Another Idea to Value Regular Season

[Liam_Gallagher]

What I honestly think is the best way to go is have the top 3 (or 4?) teams choose who they want to play in the first round. It would lead to excitement, rivalries, beef, and strategy. Imagine that? Imagine a team choosing to play a team, only to lose? Would be WWE level epicness.

[the sea duck]

Sometimes you get a team at a poorly scheduled time, or when your team is injured, etc, and you get a loss. So you go 1-1, get a schedule influenced loss and it is 1-2 and they have HCA? A season series should not have higher precedence over your whole season performance.

If a team won a lot of games through the whole season, it means they were placing some sort of value on the regular season. I'm not seeing this as really solving any sort of problem.

Yeah, that would also be my major concern here. On the other side, it might even create the opposite situation than of what was intented. Let's say a head to head is already decided (2-0 or 3-0 depending on the amount of games), what's stopping one or both teams to treat this like an end of season game? The losers because they already lost home advantage and can rest their players for games where it isn't the case, the winners because there is nothing to gain for them in that series any more.

overall record still matters for seeding. but we have scenarios where two teams treat a game as relatively meaningless anyway, so how would that scenario be different? if anything it would be more rare overall. but that's also why i say this isn't an ideal solution, but might be a better one than the status quo.

[the sea duck]

What I honestly think is the best way to go is have the top 3 (or 4?) teams choose who they want to play in the first round. It would lead to excitement, rivalries, beef, and strategy. Imagine that? Imagine a team choosing to play a team, only to lose? Would be WWE level epicness.

i think that idea mixes well with this idea. that idea makes the playoffs even more interesting. shifting to HCA being determined by head-to-head matchups makes the regular season more interesting. neither idea is perfect, and yes inevitably some team(s) will get burned in ways they feel is unfair. but that will happen under any system of rules. the average importance factor (IPF) of regular season games will increase.

the other big downside that i will concede is that maybe we don't want more important regular season games. as many have said already, there is a good argument for decreasing the number of games. this also raises the IPF, though decreases rigor of the regular season merit. but assuming the season won't be shortened, i think this idea is a decent one for raising IPF without removing games.

[Saints14]

An idea that I had to add some intrigue to the regular season (that got flamed here before lol) is to introduce "Money Games", inspired by "money balls" in the 3 point shootout, which count double in the standings. The biggest advantage that the NFL has over the NBA is that every game is high leverage, important and feels like a can't-miss event, so this would bring that element to the NBA. Money games would coincide with reducing the total number of games, so if we had say 70 total RS games 12 of them would be money games so that the standings still add up to 82. They'd be highly televised and anticipated, so you know if you tune in to an NBA game on national TV it would be important. It would help solve load management, both because of the fewer # of games but also because at the very least the games more casual fans would tune into would be the ones that teams would not sit their stars for. Player stats would not be weighted more heavily in money games, but performance in money games would be a discussion topic and could factor into end of year awards.

Yeah it's gimmicky, but so are most of the changes Silver made over the last 5 years. I think Money Games would be more compelling than the In Season Tournament, which only lasts for a few weeks and feels like it lost its intrigue.

[og15]

An idea that I had to add some intrigue to the regular season (that got flamed here before lol) is to introduce "Money Games", inspired by "money balls" in the 3 point shootout, which count double in the standings. The biggest advantage that the NFL has over the NBA is that every game is high leverage, important and feels like a can't-miss event, so this would bring that element to the NBA. Money games would coincide with reducing the total number of games, so if we had say 70 total RS games 12 of them would be money games so that the standings still add up to 82. They'd be highly televised and anticipated, so you know if you tune in to an NBA game on national TV it would be important. It would help solve load management, both because of the fewer # of games but also because at the very least the games more casual fans would tune into would be the ones that teams would not sit their stars for. Player stats would not be weighted more heavily in money games, but performance in money games would be a discussion topic and could factor into end of year awards.

Yeah it's gimmicky, but so are most of the changes Silver made over the last 5 years. I think Money Games would be more compelling than the In Season Tournament, which only lasts for a few weeks and feels like it lost its intrigue.

Every long season league will have the same issue as the NBA, and none of them can compare to the NFL in terms of importance of each game unless they drastically shorten their seasons or change their playoff style of course.

I actually think there is a part of this that is just accepting the reality that all entertainment is facing. While it is never bad to keep trying to make the regular season betterband improve, the actual reality for many people is simply the amount of games there are, not whether the specific individual games are good or not.

This is just part of the reality of any long season sports in the modern time where there's so much more entertainment at our fingertips. There was a time when if you didn't have big cable networks and you missed a game, you didn't have another 5 games every other day of the week you could watch and you didn't have full game recaps and all that to fill the gap.

Now, just like many other things, the games are even more of a commodity than they were before.

[Saints14]

An idea that I had to add some intrigue to the regular season (that got flamed here before lol) is to introduce "Money Games", inspired by "money balls" in the 3 point shootout, which count double in the standings. The biggest advantage that the NFL has over the NBA is that every game is high leverage, important and feels like a can't-miss event, so this would bring that element to the NBA. Money games would coincide with reducing the total number of games, so if we had say 70 total RS games 12 of them would be money games so that the standings still add up to 82. They'd be highly televised and anticipated, so you know if you tune in to an NBA game on national TV it would be important. It would help solve load management, both because of the fewer # of games but also because at the very least the games more casual fans would tune into would be the ones that teams would not sit their stars for. Player stats would not be weighted more heavily in money games, but performance in money games would be a discussion topic and could factor into end of year awards.

Yeah it's gimmicky, but so are most of the changes Silver made over the last 5 years. I think Money Games would be more compelling than the In Season Tournament, which only lasts for a few weeks and feels like it lost its intrigue.

Every long season league will have the same issue as the NBA, and none of them can compare to the NFL in terms of importance of each game unless they drastically shorten their seasons or change their playoff style of course.

I actually think there is a part of this that is just accepting the reality that all entertainment is facing. While it is never bad to keep trying to make the regular season betterband improve, the actual reality for many people is simply the amount of games there are, not whether the specific individual games are good or not.

This is just part of the reality of any long season sports in the modern time where there's so much more entertainment at our fingertips. There was a time when if you didn't have big cable networks and you missed a game, you didn't have another 5 games every other day of the week you could watch and you didn't have full game recaps and all that to fill the gap.

Now, just like many other things, the games are even more of a commodity than they were before.

This is a great point