The NBA's 24-second shot clock came from simple division

On November 22, 1950, the Fort Wayne Pistons beat the Minneapolis Lakers 19 to 18. The Lakers had George Mikan, and the Pistons' plan was to keep the ball away from him. They held it for minutes at a time without shooting. They took 13 shots in the whole game, and the fourth quarter ended 3 to 1.

Nothing in the rules stopped them. A team in the lead could pass the ball around until time ran out, and the team behind could do little but foul to get it back. The St. Paul Dispatch wrote that the Pistons had given pro basketball "a great black eye."

A few weeks later, on January 6, 1951, the Indianapolis Olympians beat the Rochester Royals 75 to 73 in six overtimes. In each overtime the team that got the ball first held on to it for the whole period and took one shot at the end.

The NBA tried several rule changes in the early 1950s to speed the game up. In 1954 the Syracuse Nationals tried something else in a practice game: a clock that gave a team 24 seconds to shoot.

The number came from the team's owner, Danny Biasone, and its general manager, Leo Ferris. Biasone later explained it. He had looked at the box scores of games he enjoyed, "games where they didn't screw around and stall," and found that each team took about 60 shots. That made 120 shots a game. A game lasted 48 minutes, or 2,880 seconds. And 2,880 divided by 120 is 24.

A Syracuse sportswriter remembered Ferris sitting in Biasone's bowling alley, scribbling formulas for the clock on a napkin. Others had proposed a time limit before. Biasone and Ferris supplied the number, and Biasone lobbied the league until it agreed.

The NBA brought in the 24-second clock for the 1954-55 season, and scoring across the league shot up.

Syracuse won the championship that season. The team it beat in the final, four games to three, was the Fort Wayne Pistons.