We don’t watch NBA games for the free throws. We watch professional sports to see the best in the world ply their craft. If we were interested in the best free throw shooters in the world, we wouldn’t look for them in the NBA. Dentists, retirees and gym rats of all stripes around the world hold records proving they have the physical tools and coordination to commit the set shot from 15 feet away to muscle memory better than those paid millions of dollars a year. Ray Allen and Steph Curry could never touch these men and women when it comes to raw free throw ability.

If the NBA is supposed to show us the best in the world at the sport, why dedicate so much of the telecast to such an inherently nonathletic, unexciting part of a fast-paced, improvisational game? It’s because we need to dole out basketball justice to ensure the game stays entertaining. Unfortunately, hockey-style power plays don’t seem to be on the table yet to dismiss foul shots entirely.

Free throws are rolls of the dice that punish and reward with just enough variation to allow us to imagine a narrative for why someone made or missed this specific free throw. They serve as a deterrent against breaking the rules, but does breaking play to watch free throws add any aesthetic enjoyment to the game?

Outside of arguments about basketball philosophy, the strongest catalyst for a rule change in free throws is the current outcry over a strategy that was created to contain one player: Shaquille O’Neal. Often forgotten is the major reasons for Hack-A-Shaq were to avoid one of the most dominant forces in the history of the game touching the ball and keeping his legendary offensive rebounding skills off the glass than to run him out of the game.

In the intervening two decades of basketball, coaches have widened their criteria for who is worth hacking as well as when to employ hacking. At the start of a quarter, these purposeful off-ball fouls offer no advantage- the opposing team gets a fresh shot clock while you are a foul closer to bonus free throws, and their player is one foul closer to disqualification.

Perversely, once a team breaks the rules of being too physical many times, they unlock the incentive that lets them stop the game and send any player to the free throw line. Breaking the rules more often shouldn’t be more advantageous than breaking the rules less often. Coaches are given this tool that could regain possession for their team without taking time off the clock or having to play 24 seconds of defense. Once in hand, they can’t help themselves but throw a wet blanket on the game for minutes at a time.

To fix this paradox, do we let any player take off-ball foul free throws to let poor free throw shooters off the hook? Give teams the option of turning down the free throws and taking the ball out of bounds? With all the hot takes and prescriptions proliferating, it’s easy to overlook more elegant solutions right in front of us. To eliminate the Hack-A-Strategy once and for all, we should stop bonus free throw attempts from being live-ball rebound opportunities.

The proposal: when a player is fouled while his team is in the bonus, possession goes to the team fouled and play continues as it does now before the bonus is reached. After the next long break in play (TV timeouts, team timeouts, video reviews, or the start of a new quarter) the built up bonus foul shots are all taken together by the players who were fouled with no rebounders (like technical or illegal defense fouls). To guard against a fluke free throw parade ruining a game’s pace, a cutoff at 5 free throws accumulated between both teams would stop play and cause a free throw break.

Shooting fouls would be played out just as they are now. The free throw(s) and rebound chance serve the function of simulating what may have happened if the shot attempt had been taken without the foul. It’s difficult to work yourself into a position to get a shot off, and we should reward that with a short break and foul shot attempts. Since the play was defended cleanly until the shot attempt, the defense at least earned a chance to rebound a missed free throw.

On top of that, the physical contact at the rim that often accompanies a shooting foul deserves the mini-break that comes from watching free throws while the audience watches replays of the foul. Most bonus fouls are not entertaining plays. Reach-ins, questionable screens, and over the back calls shouldn’t need a breather. We'll wait to find out the roll of the dice later instead of stopping all the up-and-down beauty of the game.

Also, since we stop the game immediately in the last two minutes for a variety of reasons (e.g. under the basket after a field goal and for video reviews), we should apply the same clause here to ensure teams are certain of the score up to the moment for weighing end-game strategies. In other words, the status quo remains unchanged for the last two minutes of the game.

Yes, this plan does trade off the Platonic ideal of the score at any moment being indicative of who is in a better position to win. Free throws accumulate and add variance to what the score is going to be after the next TV break. This ignores the the current replay system which re-assesses whether a shot was a three or a two point field goal already stepped all over the sanctity of the score always reflecting the score being correct up-to-the-second. That said, this is still sacrificing something, and we should weigh it against what else we stand to gain from the rule change above and beyond eradicating the Hack-A-Strategy. Let’s further investigate the ramifications of batching bonus free throws.

