Kerr: ‘Speeding up the game … is a good idea'

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OAKLAND -- If NBA commissioner Adam Silver is able to make good on his desire to speed up the end of games, he has plenty of support from Warriors coach Steve Kerr.

“I agree with him,” Kerr said late Thursday afternoon, prior to tipoff against Detroit at Oracle Arena. “Speeding up the game -- not just the last two (minutes) but the entire 48 -- is a good idea.

“Replay has been overdone. We’ve experimented with replay. I appreciate what the league has done, trying to get calls right. There are always unintended consequences from replay. As a league, we should continue to look at replay.”

Silver broached the subject earlier Thursday in London, prior to the Nuggets-Pacers game at O2 Arena.

"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 told reporters.

The league has been studying the matter, particularly the aspect regarding the number of timeouts allowed in the last two minutes. The idea is to shorten the overall length of games.

“Maybe only allow 20-second timeouts in the last two minutes, instead of full timeouts,” Kerr suggested.

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"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."

Kerr’s counterpart Thursday, Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy, also is a fan of shortening the games. Both coaches are willing to roll with the calls of officials.

And neither is a huge fan of replay.

“Surprisingly, the most important thing is we don’t care about getting foul calls right in the last two minutes,” Van Gundy said. “But we’ve got to get out-of-bounds calls, goaltending and that sort of stuff right. That’s why I’ve been anti-replay. If we’re going to go replay with the idea is to get it right, then at least let’s get every call right.”

Whether it’s through timeouts or altering replay, the league’s competition committee continues to review ways to shorten games.

"It's something that we track very closely," Silver said. "In the league office we time out every game, we know exactly how much time each possession takes and, again, we can also look at minute-by-minute ratings, so we know at what point fans are potentially tuning out as well."

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