NBA commissioner Adam Silver has announced that the sports association will be assessing the different aspects of a basketball game at the end of the season. One particular factor that will be focused on is the length of a game, which may become shorter because of millennials.
USA Today College reported that Silver confirmed that NBA's competition committee may be taking a "fresh look" at game length by the end of the season. He made the announcement during a press conference in London before the Denver Nuggets vs. Indiana Pacers game on Thursday last week.
Silver said that millennials "have increasingly short attention spans." He also noted that, as a business, NBA needs to pay attention to that factor especially when, currently, the last few crucial minutes of the game often get extended to 10 minutes.
According to ESPN, Silver talked about how the last few minutes of the game can sometimes be "incredibly interesting for fans" but, other times, it is not. Apparently, the association monitors this closely along with minute-by-minute ratings.
There are also plans to increase the number of regular season games played overseas. Silver noted that the focus will be in the Middle East and the U.K.
In a 2015 report by TIME, a study by Microsoft found that people nowadays lost concentration after eight seconds. The research was done on 2,000 participants who were surveyed while the brain activities of 112 others were studied using electroencephalograms (EEGs).
It was found that, since 2000, the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds. This may have been caused by the boom of the mobile revolution.
It seems worrying that people are now more easily-distracted. On the other hand, the study shows that our multitasking ability has "drastically improved." Microsoft believes that the changes were proof of the brain's ability to adapt and change itself over a period of time.
