The ROAR Podcast: Nick Elam

[upbeat music] Picture a Division II gym in Philadelphia, summer of 2017. Maybe eight people in the stands. And sitting courtside at the scorer's table, a former high school math teacher watching an idea he'd chased for 10 years finally get played for real. The idea started in 2007 with a young teacher in southwest Ohio asking a simple question: Why does the end of a basketball game reward the teams for breaking the rules? Intentional fouls, stalling, shots that look like a blooper reel. What if you turn the clock off and play to a target score instead? He pitched it to roughly 80 commissioners, executives, and media members. Maybe 5% wrote back. He called what followed "10 years of tomorrows." Then TBT said yes, then the Canadian Elite Basketball League, and in January of 2020, his phone rang in an airport terminal. It was the NBA league office, and the players wanted to try it for the All-Star Game. Today, the Elam Ending lives in the G League, Unrivaled, the Women's College Basketball All-Star Game, and countless grassroots leagues around the world. His name is Dr. Nick Elam. He's a professor of educational leadership at Ball State, holds a master's in sports administration with a focus in sports analytics from Northwestern, and he hosts his own show, "The Sports Rules Pod." He also spent 21 seasons as a Cincinnati Reds ground crew and keeps stats for the Pacers and Fever. In this conversation with Adam, Nick talks through the rejections, the reinventions, and why the best rule changes aren't about changing the sport. They're recalibration, a way to bring back the game fans actually love. And Adam makes the case that rules are more than the fine print. They shape the fan experience, ticket sales, and sponsorship value. I'm Bryce Clinton, and this is the ROAR Podcast.

Welcome to the ROAR Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Grothman. With me today is Nick Elam. Nick, welcome to the pro- podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, thanks for being here. I think people may have heard of the Elam Ending and everything that you've done, and I think we're gonna talk about some new ideas and new concepts and new things that you think could be interesting. But for those who are not familiar, let us learn a little bit more about you and your background and what is the Elam Ending and how did it become so famous and so popular?

Sure. So the Elam Ending in a nutshell is an idea not meant to change basketball, but actually to do the opposite, to preserve a more natural and exciting style of play through the end of every game. And the way that it's done is to remove the clock at the end of every game and to play to a target score instead. And what that does is that gets r- rid of a lot of the warping strategies that we see so often in timed games, uh, and allows for a more authentic, familiar, suspenseful style of play down the stretch of games. And it was first implemented at TBT, the Basketball Tournament, in 2017, where it has been implemented ever since. Although there were 10 years of independent research and outreach-

Yeah

... leading up to that first implementation.

Well, well that's... I, I know I kinda-

But-

Yeah, I kind of jumped into, like, 'cause I think