first 38 minutes of the game, but not so much in the last two minutes. We abandoned it after one year.

Honestly, what I think works best is what we do in our stake. In most stakes I have been in, individual wards will have pickup basketball nights. In my current stake, we have some of that, but there is essentially stake-wide pick up ball two nights a week, and Saturday mornings. Very few people make it to all three, but a large number of players in the stake make it at least once or twice a month to one of the pick up games. The result is that we have all played with each other for years, and are all friends. In my experience, it is much more common for problems to occur when you have teams that don't really know each other. In our stake, all the basketball players know each other; 80% of the guys I play with in the league are the same guys that I played with the previous Saturday morning. That makes it a lot less likely for someone to fly off the handle. We also have about a dozen non-members who come to pick up ball, and most of them play in the league.

It's not perfect; we still have the occasional barking or sharp word, but I don't remember the last time we had a situation that was anywhere close to what I would consider "serious".