Okay, here’s my blog post about figuring out NBA quarter times:
Alright folks, let me tell you about this little project I tackled. It all started with me getting super into basketball and wondering, like, how long are those NBA quarters really? And how much dead time is there actually? So, being the kinda person I am, I decided to stop wondering and start figuring it out myself.
First thing I did was hit up the NBA website. I was hoping for some official stats or something, but no dice. They have game scores and player stats galore, but actual quarter timings? Forget about it. So, Plan B. I figured I’d just watch a bunch of games and time them myself. Yeah, I know, sounds kinda crazy, but I was determined.
So, the first step was grabbing some data. I started recording games. I picked a few random games from different teams, trying to get a decent sample size. I’d sit there with my phone’s stopwatch, hitting start at the beginning of each quarter and stop at the end. Painstaking? You bet. But I was committed.
- Got my phone ready.
- Started the stopwatch at the tip-off of the first quarter.
- Stopped the stopwatch at the final buzzer of the first quarter.
- Repeated for all four quarters.
- Wrote down the times for each quarter.
The next part was the fun part, kinda. I had all this raw data, so I needed to clean it up and make sense of it. I tossed all the times into a spreadsheet. Then, I calculated the average time for each quarter across all the games I watched.
I found something really interesting. Not all quarters are created equal. Obvious, right? But seeing the numbers in front of me was cool. Some quarters were consistently longer than others, mostly due to fouls, timeouts, and all that jazz. The fourth quarter was almost always the longest because everyone fouls, especially at the end.
I also started timing the breaks between quarters. Those are supposed to be like a minute or two, but sometimes they felt way longer. Turns out, TV timeouts can really stretch those breaks out. It’s almost always longer than they should be thanks to all the commercials.
After doing all the calculations, I was able to get a pretty good idea of the average length of each quarter, and the average length of the breaks. And, I can safely say, the amount of actual gameplay in an NBA game is way less than the total time you spend watching it. Shocker!
So, was it a waste of time? Nah, not really. I learned a lot about the flow of an NBA game, and I got to geek out with some data. Plus, now I can annoy my friends with random NBA trivia about quarter lengths. Worth it!
