Quote:
Originally Posted by Snaqwells
Personally, I don't mind it. Whether you use 6 minute stopped clock quarters, or 20 minute running halves, the games take about the same amount of time. The benefit of the running halves, though, is consistency. All the summer leagues here use 20 minute running halves, and I haven't been off schedule yet even with two over time games. Of course, the OTs are sudden death.
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I think the consistency is the biggest issue. With stop clock, you can have very short games or very long games depending on the style and skill level (few or many fouls/violations).
Since many rec leagues are on a tight budget and you must vacate the gym on time, it only makes sense to make sure everyone gets a fair allotment of game time and not shortchange those at the end of the day when you lose access to the gym.
The only way to effectively do that would be to use a running clock OR put time limits on games....where X minutes before the next scheduled game time, you could drop the game clock to 1 or 2 minutes if it is not already below 1 or 2 minutes. This would allow games that were progressing well to be unaffected and would have a normal clock situation while the long-running games would be cut short.
In a league that I once ran, we did some things just a little different though with the period endings. In addition to the the typical stop clock in the last 1 or 2 minutes of the game if the score difference was 10 or less, we had a stop clock at the end of all other periods (half/quarter) when it was under 30 seconds. This didn't really affect the length of the game but was enough to prevent a team from deliberately delaying a throwin/freethrow in order to make sure the other team wouldn't get the ball back or wouldn't get a chance to score by making the time run out during the FT or dead ball. Before we stopped the clock at the end of all periods, we had some men's teams do exactly that.
Having a stop clock at least at the ends of each periods also gives the kids some exposure to clock management....not a major item, but one that is part of the game as they move up.