New FIBA rules (1)

The new FIBA rules, valid from the 1st of October 2014 have been out for some time now. They have special interpretations too, with every possible situation taken into consideration. In the following articles I will try to go through the changes and see what they mean for the game of basketball.

The new rules were adopted on the 2nd of February in Barcelona, Spain by the FIBA Central Board and will be mandatory for all FIBA competitions from the 1st of October 2014, with the remark that in some competitions, like Euroleague, Eurocup, etc., they were used since 2013.
There are changes in the new rules, that don't really influence the game, changes in terminology, like shot clock instead of 24 second clock, goal released from a shot instead of goal from a shot, etc. But there are bigger changes, ones that were introduced with the goal of making the game quicker, more dynamic,  and hence more spectacular. This is why the 24 second rule was changed, the new time-out policy was introduced, the no charge semi circle area was widened, etc.

In this article I will analyze the new time-out policy of FIBA. There are two major changes:

• the introduction of the media time-out;
• the introduction of a maximum of 2 available time-outs in the last two minutes of the second half.

The first rule change won't really make a difference in Romanian basketball in the near future. Although basketball recently saw a big increase in popularity and media coverage, it is still considered a distant second behind football in the country. No popularity means no interest from the media, means no advertising, means no need for media time-outs. Let's hope that the popularity of basketball will keep increasing and we will see the media time-out introduced in LNBM also.
We can find the definition of the media time-out in section E of the rules. The rule states that every countries organizing body can decide whether to use these time-outs or not, and their length. There can be only one media time-out in each period. If a team requests a time-out in the first five minutes of the quarter that should be the media time-out. If neither team requests it until the 5th minute, the time-out shall be granted at the first possibility, but none of the two teams will lose one of their regular time-outs.

The second rule change is a more important one. In many close games, coaches tended to save all their second half time-outs for the final two minutes. Because of this, the last two minutes of those games had been played longer than the first eight. Since the fans wanted to see basketball, not time-outs, FIBA decided to limit the number of time-outs available in the last two minutes of regulation. Article 18.2.5 states that each team may be granted 3 time-outs during the second half with a maximum of 2 of these time-outs in the last 2 minutes of the second half. So if a coach doesn't use his first time out in the first 18 minutes of the second half, he will lose one of these 1 minute rest periods.
To elaborate a bit I will copy & paste an example 18/19-19 from the FIBA interpretation manual.

Example: With 2:09 on the game clock in the 4th period coach A requests his 1st time-out in the second half while the game is played. With 1:58 on the game clock the ball goes out-of-bounds and the game clock is stopped. The time-out for team A is now granted.
Interpretation: The scorer shall mark 2 horizontal lines on the scoresheet in the first box of team A as the time-out was granted at 1:58 in the 4th period. The time-out shall be entered in the second box and team A has only one more time-out left.

We will see if this rule change shall have it's desired effect, one thing is sure though, coaches will have to somewhat rethink their endgame tactics and rely more on the quick decision making of their players.

In the next part of this article I will try to analyze the changes in the Ball returned to the backcourt section, which is a very controversial rule in the eye of the fans.

You can download every rule and regulation manual from the FIBA site.