Not only did Major League Baseball shorten games with its wide-ranging rule changes, but it did so by eliminating many of the sport’s boring moments.

Don’t like that a pitcher can shake off five signs from his catcher, step off the mound and walk around for 20 seconds to get his bearings? Here’s a pitch clock. Don’t like that a hitter has a 40-second routine with his batting gloves between every pitch? Well, he can only get one timeout per at-bat. Do you suspect pitching coaches and catchers go out to the mound only to give relievers more time to warm up? We’ll put a limit on those visits. Do you believe there are too many pitching changes? Every pitcher now has to face at least three batters, unless an inning ends. Do you hate at-bats in which pick-off attempts outnumber pitches? We’re going to limit those, too.

The changes cut back on some of the inherent strategizing in the sport, but they mostly cut out some dead spots in the game. The NBA should learn something and take aim at late-game intentional fouling.

On Saturday night, it hurt the NBA Cup semifinal between the San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder, turning what felt like the best regular-season game of the year for most of the night into an unbearable slog. It validated casual basketball fans who insist that the last two minutes of game time can take 25 minutes in real time. What should have been the most dramatic part of a great game turned into a chore to watch.

In this case, the “foul-up-three” strategy was the main culprit. While the Thunder tried to extend their window to tie or take the lead, fouling the Spurs and hoping for missed free throws, the Spurs responded in kind by fouling the Thunder when they had a three-point lead, not allowing the Thunder a 3-point attempt that could tie the game. If executed correctly, and if free-throw makes are matched, the strategy makes the trailing team have to try to purposely miss a free throw, hoping for an offensive rebound that gives a chance at two more points.

(A quick related tangent: Those purposeful misses can turn into the NBA’s version of the tush push, in that they are difficult to officiate correctly. With everyone knowing that a miss is coming, all of the players are going to try to gain advantages, whether through lane violations or under-the-glass grappling. There is almost too much for the referees to monitor, making it exceptionally easy to overlook one element of a play, as might have happened on Saturday.)

My colleague John Hollinger wrote in May that the foul-up-3 strategy and its spotty application actually represent the best chance for the team in the lead to lose the game in regulation, therefore leading to more uncertainty with the result instead of less. While some of the machinations make my head hurt, I trust John with these matters.

Still, while it might maximize the amount of time a game hangs in the balance, the nature of that time matters, too. So much of it is spent with players walking back and forth between free-throw lines, often with some reviews thrown in to check on the game clock, slowing things down even further. It does not make for enthralling basketball. In fact, it’s largely not basketball.

Ideally, you want players trying to score (and their opponents trying to stop them) in the run of play, without relying on intentional fouls. The league has made its end-of-game scenarios a little better by limiting the number of timeouts teams can carry into the final three minutes. Since 2017-18, they can have a maximum of two.

That has led to more back-and-forth play at the end of games. Coaches have also learned that it is easier for their teams to score against a defense that is running back in transition perhaps without its preferred matchups, than it is against a set and prepared defense. That scenario is what recently led to the end of LeBron James’ consecutive games streak of scoring at least 10 points on Dec. 4, with the final 2:40 of that game played without a single whistle or timeout. That it unfolded so quickly is part of what made the moment so exhilarating. Alas, the Lakers and Raptors entered the last possession of that matchup tied at 120 apiece.

The problem is when there is a three-point lead and the trailing team has the ball, or some variation of that. The easiest solution would be using the Elam Ending, which the league experimented with in All-Star Games from 2020-2023 — setting up a target score after the third quarter, making it so that there is always an incentive for the teams to try to score and stop their opponents from scoring, full stop.

The free throw remains the most efficient way to score, so teams would likely not be in a position where giving up two free throws would be way better than trying to prevent a 3-point attempt. (For the mathematically inclined, the league was shooting 78.8 percent from the line going into Sunday’s play, meaning two free throws result in an average of 1.58 points. At 36.9 percent on 3-point attempts, the average possession that produces a 3 is worth 1.11 points.)

Alas, the league didn’t even stick with the Elam Ending in the All-Star Game, so it is not going to insert it into games that count. Such a radical change would be akin to Major League Baseball putting a runner on second base to start extra innings, hoping to avoid games that push 16 or 17 innings and decimate pitching staffs. Adopting the Elam Ending would be a fundamental change that impacts how and why points are scored. I get the conservatism, even if it would make the ending of games more fun, and certainly limit intentional fouling.

The other main option is to penalize intentional fouls in some or all situations. To specifically get rid of the foul-up-three issue, any intentional foul committed by a team that is winning in the final 30 seconds of the game would result in its opposition getting one free throw and retaining possession. This is how Hollinger imagined one possible interpretation of that philosophy:

“If the offense is in the bonus, a take foul by the winning team up by three points in the last six seconds (or eight or 10, whatever the committee thinks is appropriate) is one shot and the ball out of bounds.”

That seems simple enough, but that would leave the trailing team able to intentionally foul while the leading team could not, which is not entirely fair. If it wanted, the NBA could say any intentional foul, committed by any team at any point would result in a free throw and possession for its opponent. (This would have the welcome, if unintended consequence of ridding the league of away-from-the-play intentional fouling of poor free-throw shooters throughout the game, the Hack-a-Shaqs of the world.) Would that put way too much power in the hands of officials who would have to determine when there was a legitimate play on the ball and when there was not? Possibly.

When changing a rule, you must consider the domino effect and how teams will try to game the system in other ways. It’s not easy to anticipate the repercussions, although the NBA has enough resources and employees to study any issue thoroughly.

To borrow a cliché often used in sports, the NBA has to keep the main thing the main thing. Unexpected consequences are likely if there is a rule change, sure. But Saturday’s Spurs-Thunder game should have been an unimpeachable gem, one of the best games of the season. We should have been able to see what Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama and their teammates tried to do to prevail, preferably with a solid flow of play and a hard cap on timeouts.

Instead, we saw both teams trudging to the free-throw line, capped by an intentionally missed free throw and an arguably missed call. Also, the whole thing took forever — the last 9.8 seconds of game action took nearly 12 minutes in real time.

It was an especially notable example of something that happens regularly. Who wants that?