I was about to say that I sort of like the play-in because it offers surging teams who are actually good a chance to make the playoffs - thinking about the 2023 Miami Heat who went to the finals or this year's Hornets. But then I looked it up and The Heat were actually the 7th seed at the beginning of the play in, so the play in didn't really change their chance, and it's looking like The Hornets can probably snag at least the 8th seed if their recent performance is durable.
All of these things are just relics of a bygone era.
Baseball plays a ton of games because when baseball started, 1) people just liked watching and playing baseball and 2) people paying money to watch the games was the way they made money. In the early days they even did barnstorming tours in the offseason and people paid to watch "exhibition" games. Championships did matter, but largely people showed up to be entertained and root for their team to win the game being played on that day. It was entertainment and didnt require additional "meaning". College football is the only sport that retains this effect to any degree.
Basketball and hockey followed suit when their leagues got up and running and had the same financial incentives and entertainment draws. All star games were cool because it was a rare occasion to see all these players.
Now fans demand something "more" than the game in front of them. It requires context and additional "meaning" for better or worse. So the original model, constructed over 100 years ago no longer serves those customers optimally. And the people who enjoy the regular seasons are the few remaining people akin to people 100 years ago - people who just like watching the sport played at a high level detached from a greater "meaning."
The strongest meaning in sports, is generated through intergenerational context. These are children's games that can serve as a fixed but dynamic reference for myself, my father, my neighbors, etc., as all of us change. As these leagues change in order to compete for attention amidst new attractions, they risk losing their primary way of generating meaning. Sports will never be as good at purely getting attention as a short-form video platform, they must draw on their strengths.
All to say that there are significant trade-offs in either direction.
Shorten the season to 60 games (soon to be 64) and have all teams play each other twice. Get the best of both worlds between being an inventory and scarcity product with appointment viewing.
Remove the first two rows of the bowl seating and widen the court to extend the corner three - and all other threes - to a distance where it’s expected value is the same as 15-17’ shot. The extra long two will still be a bad shot but otherwise most of the area below the three point line will now be back in use on offense.
(Also, as a side note, the first two rows are miserable viewing because of the players and coaches standing and the lack of elevation even on the other side. This fixes that so the new first two rows become even more valuable and the NBA only actually loses money from the last two rows of the lower bowl).
Reviews should get done at league HQ and must take 90 seconds or else the call stands. Also, for the defense to win a ball that went out of bounds, it must go off a body part of the offensive player with the ball that isn’t his hand - no more trying to analyze if his fingertips brushed the ball after it was swiped.
Shoot only one free throw and have it count for two points or three points depending on what the foul was.
Add in your tanking idea but extend it to first round losers and then really juice the playoff share for the eight remaining teams.
David Stern said (roughly): "when in doubt, return to the game."
Adam Silver's problem is that he fundamentally does not understand that the NBA's "PRODUCT" is basketball games. The issue is not tanking, or load management, or godawful delays for officiating reviews, etc, although those are all problems. The issue is that Silver has (and has allowed) the complete devaluing of the NBA's core product. The inseason tournament devalues the rest of the regular season. The play in game devalues the regular season. Having players, coaches, and teams agree that they would rather certain players just not play, despite no particular injury, devalues the product.
When the league, players, coaches, and teams tell you that something is not important, the public will catch on. This is the big issue. Is it fixable? Can you put the toothpaste back in the tube?
Two things can be true at the same time. Banishment from All-Star is both gimmick and reform lol. The reform that the NBA needs to embrace is creating a draft tournament for the number 1 pick. If people want to know more about the idea, I'll spill it but it would nearly eradicate tanking.
The way you stop something is by punishment, which is different from creating rewards to not do it. (You get better compliance by charging a $1 penalty for doing x, in comparison to giving a $1 reward for not doing x).
Tanking would disappear if the bottom 6 teams were delegated to the Euroleague. Load management would disappear if the automatic penalty was a playoff ban for that season. (Put in your draconian punishment for all star game loafing here).
