I’ve only come to basketball as a parent, and in that capacity I often find myself on shot clock duties, as one of the few people who seems to enjoy – or at least tolerate – the shot clock.
Perhaps I tolerate – or even enjoy – the shot clock because I imagine myself a human state machine, performing only limited actions to transition between very limited states, which makes it harder to get wrong, and less personal if I do. (I occasionally emerge from my imaginary machine world to speak to the other human parents too 🙂
I thought someone else somewhere on The Internet would have taken the time to write about this curiosity already, but given a brief search uncovered nothing, it seems that cometh the hour (or 24th second), cometh one more whimsical sport-x-CS post.
So here is my basketball shot-clock human state machine diagram.
This is based on 24s reset only. I haven’t formally proved it meets the competition guidance or tested it against a stream of game events, it’s just the model I have in my head, based on the applicable rules, that seems to do the job on game night. Please share any feedback though!