Idea to make end of RS games more interesting

[The Laker Kid]

Ok if a team sucked all year, what makes you think they will all of a sudden become more interesting at the end of regular season?

[Dr Aki]

Can't we simply just have a finishing line system? Where the finish line is when a team is mathematically eliminated from play-in contention? e.g. Team A is eliminated from play-in contention after 60 games, they get the lottery odds of the worst team, Team B gets eliminated from contention after 62 games, and get the lottery odds of the 2nd worst team, and so on and so forth.

Any games after getting eliminated from contention will have ZERO bearing on lottery odds. There are several assumptions:
1. Teams don't tank early in the season, only the truly bad/injury-riddled teams lose the most games.
2. Teams eliminated from play-in contention will be free to play their "stars" as much as they want without affecting their lottery odds, providing a better product on the floor for the rest of the season.
3. This is not perfect, but it will shift the "tanking" to the middle third of the season so really bad teams (or teams with sufficient bad injury luck) get to "lock in" their lottery position and can instead focus on team building and providing healthy competition at the real pointy end of the season during the fight for playoff seeding. Teams may still elect to sit their "stars" until they hit the finishing line, but this wouldn't be any different to the status quo anyway.

This way, tanking is localised to when a bad team is close enough to the finish line, and will improve late season competition. This also doesn't guarantee draft position the same way the current lottery odds don't.

[Jamaaliver]

1. Decrease the number of Regular Season Games
(No back to backs, No 3 Games in 4 Nights)
Higher quality play with time to breathe and hype upcoming contests


2. Do away with conferences and make a top-16 Playoff
Create four (4) 8-team divisions
Brings back division rivalries


3. Guarantee Division Winners a top-4 seed in the post season
This incentivizes going all out for division games

4. Give the top seed to the division winner with the best out of division record
This motivates teams to play top teams hard outside of their own division


5. Play half your games in division
this makes every game more important
this makes inter divisional matchups more appealing


6. Schedule Nationally Televised Matchups during the season
Too many top matchups end up only locally broadcast -- or on NBA TV

[CS707]

If NBA cared about any of this they’d simply stop tanking and sitting healthy players without some mechanism in place to twist their arm.