Adam Silver made headlines when he said the hack-a-strategy needs attention, but long before that he prioritized coming up with ways of bringing down average game length. One of the ideas currently being floated is to shorten games to 44-minutes, which may be good for the game overall, but it would mean ~8% less action for everyone that buys a ticket. I have a sneaking suspicion owners would not immediately drop ticket prices by a corresponding percentage. Batching bonus free throws is a less drastic strategy to shorten game length alongside its other benefits.

When I discovered the joy of DVRing basketball games and catching up just in time for a live ending, I was most surprised by how much time free throws take up from the whistle blowing for a foul to the ball being live again. Unless you’re a connoisseur of basketball announcing, good luck finding anything interesting about a broadcast during two DeAndre Jordan bonus free throws during the second quarter of a 15-point game in mid-January. That scenario and those like it keep the NBA from being on the national consciousness until after the Super Bowl. If the commissioner is considering the sacrificing live-ball minutes of basketball goodness to the TV-contract gods, it’s absurd not to trim all the flabby parts of the broadcast first. Would you prefer a 44-minute game that takes two hours, or a 48-minute game that takes two hours?

Bonus free throws are inherently unexciting TV content because a replay of the foul only takes seconds to cue up, and by the time you see it everyone is still just getting into position on the block, then another ten seconds until the free throw is up, wash and repeat. Add in time for a substitution, another short horn honk for the opponent to match that substitution, and the obligatory handshakes- you’ve got a pile of dead time that’s rarely used to any great effect.

The broadcast switches gears from the equivalent of PhDs who are brilliant communicators explaining state-of-the-art statistical modeling to those same PhDs calling a game of dice. We won’t miss much understanding of the game since announcers don’t have exciting things to say about free throws the vast majority of the time. Viewers hear the player’s free throw percentage while looking at a graphic of his free throw percentage. We hear jokes from the color guy about how the play-by-play guy jinxed a player.

Additional entertainment complaints surrounding foul shots include the danger inherent in players standing still and throwing their bodies into each other in ways that would be a foul if done at any other time. Lane violation rules are rarely and arbitrarily enforced. It’s an unnatural play best compared to the kickoff return in football. In both, the flow of play is wholly interrupted with much set up and maneuvering for 5 seconds of psuedo-excitement.

Sure, the meditative aspect of watching free throws may provide processing time with friends or on social media. But since free throws don’t need interpretation from the announcing crew, the welcome back from commercial screams for some in-game advertising. There’s no moving action around to absorb our attention, and only the few seconds of the ball arcing through the air could be considered action at all.

Projecting a logo onto the court and reading a 30-second spot would more than offset the one or two commercial breaks missed because of how much we shortened game length by instituting the rule. The only workaround DVR move to avoid the ad is to miss points being scored. I only pay half attention to early bonus free throws anyway, because that’s all they should be: begrudgingly necessary carrots and sticks so we get more entertaining basketball.

I concede I am not qualified to be arbiter of the precise structure of the bonus free throws awarded. Awarding two shots for every foul would make all bonus fouls equivalent to the current punishment for a flagrant. This feels steep. Someone statistically inclined could even find the expected point outcomes of different options then match up the structure to effect the game as much as the current bonus structure does. This could ensure free throws doen’t become drastically more or less important.

My basketball intuition gravitates towards one free throw awarded per bonus foul that escalates to a one-and-one and eventually to the flagrant-equivalent of two free throws and the possession every time. I could be swayed that a whole new bonus system that accumulates over a game or a half would be better suited to making the most fair and entertaining basketball. The devil is in the details, and this rule is too good to be saddled with my basketball values on this one detail to sour anyone on the rest of the merits. Smarter people than me could dial this in over the years.

Batching together bonus free throws sometimes won’t effect the viewing experience or run time in cleanly played games without much fouling. The beauty of batching is that the more disjointed a game would’ve been under current rules, the greater the impact the rule would have on restoring a flow to play.

So, Commissioner Silver and the competition committee, we all know the easiest way to eliminate the Hack-A-Strategy is by allowing teams to take the ball out during the bonus instead of taking the free throws. Heading down that route would continue one-way ratcheting down of free throw ability’s importance that the NBA began when they got rid of the one-and-one for Shaq.

Don’t take the easy way out by devaluing free throw shooting again. Instead, put bonus foul shots where they belong as a side-show so we can have more time to watch the greatest basketball players do what they do better than anybody else in the world: play full court, 5-on-5 basketball.