IN BRIEF (Page 23)

Basketball

Nowitzki prefers shorter season

Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki heard about the NBA experimenting with shorter games in the preseason but he has another idea. He would like to see a shorter season, as in fewer games, rather than games with 11-minute quarters instead of 12. A workable number of games, in his view, would be somewhere in the mid-60s, a significant reduction from the current 82-game schedule.