The 2024 Paris Olympics concluded with two thrilling gold medal games on the men’s and women’s sides. In both matchups, Team USA held off the host nation France in instant classics that came down to crunch time.

On the men’s side on Saturday, Stephen Curry propelled Team USA to a 98-87 win and the gold medal with an unconscious late-game shooting stretch that put Paris in hysterics. Then on the women’s side on Sunday, A’ja Wilson and the U.S. won 67-66, overcoming a scrappy upset attempt from France that came literal inches short of overtime.

The men’s team captured its fifth consecutive gold medal, while the women’s side won its eighth consecutive gold at the event.

Just as Team USA winning gold in basketball has become Olympic tradition, the Olympics also brings with it the quadrennial tradition of debating if the NBA should adopt the FIBA rules that are used on the world stage.

Using FIBA rules, the Olympics come with famous differences from the NBA game such as no rule against defenders camping in the paint and more attention paid to traveling. Another difference concerns basket interference. Once the ball hits the rim, players can knock or tap the ball off the rim, unlike NBA players who must wait for the ball to leave the cylinder.

This difference created a hilarious moment in the closing minutes of the men’s gold medal game against France, as Anthony Davis and Kevin Durant both animatedly called for basket interference on a Victor Wembanyama put-back (my dad was right there with them yelling goaltending!). After a split second, both Davis and Durant realized the dunk was legal in this setting and got back on offense.

Perhaps, most notably, the biggest difference in the rules can be felt with the speed of international games. The quarters are 10 minutes instead of 12, teams get five timeouts instead of seven, and the last two minutes don’t seem to take an eternity because there are less stoppages in play.

This factor of the Olympics, the speed and smoothness of the product, seems to consistently get overwhelmingly positive reviews from NBA fans sounding off on social media sites. It has for some time.

This weekend, a 2012 article about the topic from TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott resurfaced on Reddit/NBA, revisiting the rule-change debate that Abbott asked readers about over a decade ago. That article included the subheading, “Where Crunch Time is Heaven” when referring to the FIBA rules.

I used to have little hope for conversations like this, thinking they were purely hypothetical. Yet, just recently, the NBA made some positive corrections regarding foul-baiting and the MLB added a pitch clock. Maybe there’s hope for some more positive rule changes in the future.

So, with another Olympics and some dramatic finishes adding to the data, here we are re-engaging with this discussion, too. Whether its quicker finishes, basket interference or some other difference, should the NBA adopt some of the FIBA rules used at the Olympics?