NO HAND CHECK and the Restricted Area!?

"Were they really going to make such a change?" A roundtable meeting was underway at NBA headquarters.

Stern clasped his hands before his forehead and slightly closed his eyes, listening to the think tank's presentation on the proposed rule changes.

Compared with soccer, basketball had a much shorter history and far less tradition.

On December 21, 1891, James Naismith, a physical education instructor at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States, invented basketball.

Then, on June 6, 1946, the NBA was founded in New York, with Maurice Podoloff serving as the league's first president.

The NBA had existed for fifty-two years, and those fifty-two years had also seen the most dramatic evolution in basketball.

Countless rules had been introduced, ushering generations of stars in and out. Players of different eras adapted to different rules—every version had its own gods.

After more than fifty years of revisions, basketball no longer resembled what it had been at the beginning.

One pivotal rule change after another had made basketball utterly different.

Zone Defense Prohibited (1947)

The NBA made this major decision because it believed zone defense slowed the pace down too much, while one-on-one man-to-man defense was more entertaining and made fans more excited to watch.

Furthermore, eliminating zone defense allowed more individually dominant stars to shine, while also creating more physical confrontation, which was highly beneficial to the league's commercial growth.

This change established the NBA's tone for many years. Though the details were tweaked several times afterward, the core rule forbidding zone defense remained in place for a full fifty years.

24-Second Shot Clock (1954)

On November 22, 1950, the Pistons' road game against the Minneapolis Lakers took "slow" to the absolute extreme.

Each shot attempt took an average of ninety seconds. When the game ended, the Pistons narrowly