The NBA’s big problem is that it does not understand what it is. The point of the NBA is not to crown the best basketball team in the world any given year. That’s an incidental byproduct. The point is to provide maximal entertainment over 82 games + playoff. Teams and players should be punished when they pursue the former at the expense of the latter.
Entertainment over 82 games sounds like an oxymoron. It is like telling someone they have to make a 4 hour movie entertaining. Can it be done? Sure, but the odds of keeping the average person's attnetion for that long is low.
And it just isn't feasable for the Kings to be in the euro league, untill we invent a faster way to travel.
I know the money has blurred the lines, but sports are first competition that can be entertaining. This is why the play in tournament is something I enjoy. Because it's first and foremost about winning. The relegation idea is interesting because it's about competition with entertainment being a byproduct of it.
Professional sports are not at “first” a competition—that’s why they are called “professional” sports, with the word professional coming first. You can believe pro sports leagues should be x, y, or z but that’s not just what they are.
When the Devils figured out how to compete better with the NZ Trap, people didn’t go “how wonderful that they compete so well!” — and rules were changed to stop it. Same with MLB and the extreme shifts, etc…
You uknowingly proved my point. Things that happened within the competitve framework of the game were neutered, outlawed, etc to enhance entertainment value. These things always begin and end with competition.
…when something begins in support of one goal (competition i.e. winning) and ends when it conflicts with another goal (entertainment) then the framework that the thing operates in prioritizes (places “first”) the later.
Agreed here but the point of the sport is to win competitions. The NBA draft (and all American sport drafts) is completely antithetical to sports.
Penalizing teams for tanking in a harsh way would work, but owners will never agree to it. Players probably won't either.
I do think shortening the season and making other small changes (eliminating protections, withholding luxury tax revenue from tankers) can quell tanking to NFL levels. And even they got a little shit this year with the whole Maxx Crosby situation in LV.
It's pie in the sky to think we will ever get pure competition at the highest level in the regular season of American sports.
The punishments weren’t supposed to be realistic — but exemplify the kinds of things you persue if you really want to stop a problem. The lack of pursuit of such things exemplify the structural management issue with the NBA. Stern, by contrast, understood what the business of the NBA was, and was draconian in protecting it (dress code etc…)
Again, one can pontificate about what the point of a sport is, but the point of the NBA is to provide entertainment in exchange for money. Its goal is to provide more entertainment for more money in the future. The players get paid as much as they do not because they are good at one of the many silly made up games of putting ball in hole, but because this game is entertaining —and teams are worth billions because they provide such entertainment.
Any reform should consider whether it is aligned with the actual point of the NBA.
With tanking, some of these dopey gimmicks people are proposing are the exact types of big-brained alleged fixes with far worse unintended consequences that Adam seems to gravitate to and that scares me.
I don't think the tanking is really all that difficult to curb. Just don't limit how far teams can fall in the lottery. Do a drawing for each pick from 1 all the way to 30. Tanking still might work for you, but you could also *possibly* drop from the 1st pick to the 9th, or the 12th in given year. Take out the certainty safety net every gets, knowing they can only drop 4 spots max.
And don't punish teams for making the playoffs. Give them some small number of lottery combinations. It should never be in the mind of a team that it might be better to miss the postseason rather than to sneak into the last spot.
There are only three ways to win an NBA championship:
1. Be a big market franchise that can attract star free agents.
2. Be a small/medium market franchise that gets lucky and drafts a superstar in the mid to late 1st round.
3. Be a small/medium market franchise that is intentionally bad for half a decade, aggregates top-of-draft talent, and either gets a star in that process or gets enough above-average players to trade for a star.
The NBA will NEVER "fix" tanking so long as this is the reality. Ask an OKC fan if they regret tanking. Ask a Pisons fan. Ask a Spurs fan. Ask a Cavs fan. Ask a Magic fan. Ask a Rockets fan.
Fans want their team to tank if it means they actually have a chance at a championship. I lived in DC, and there is nothing worse (not even tanking) than the middling purgatory that Ted Leonsis put that fanbase through for over a decade.
