How will it affect UVU Basketball?
Kyle Bruderer
Sports writer
In 1970 the National Collegiate Athletic Association adopted a 30-second shot clock, but only for women’s basketball. It wasn’t until 1985 that men’s basketball implemented a shot clock with a time limit of 45 seconds per possession. Eight years later it was dropped to 35 seconds and in the upcoming 2015-2016 season it will be trimmed down once more to 30 seconds, matching what the NCAA did with women’s basketball nearly 50 years ago.
“I think it’s moving in the right direction and I think it’s good for the game,” said Mark Pope, head coach of the Men’s basketball team. “It makes you be more efficient with your offensive actions and your game plan. It also allows defenses to be more aggressive.”
Men’s college basketball can be very entertaining, considering that many players are fighting each game to prove their worth to scouts at the professional level, especially during the NCAA tournament. Some teams run very up-tempo and free-flowing style offenses, while others use a slower paced offence with constant passing around the perimeter. It’s the more structured and slower offenses that will be more affected by the new change.
“I think it’s probably something that won’t affect us very much here at Utah Valley the way we play,” said Pope. “If you think of teams that are very motion offense oriented like Air Force or Wisconsin, they’ll probably swing the ball from side to side five times, but now you can only swing four times.”
Pope believes that the shorter you make the shot clock, the more you take out of the game. Pope also said the shot clock took away the four corners offense, which teams used to create scoring opportunities or simply hold onto the ball until the opposing team was forced to commit a foul in order to regain possession. “That idea of motion and probing offensively until something just springs open because of a defensive mistake is slowly vanishing” Pope said.
Before taking job as head coach at UVU, Pope spent the last four years as an assistant coach at Brigham Young University. During his final season at BYU in 2014, the Cougars led the entire nation in scoring. So Pope is accustomed to playing a very fast-paced style of basketball and not worried about the shot clock time change.
“The seven seconds that it takes for a team to inbound the ball and walk the ball up the floor to call out a play just drives me insane,” said Pope. “Coach Pitino, Coach Rose, and Coach Karl just kind of ruined me that way. I just want to be in attack mode. This clock won’t be an issue for us.”
