Last March felt like an eternity. April was a blur. Mondays are Fridays. 11 a.m. might as well be 6 p.m. Just weeks before the reality of the pandemic set in last year, the Elam Ending exposed the clock as a gimmick in the fourth quarter of the 2020 NBA All-Star Game.
The Elam Ending was concocted by Nick Elam — a card-carrying Mensa member, professor and die-hard basketball fan — as a solution to the tyranny of clock management at the end of games. As it stands, the team with the lead deliberately slows down the game, stalls its offense and chucks up bad shots at the end of the shot clock, all in service of ending the game while incurring little risk.