On Dec. 1, the Cavs managed to grind out a 115-111 win over the Celtics in a clash of Eastern Conference titans. Like the teams’ first confrontation in Boston, the showdown in Cleveland featured wild momentum swings and late-game heroics that made for riveting sports entertainment – until the last 34 seconds.

That’s when the game devolved into a Bataan Death March of free throws, intentional fouls and timeouts, as NBA games often do when they’re tightly contested.

Brad Botkin of CBS Sports has seen enough.

Instead of ending the game in “thrilling fashion” – on Donovan Mitchell’s barrage of 3-pointers that erased a five-point Boston lead – Botkin laments that “we were subjected to the all-too-familiar and frankly torturous conclusion of watching 17 free throws over the final 34 seconds — which, in real time, lasted almost half an hour.”

“It was the latest piece of evidence admitted into the case against traditional, timed basketball endings,” Botkin asserts in an article on csbsports.com. “Or, put another way, in the case for the Elam Ending, which eliminates the running clock at the four-minute mark of the fourth quarter. From that point forward, the game is played to a target score of seven points greater than the leading team’s total.”

He’s not wrong, and I can’t imagine there are too many NBA fans out there who enjoy the grueling late-game slog that is the last minute or so of a tightly contested NBA game, regular season or otherwise. It’s like going on a roller-coaster ride for 46 minutes and then spending the last two minutes milling buckwheat.

Nick Elam, a former high school math teacher, developed the Elam Ending in March 2007, according to Elam’s website.

Under the auspices of the Elam Ending, at the first dead ball with under four minutes remaining, officials would turn off the game clock. If Team A is beating Team B by a score of 112-110, the game becomes an all-out sprint to 119 points.

In a tight game, proponents of the Elam Ending espouse, this format discourages the incessant fouling and stalling tactics that awkwardly bring an otherwise enjoyable NBA game to a grinding, grating, anticlimactic conclusion – not unlike winding your way through customs after an international trip.

“From an entertainment standpoint, it’s a no-brainer,” Botkin asserts. “Not only does it guarantee a game-winning shot, but it more importantly eliminates all incentive for the trailing team to intentionally foul as more free throws would only provide opportunity for the winning team to move closer to the final total.”

It makes sense to me. But when I think about the last few minutes of a competitive NBA game – which are rife with stoppages that lend themselves to frequent commercial breaks – I wonder if the NBA would embrace this concept.

To the league’s credit, the NBA has experimented with the Elam Ending. The league introduced the Elam Ending in the 2020 NBA All-Star Game, and retained the format for the next three years. However, the All-Star Game reverted to a traditional timed ending in 2024.

Still, the NBA has shown some willingness to tweak the rules in the name of a purer game. In 2022, the league implemented the transition-take foul to discourage defenders from committing intentional fouls to disrupt fast breaks. In 2023, the NBA started cracking down on flopping when it introduced an in-game flopping penalty – a non-unsportsmanlike technical foul resulting in a free throw – on a trial basis. Mercifully, the flopping penalty is permanent now.

Maybe there’s a middle ground

Botkin believes that the NBA should punish intentional fouls in the same way that it regulates take fouls. With the Elam Ending, Botkin and other proponents hope to eliminate excruciating late-game sequences like this one from the Dec. 1 Cavs-Celtics clash:

“And so the parade continued, back and forth, intentional foul after intentional foul, whistle after whistle, until finally, with no more time left to manipulate, [Payton] Pritchard was forced to miss a free throw on purpose. He fired a bullet off the front of the rim in hopes of getting his own rebound. It nearly worked, but he was called for a violation for crossing the line before the ball actually made contact with the rim.”

Botkin continues: “This is how the game finally, mercifully, ended, with a series of gimmicks: intentional fouls and intentionally missed shots in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of a game that should have – and easily could have – ended in far more dramatic fashion.”

Botkin concludes his excellent piece with the equivalent of a mic drop:

“The ending of this Boston-Cleveland game was a disgrace, plain and simple, and the league should be embarrassed by how long it’s taking to even acknowledge the problem, let alone take easy steps toward fixing it.”

Botkin acknowledges that “it’s a long shot” that the NBA would implement the Elam Ending anytime soon. But what if there’s a middle ground?

An obvious compromise would be to penalize intentional fouls in late-game situations by awarding possession to the other team, if the foul occurred on a non-basketball play.

The NBA also could consider specialized penalties for fouls that occur when the opposing team has a three-point lead with under 24 seconds to play.

“With under 24 seconds to play in a three-point game, if you commit a foul on the ball outside the 3-point line, whether it’s on the shot or the ground, it’s three free throws,” Botkin proposes.

If a defender commits a foul away from the ball in this situation, the offensive team would have the right to decline the foul and take the ball out of bounds rather than attempt the free throws.

“Foul two straight times off the ball, and it’s a technical foul, which is one free throw plus possession,” Botkin proposes. “That’s all you need to make teams stop fouling when up three, and give the fans the exciting finishes they deserve with the money they’re paying.”