Opinions vary on the causes and potential solutions for the NBA's early-season injury crisis, and an idea commissioner Adam Silver once floated is back in the conversation. Sports Illustrated's Chris Mannix said on the Open Floor podcast that he has heard that Silver likes the idea of shortening NBA games to 40 minutes. This is an idea that Silver has previously supported publicly.
"As we get more involved in global basketball, the NBA is the only league that plays 48 minutes. And I would be -- I am -- a fan of four 10-minute quarters," Silver said on The Dan Patrick Show in 2025. "I'm not sure that many others are. Putting aside what it means for records and things like that, yeah, I think that a two-hour format for a game is more consistent with modern television habits."
Silver is not the only major supporter of the idea. Mark Cuban has vouched for it as well, and given the sheer number of notable injuries the NBA has endured so far this season, the league is suddenly in a position in which it probably needs to consider pretty drastic changes to keep its best players on the floor. Is the idea of a 40-minute NBA game feasible? What are the pros and cons here, and why do the negatives ultimately outweigh the positives? Let's dive in.
The pros
1. Fewer minutes mean fewer opportunities for injuries
Some basic math: 82 48-minute games equals 3,936 minutes of regular-season basketball for every team, before overtime. Trim games to 40 minutes and teams instead play 3,280 regular-season minutes per year, or around 17% less total basketball. Fewer minutes means fewer opportunities for players to get hurt.
That much is essentially indisputable. Where things get more promising is in the theoretical, compounding effect of playing less. If players are likelier to get hurt when they're overworked, reducing their workloads could potentially limit those more vulnerable minutes late in games and seasons because they simply aren't accumulating the same degree of wear and tear.
Fresher players would hopefully be healthier players.
2. A shorter game brings the NBA in line with every other major league
College basketball games are 40 minutes. WNBA games are 40 minutes. FIBA games are 40 minutes. The NBA is the outlier here. It is the only major basketball league in which games have those eight extra minutes, and standardizing games across the sport could make it easier to translate player production across leagues.
This isn't strictly a basketball phenomenon, either. Major League Baseball is in the middle of a renaissance sparked in part by game-shortening measures like the pitch clock. Silver acknowledged this in that Dan Patrick Show interview, calling a two-hour game "more consistent with modern television habits." It's simply easier to hold the attention span of a television audience for a 40-minute game than a 48-minute game.
3. Shortening games introduces more randomness
This has certainly been less true in the "eight champions in eight years" era we are currently living through, but the NBA tends to be more predictable than other sports when it comes to playoff outcomes. The NFL's single-elimination format makes the best teams extremely vulnerable in the postseason, and baseball is so inherently volatile because pitcher performance makes upsets so common.
Over a seven-game sample, the better team usually wins out in an NBA playoff series. This isn't absolute, of course, especially with health and 3-point variance factored in, but Cinderella runs are relatively rare in basketball. Only two NBA champions were seeded lower than No. 3 in their conference, and neither came this century. Nearly twice as many No. 1 seeds (53) have won titles than all other seeds combined (27).
Smaller samples create more volatility. It's easier for an inferior team to overcome a superior one across 40 minutes than it is across 48. Every hot shooting stretch means more; every key player in foul trouble has to miss a larger portion of the game. If you view the NBA through a purely competitive lens, this is a negative. If you view the NBA primarily as an entertainment product, creating more upsets is a real benefit of shortening games.
The cons
1. Benches would be trivialized
NBA games may last 48 minutes, but nobody actually plays anywhere near that much anymore. In fact, nobody even averages 40 minutes per game anymore, with Jamal Murray leading the league at 38.4 minutes per game thus far this season. What this essentially means is that teams could largely maintain the workloads of their superstars in a 40-minute game and simply use their bench players less.
This is the immediate reason that a change like this isn't feasible. Why on Earth would the NBA Players Association go along with a change that trivializes the majority of its membership? Stars would suddenly be more valuable than ever because they'd be playing a greater proportion of the game, but everyone else becomes less valuable for the same reason.
This has enormous team-building implications as well. Suddenly, superteams would be back in vogue because tying all of your money and assets into two or three players would make more sense in a world where fewer players are needed to get through a game or season.
On this note, it's not even clear what sort of health benefits this change would actually create. Bench players would certainly stay healthier just for playing less... but would stars benefit from this at all? That's less clear, and the NBA is obviously far more invested in keeping the best players on the court than role players.
There are theoretical fixes here, but none are perfect. The NBA could put a minutes cap on individual players, but remember, stoppages aren't uniform. Say the league sets a 30-minute cap, and a player crosses that threshold because no timeout, foul or dead-ball turnover stops the game for him to leave. How does the league handle that? It could mandate that players sit one full quarter, but doing so would inevitably lead to star players essentially playing at least one full half.
There's no clean solution to this problem, and until someone finds one, it's hard to believe this sort of change is feasible.
2. The inherent problems with the schedule would persist
The length of games is only a small component of what makes the NBA schedule so grueling. Shortening games to 40 minutes wouldn't eliminate the need to travel to 41 regular-season road games. It wouldn't remove back-to-backs from the slate either, and it wouldn't bake more time into the schedule for practice, conditioning or a longer training camp.
NBA basketball is simply more difficult to play today than it was in the past. Players are more skilled and athletic than they used to be, forcing them to cover more space, play faster and endure more punishment than they once did. Shortening the game wouldn't change how it is played.
That's the danger of any incremental solution. Shortening games would carry substantial costs to the NBA. Shorter games would mean fewer commercial breaks for the television product. If the league tries it and it doesn't work, it has sacrificed revenue for nothing and is therefore less likely to take bigger financial risks to reap more substantial rewards, such as cutting games from the schedule.
3. Records would lose all meaning
Even if records and statistics aren't that important in the grand scheme of things, they're treated as sacred components of league history by many fans. Even if every other major rule has been subject to change across eras, the length of the game has been stable. That makes comparing stats and records across history at least somewhat viable. That changes if you shorten the game. Modern records become nearly unbreakable.
If the league were willing to tamper with its history in this way, there are simply lower-risk changes it could make instead of shortening games. One concept: increasing the value of 3-pointers to four points and similarly pushing 2s up to three. Doing this would narrow the value gap between shots behind the arc and those inside it, thereby incentivizing players to take more mid-range shots and, theoretically, forcing defenders to cover less ground than they do currently. One reason a change like this is unlikely is that it would make comparing numbers across eras pointless.
The NBA may one day decide it's willing to break that glass, but it has given no indication that it is prepared to do so now.
