Here's an ESPN article from a couple weeks discussing the decision of TBT (The Basketball Tournament) to implement the Elam Ending this summer:

http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/19078511/zach-lowe-basketball-tournament-innovative-end-game-rule

Basically, the Elam ending is a solution to the herky jerky foulfests you see at the end of games. The big change would be to move to a hybrid timed/untimed format in which the clock is turned off near the end of the game and teams instead play until someone reaches a target score. From the article:

“Elam landed on something more radical: eliminate the game clock from crunch time. Under Elam's proposal, the clock would vanish after the first stoppage under the three-minute mark in the NBA and the four-minute mark in NCAA games. Officials would establish a target score by taking the score of the leading team and adding seven points -- then restart the game without a clock. The team that reaches that target score first wins.

“In simpler terms: If the Clippers lead the Jazz 99-91 when Rudy Gobert hacks DeAndre Jordan with 2:55 left, the game then becomes a race to 106 points. Utah must outscore the Clippers 15-6 to win”

With this change you’d get true basketball all the way until the end of each game—instead of the fouling-and-free-throws contests we get now—and, as a side benefit, every single game would end with a walk-off shot.

It would also be kind of a cool throwback to the pickup up ball everyone grows up playing—a race to a target score as opposed to playing for a set amount of time.

I’d love to see it tried, but what do you think? Would you support an experimental trial of the Elam Ending in college basketball?