Hey! Millennials! Look over here! I’m jingling these keys because I want your focus for a sec…LOOK OVER HERE! Thank you. Okay, you’re going to get mad about this, but stay with me: NBA commissioner Adam Silver is looking at ways to shorten the end of games because he fears millennials can’t pay attention for long periods of time.
I know, I know. The quotes from the ESPN story you’re about to read aren’t going to help your mood, either:
“It’s something that I know all of sports are looking at right now, and that is the format of the game and the length of time it takes to play the game,” Silver said. “Obviously people, particularly millennials, have increasingly short attention spans, so it’s something as a business we need to pay attention to.”
“When the last few minutes of the game take an extraordinary amount of time, sometimes it’s incredibly interesting for fans, other times it’s not,” Silver said. “The short answer to your question is we are going to take a fresh look at the format, specifically in the last two minutes.”
Millennials get blamed for all sorts of things. They’ve “ruined” napkins, the housing market, closet sizes and dozens of other things. Most of things they “ruin” are bad, like napkins, so please continue to ruin things, millennials.
But let’s be honest — millennials have no attention spans. But let’s be even more honest — nobody has an attention span. And let’s be even more honest — six timeouts in the final 30 seconds of an NBA game suck whether you’re 25, 45, or 65. I’m not a millennial and have zero attention span. I checked Twitter three times while writing this. I’ve watched basketball since the 1990s, and the last minute of NBA games has been bad the whole time.
So yeah, Silver has a point. Tweets are 140 characters. Snapchat videos are 10 seconds. Instagram videos are like 15 seconds. If I have to click the “show more” thing on a Facebook status that goes on too long, I’d rather die. Let’s not lie to ourselves and get into a generational argument about the ability to focus and instead embrace the beauty of the NBA thinking about picking up the pace in the final two minutes.
(ESPN)