I’m seeing a lot of great suggestions in the comments, but for me a lot of my waning interest is a function of the league’s weird schedule. The season starts right in the middle of NFL/CF season and during the heat of the MLB playoffs. That’s ridiculous. Start the season in late Jan/early Feb to coincide with the two weeks between the conference championships and the Super Bowl, and extend it further through the summer so people have a kinetic sport to watch in the dead zone before the NFL season starts. Then there’s the tip-off times. Games between Eastern Conference teams often don’t start until 8:30, even though 43 percent of the teams in the entire league are located in this time zone. Outside of the playoffs, I’m not going to stay up until midnight to watch my team live, sorry. The rest of the U.S. is beholden to the whims of five Pacific teams - as if we’re still waiting for those West Coast fans to get out of work at the mill so they can watch the broadcast on their four-channel TV. This is stupid. If you broadcast most games on weekday evenings (unlike football), and if you want more people to stay up to watch them, then start the games earlier. Voila, two reforms!
I used to say that the NBA should start on Christmas day, but now that Christmas belongs to the NFL, I'm not sure when it should start. Ratings would probably dip if the league went deep into the summer.
I was about to say that I sort of like the play-in because it offers surging teams who are actually good a chance to make the playoffs - thinking about the 2023 Miami Heat who went to the finals or this year's Hornets. But then I looked it up and The Heat were actually the 7th seed at the beginning of the play in, so the play in didn't really change their chance, and it's looking like The Hornets can probably snag at least the 8th seed if their recent performance is durable.
All of these things are just relics of a bygone era.
Baseball plays a ton of games because when baseball started, 1) people just liked watching and playing baseball and 2) people paying money to watch the games was the way they made money. In the early days they even did barnstorming tours in the offseason and people paid to watch "exhibition" games. Championships did matter, but largely people showed up to be entertained and root for their team to win the game being played on that day. It was entertainment and didnt require additional "meaning". College football is the only sport that retains this effect to any degree.
Basketball and hockey followed suit when their leagues got up and running and had the same financial incentives and entertainment draws. All star games were cool because it was a rare occasion to see all these players.
Now fans demand something "more" than the game in front of them. It requires context and additional "meaning" for better or worse. So the original model, constructed over 100 years ago no longer serves those customers optimally. And the people who enjoy the regular seasons are the few remaining people akin to people 100 years ago - people who just like watching the sport played at a high level detached from a greater "meaning."
The strongest meaning in sports, is generated through intergenerational context. These are children's games that can serve as a fixed but dynamic reference for myself, my father, my neighbors, etc., as all of us change. As these leagues change in order to compete for attention amidst new attractions, they risk losing their primary way of generating meaning. Sports will never be as good at purely getting attention as a short-form video platform, they must draw on their strengths.
All to say that there are significant trade-offs in either direction.
Amen. Reform it is.
Shorten the season to 60 games (soon to be 64) and have all teams play each other twice. Get the best of both worlds between being an inventory and scarcity product with appointment viewing.
Remove the first two rows of the bowl seating and widen the court to extend the corner three - and all other threes - to a distance where it’s expected value is the same as 15-17’ shot. The extra long two will still be a bad shot but otherwise most of the area below the three point line will now be back in use on offense.
(Also, as a side note, the first two rows are miserable viewing because of the players and coaches standing and the lack of elevation even on the other side. This fixes that so the new first two rows become even more valuable and the NBA only actually loses money from the last two rows of the lower bowl).
Reviews should get done at league HQ and must take 90 seconds or else the call stands. Also, for the defense to win a ball that went out of bounds, it must go off a body part of the offensive player with the ball that isn’t his hand - no more trying to analyze if his fingertips brushed the ball after it was swiped.
Shoot only one free throw and have it count for two points or three points depending on what the foul was.
Add in your tanking idea but extend it to first round losers and then really juice the playoff share for the eight remaining teams.
I hate replay review. Just get rid of it. Check ball
David Stern said (roughly): "when in doubt, return to the game."
