Gambling was a primary reason fans throughout the NBA were so noisy and uncontrolled. The league had avoided the point-shaving scandals that devastated college basketball in 1951; during the fifties, only two people, an official named Sol Levy and a Fort Wayne player named Jack Molinas, were ever found to be involved in gambling. But the fans bet heavily. Some were gamblers first and fans second, attending games because they knew that by screaming at referees and players, and by barraging the court with litter, they could influence the outcome. In fact, betting was such a prominent part of fans’ attraction to the game that the cheering was at times louder at a shot that put a team ahead of the point spread than at a shot that won a game. In many arenas, bookies appeared under the stands at halftime, taking new bets. Johnny Kerr, a center for the Nats in the fifties, recalled that fans in Boston Garden would yell, “Hey, we doubled our bets on you shmucks, so you better beat the spread.”

Despite the rambunctious fans, the game itself often seemed oddly unrealized, at times a confused morass of struggling bodies, at times stilted and lifeless. One problem players faced was congestion under the basket. Too many of them struggled for rebounds, the offensive players crowding in, creating the impression of a wild rugby scrimmage rather than deft individual maneuvering. Since the lane was only six feet wide, it extended only three feet on either side of the basket, which meant a giant like George Mikan could station himself, in his metal-rimmed glasses, a mere three feet from the basket and wait for the high pass, then sweep away defenders with his Herculean left arm and loft in a right-handed hook shot.

To ease the congestion under the basket, the franchise owners voted in 1951 to widen the lane from six feet to twelve feet, and this had an immediate effect, forcing the players to rely more on distance shooting. But the game was still frequently boring, degenerating all too often into what were known as “freeze-and-foul” contests, with the team in the lead playing possession ball to run out the clock and the losing team fouling to try to recover, the game stopping each time it succeeded. In one notorious example of “stall ball,” as it was also known, on November 22, 1950, between the Minneapolis Lakers and the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, the final score was 19–18. The Pistons coach, Murray Mendenhall, had decided not to run the ball but simply to hold it and wait until the end of the game to score the winning point. He succeeded, but fans were reading newspapers in the stands; some walked out and demanded their money back, others swore never to buy another ticket to a professional basketball game.

By the spring of 1954, it was obvious to the owners that the rules needed to be rethought. “When fans are walking out on your show,” Ned Irish told an acquaintance, “you don’t have to be awfully smart to realize that you’re doing something wrong.” Danny Biasone, owner of the Syracuse Nationals, argued that the league needed to pick up the pace of the game by limiting the amount of time a team could hold the ball. Biasone was alternately feisty and dour, a slight man with a large head who wore a fedora, spoke in an Italian accent, and sat on the bench during games, a cigarette dangling perpetually from his lips. Ned Irish derided him as the prototypical small-town owner, and in many ways he was—his wife made his players pasta and even washed their uniforms—but he was responsible for the single most important innovation in basketball since James Naismith invented the game. Biasone had decided that the exciting games were the ones in which each team took at least sixty shots. He divided the length of the game, 48 minutes, by 120 shots, 60 for each team, and came up with 24 seconds per shot. He had his team play some college students in an exhibition game using a shot clock that required both teams to turn the ball over once twenty-four seconds had elapsed. At first the players, not used to any time limit, rushed their shots. “Take your time out there,” Biasone called. “Twenty-four seconds is a long time.” The players slowed their pace and found out that they indeed had plenty of time to set up and shoot.

All the owners agreed to the measure. Walter Brown immediately saw its potential to make the game more exciting. The new rule did have its opponents, including Red Auerbach, who felt that stall ball worked effectively for the Celtics. Even though the fans hated it, toward the end of a game he’d take out Cousy and put in Sonny Hertzberg, who’d simply stand there holding the ball. Some sportswriters also complained that the innovation robbed the game of complexity. “Movement is no longer necessary,” wrote Milton Gross, the sports columnist for the New York Post. “Ballhandling now becomes a liability. The strategic freeze is outmoded.