Peregrine01 wrote:TheGOATRises007 wrote:Peregrine01 wrote:They should shorten the season imo.
Less money for everyone involved, so they'll never do it.
Hardly anyone even pays attention to the regular season save for a few marquee games. With load management and the frequency of injuries, the vast majority of stars are only playing three-quarters of the season tops anyway. Why not just cut out a third of the games, make the regular season more meaningful, have higher participation from stars during the regular season and preserve healthier players for the playoffs? The NBA should take some notes form the NFL: less is more.
I think this is the thing that the NBA and their partners really need to get through their heads:
A shorter season means more significant games, which means better player, and better viewership per-game at a time when low significance games should be expected to lose even more of their ratings due to the nature of the 21st century audience.
Will chopping the season by X% more than pay for itself immediately? No, it will cost money in the short term.
But:
Does the NBA have a problem now that's getting worse every year? Yes.
Will it get any easier to fix the problem in the future? Not necessarily.
So there may be no time like the present to tear the band-aid off and if they just can't make themselves do it under this Commish, well, let's hope the next one is more bold.
Tangent, were I the czar of NBA basketball, my plan would be something like this:
1. Expand the "NBA" to 32 North American teams and never expand again.
2. Further expansion will involve other leagues both domestically and overseas which might culminate in something like a Club World Cup.
3. The NBA is re-organized to have 2 conferences that each of 2 divisions of 8.
4. Teams play division rivals 4 times, conference rivals 2 times, and teams form the other conference just once, for a 60 game season.
5. Kill the all-star game, and shift the NBA Cup so it's Final is roughly when the all-star weekend was. You can even keep calling it the All-Star Weekend if you want, and announce the official All-Stars as is traditionally done.
6. Back load the schedule to have most in-division games toward the end of the season (after the Cup & trade deadline), and have division winners determined only by in-division games. Each division winner would earn a Top 2 seed in the playoffs.
7. Cup qualification games should either be separate from the 60, or should be inter-division.
8. No radical changes to the playoffs, but chop the first two rounds of the playoff Best-of-5.
Reasoning:
1. 32 is just the right number to stop at because it's a power of 2 which gives a lot of logistical options that will work - so if we tried my 4 divisions of 8 approach and didn't like it, we'd have plenty of other balanced options.
A mock-up of that assuming that Seattle & Las Vegas are the two new franchises with Minnesota moving to the East.
Western Conference
Pacific DivisionGolden State
LA Clippers
LA Lakers
Las Vegas
Phoenix
Portland
Sacramento
Seattle
Frontier DivisionDallas
Denver
Houston
Memphis
New Orleans
Oklahoma City
San Antonio
Utah
Eastern Confrence
Central DivisionAtlanta
Chicago
Cleveland
Detroit
Indiana
Milwaukee
Minnesota
Toronto
Atlantic DivisionBoston
Brooklyn
Miami
Milwaukee
Orlando
New York
Philadelphia
Washington
Notes:
- Memphis might end up as the team that goes East in stead. I believe the Grizz have actually pushed for this in the past in the wake of their move from Vancouver.
- I'm sure New Orleans would love to go to the East as well, but frankly my expectation is that eventually that franchise will leave the Big Easy unfortunately. I love me some Nawlins, but it's not the market it used to be, and meanwhile, eventually I expect Mexico City to get a team unless the NBA works out some other LANBA (Latin America NBA) way to bring that mega-city into the fold.
- More information that I'm sure anyone cared for, but Atlanta not being in the Atlantic Division certainly seems wrong, and it does say something about how many teams are East of the Mississippi, but Atlanta was named after Atlantic Railroad not the Atlantic Ocean, and is actually further west than traditional Midwest cities like Cleveland and Detroit because ideal railroad hub placement isn't the same as ideal sea port placement.
2. While having small Divisions isn't necessarily something that achieves anything with fan interest, I do believe that it makes sense to keep trying. The reality is that if only the chip matters, most team fans are going to disengage from the season even if their team makes the playoffs. How big should a division be? It's a great question, but I would say that the 4 than the NFL uses only makes sense to me for a bloodsport where it's so hard to play many teams both home & away in the same year. 16 on the other hand is, well, too many for us to count with the fingers on our hands. 8's the power of 2 that I think gives us the closest to a Godilocks number of a divisional rivals.
3. Having a late RS in-division season to end the year, with the results of those games possibly allowing a team that started the year slowly to be able to fight to be a Champion (and get a Top 2 seed), gives the late season a reason to be anything but "silly". And it can specifically be used to build-up rivalries again.
4. I'm not dead set on the numbers I gave for shortening the season, but I'll say that there are costs to chopping it further I don't like. There's a cost to not playing a team in a given year, another cost for not playing that team at home, and another cost for not having any rivals that you you don't at least play at home twice. If I were going to chop further from the 60, I'd chop the conference from 2 games to 1 game first (so 52 games instead of 60), and then I'd chop division games from 4 games to 2 (so 38 games instead of 52). Any further chopping would require a total re-think of structure as you'd simply have to accept that you don't play every team every year, and so there will be teams you play at home less than once every two years. American football obviously deals with this out of necessity and it's worked for them, but it's never been how American sports that are not blood sports have functioned, and it's worth noting that that the 3 other major professional team sports in the US have all focused their meaning around the idea of winning series rather than games, and thus the idea of one team figuring the other out over the course of games is baked into the culture now.
5. I don't think there's any way to save the all-star game itself. I do think having something like the All-Star weekend at around the mid-point of the year should be saved.
6. The idea of the NBA Cup seems much more promising than the all-star game to me going forward, but I don't think trying to develop a new basketball cultural event during football season is going to work, but a version of the Cup that culminates around the time of the traditional All-Star weekend works.
7. Being able to transition then from the Cup final into in-Division rivalries then works thematically, and is a big improvement of the existing "now we're going to play more regular season until college basketball ends even though a lot of teams have given up on the season at this point".
