you might expect, Michigan is consistently towards the Wisconsin end of the spectrum. Last year 15% of their shots were attempted in a period that will no longer exist. Despite having an off year (after back-to-back #1 finishes in offensive efficiency at Kenpom) they were also very good at executing late, with an eFG of 49.4%. That was 30th nationally.

You could look at those numbers and worry that a hunk of time that Michigan utilizes unusually frequently and well is going away. You could look at those numbers and revel that the NCAA is moving a number of shots into a late-clock situations and Michigan will be better prepared than most to deal with that fact.

If the NIT is any evidence, both of these hypotheses will be hard to test because the shorter shot clock won't have enough impact on efficiency to make a difference.

TIMEOUTS AND PACE OF PLAY. There is one fewer, and any TO within 30 seconds of a media timeout becomes that media timeout. As noted above, your author does not believe this is anywhere near enough timeout murder. He will take what he can get until Congress passes the To Take A Timeout A Basketball Coach Must Cut Off One Of His Digits Act, though.

The NCAA prohibited live ball timeouts… but just from coaches. That will not prevent players from preventing turnovers by spending TOs. They also are "emphasizing" returning to play quickly after a TO and have removed the free timeout teams get after a player fouls out. (Maybe. Those latter changes have gray areas and there is a tendency to backslide whenever a rule is not a bright line.)

Except for the fact that they were not nearly ruthless enough, all of these changes are excellent.

FLOPPING. The NCAA will implement the full NBA-sized restricted circle and can call fouls on players who are deemed to have flopped when they are in the middle of an interminable review. Thumbs up on the former even if it hurts Michigan's defensive strategy; the latter isn't likely to have much impact.

MISCELLANEOUS

• Refs can check for shot clock violations whenever they want. This is clearly spurred by that Nigel Hayes basket in the Wisconsin-Kentucky game and will just add to the reviews that almost never actually result in a call getting reversed. A good rule of thumb is that any law named after a deceased child is a terrible law; the basketball equivalent is that any rule change clearly traceable to a single possession in an NCAA tournament game is almost certainly not going to be worth the extra time spent reviewing things.
• "Class B" technical fouls are now just one shot. Remember when Aaron White didn't get ejected from a game in which he had two techs? Apparently that was legit because one of those was for hanging on the rim, which is a Class B tech. Now people will know that there are different classes of techs—which I did not. So they've got that going for them.
• There is no more five second "closely guarded" rule. I'm torn. In no way was that rule important, but when it got invoked it felt like a reward for superior perimeter defense. On the other hand, I'm all for reducing the burden minor rules impose on referees in the hope that they'll get the more important stuff right.
• You can dunk during warmups. Aubrey Dawkins has been high-fiving himself for days now.

There is also a potentially massive future change on the horizon: adding a foul per player. The NCAA plans to test that at the NIT next year. I am not in favor of that at all; offering additional incentive to foul the pants off your opponents is not going to help create the open, flowing game everyone says they want.