The Night the Box Score Died: How a “Double-Foul” Broke the NBA for Millions of Fans
If you were tuning into the Timberwolves vs. Nuggets game on the night of November 15, 2025, you probably thought your internet connection was broken. You might have restarted your router. You might have frantically closed and reopened your ESPN app. You weren’t alone.
For thousands of fans inside the Target Center and millions watching at home, the game between these two Western Conference heavyweights turned into a bizarre experiment in time travel. For the first time in the modern era, we were forced to watch basketball like it was 1960. No advanced analytics. No real-time updates. No box score. Just ten guys running up and down a court and a scoreboard that only told us two things: the time and the points.
While the Denver Nuggets eventually secured a 123-112 victory over the Minnesota Timberwolves, the final score is almost a footnote. The real story is the chaos that ensued when the lights—digitally speaking—went out
The Glitch: How a Routine Play Crashed the System
In a league that prides itself on high-tech innovation—where cameras track the spin rate of the ball and sensors monitor player fatigue—it is almost laughable what actually brought the system down. It wasn’t a hacker. It wasn’t a power surge.
It was a double-foul.
Late in the third quarter, chaos struck. According to reports from the scorer’s table, the official statistician attempted to input a double-foul into the NBA’s courtside software. It is a play that happens in almost every game. But this time, the system choked. The software froze, the backup failed, and the data pipeline that feeds the entire world’s sports apps instantly severed.
It’s the digital equivalent of a Ferrari breaking down because you put the wrong kind of air in the tires. A billion-dollar industry was brought to its knees by a data entry error.
Flying Blind in the Information Age
To understand the frustration, you have to realize that for modern fans, the game doesn’t just happen on the TV screen. It happens on the “second screen”—our phones.
When the stats outage hit, it caused a ripple effect of confusion across the sports ecosystem.
The Fantasy Panic: Imagine being a fantasy basketball manager that night. You have Nikola Jokic on your roster. You are watching him dominate, grabbing rebounds and dishing out assists. But you look at your app, and he has zero points for the quarter. The panic sets in. “Did he get injured? Was he benched?” Nope. He was playing out of his mind, but the digital record said he didn’t exist. Social media was flooded with screenshots of frozen apps and angry captions.
The Betting Blackout: For the sports betting community, this was a financial nightmare. Live betting relies entirely on real-time data feeds. When those feeds cut out, the sportsbooks locked the markets. If you had a parlay depending on Anthony Edwards hitting a certain number of threes in the fourth quarter, you were left in limbo, sweating out a result you couldn’t even track.
The Broadcast Struggle: Even the announcers were lost. We are used to commentators giving us deep insights: “That’s his 5th rebound of the quarter!” or “The Wolves are shooting 20% from the field.” Without their monitors working, the broadcast team had to resort to old-school eye tests. They were guessing just as much as we were.
The Ghost Triple-Double
The cruelest irony of the night is that we almost missed a masterpiece because of a computer bug.
When the dust settled and the engineers finally retrieved the data hours after the final buzzer, we learned that Nikola Jokic had put together a monster performance. The Nuggets superstar quietly racked up a triple-double: 27 points, 12 rebounds, and 11 assists.
Usually, when a player nears a triple-double, the arena buzzes. The announcers count down the stats: “He just needs one more assist!” But because of the outage, Jokic’s brilliance happened in a vacuum. He achieved one of the hardest feats in basketball, and nobody realized it until he was already on the plane home.
Similarly, Anthony Edwards fought hard for his 26 points, but the lack of live stats hid the fact that he was struggling with efficiency in the fourth quarter—a narrative that would usually be dissected in real-time on Twitter.
Conclusion: A Wake-Up Call for the League
Ultimately, the Timberwolves-Nuggets statistics outage was a harmless glitch in the grand scheme of things. The right team won, and the stats were eventually fixed.
But it serves as a massive wake-up call for the NBA. We have built a sports culture that is addicted to data. We crave the numbers just as much as the highlights. When you take that away, the experience feels broken.
The league needs to ensure its technology is as resilient as its athletes. Because in 2025, if a tree falls in the forest (or a player scores 30 points) and the app doesn’t update, did it really happen?
Photo credits: Serpstat, Artem Podrez (via pixabay.com)