Adam Silver's problem is that he fundamentally does not understand that the NBA's "PRODUCT" is basketball games. The issue is not tanking, or load management, or godawful delays for officiating reviews, etc, although those are all problems. The issue is that Silver has (and has allowed) the complete devaluing of the NBA's core product. The inseason tournament devalues the rest of the regular season. The play in game devalues the regular season. Having players, coaches, and teams agree that they would rather certain players just not play, despite no particular injury, devalues the product.
When the league, players, coaches, and teams tell you that something is not important, the public will catch on. This is the big issue. Is it fixable? Can you put the toothpaste back in the tube?
Two things can be true at the same time. Banishment from All-Star is both gimmick and reform lol. The reform that the NBA needs to embrace is creating a draft tournament for the number 1 pick. If people want to know more about the idea, I'll spill it but it would nearly eradicate tanking.
I like the gimmick vs reform framing. That rings true. They’re applying all these bandaids but the patient has cancer
The way you stop something is by punishment, which is different from creating rewards to not do it. (You get better compliance by charging a $1 penalty for doing x, in comparison to giving a $1 reward for not doing x).
Tanking would disappear if the bottom 6 teams were delegated to the Euroleague. Load management would disappear if the automatic penalty was a playoff ban for that season. (Put in your draconian punishment for all star game loafing here).
The NBA’s big problem is that it does not understand what it is. The point of the NBA is not to crown the best basketball team in the world any given year. That’s an incidental byproduct. The point is to provide maximal entertainment over 82 games + playoff. Teams and players should be punished when they pursue the former at the expense of the latter.
Entertainment over 82 games sounds like an oxymoron. It is like telling someone they have to make a 4 hour movie entertaining. Can it be done? Sure, but the odds of keeping the average person's attnetion for that long is low.
And it just isn't feasable for the Kings to be in the euro league, untill we invent a faster way to travel.
I know the money has blurred the lines, but sports are first competition that can be entertaining. This is why the play in tournament is something I enjoy. Because it's first and foremost about winning. The relegation idea is interesting because it's about competition with entertainment being a byproduct of it.
Professional sports are not at “first” a competition—that’s why they are called “professional” sports, with the word professional coming first. You can believe pro sports leagues should be x, y, or z but that’s not just what they are.
When the Devils figured out how to compete better with the NZ Trap, people didn’t go “how wonderful that they compete so well!” — and rules were changed to stop it. Same with MLB and the extreme shifts, etc…
You uknowingly proved my point. Things that happened within the competitve framework of the game were neutered, outlawed, etc to enhance entertainment value. These things always begin and end with competition.
…when something begins in support of one goal (competition i.e. winning) and ends when it conflicts with another goal (entertainment) then the framework that the thing operates in prioritizes (places “first”) the later.
Agreed here but the point of the sport is to win competitions. The NBA draft (and all American sport drafts) is completely antithetical to sports.
Penalizing teams for tanking in a harsh way would work, but owners will never agree to it. Players probably won't either.
I do think shortening the season and making other small changes (eliminating protections, withholding luxury tax revenue from tankers) can quell tanking to NFL levels. And even they got a little shit this year with the whole Maxx Crosby situation in LV.
It's pie in the sky to think we will ever get pure competition at the highest level in the regular season of American sports.
The punishments weren’t supposed to be realistic — but exemplify the kinds of things you persue if you really want to stop a problem. The lack of pursuit of such things exemplify the structural management issue with the NBA. Stern, by contrast, understood what the business of the NBA was, and was draconian in protecting it (dress code etc…)
Again, one can pontificate about what the point of a sport is, but the point of the NBA is to provide entertainment in exchange for money. Its goal is to provide more entertainment for more money in the future. The players get paid as much as they do not because they are good at one of the many silly made up games of putting ball in hole, but because this game is entertaining —and teams are worth billions because they provide such entertainment.
Any reform should consider whether it is aligned with the actual point of the NBA.
With tanking, some of these dopey gimmicks people are proposing are the exact types of big-brained alleged fixes with far worse unintended consequences that Adam seems to gravitate to and that scares me.
I don't think the tanking is really all that difficult to curb. Just don't limit how far teams can fall in the lottery. Do a drawing for each pick from 1 all the way to 30. Tanking still might work for you, but you could also *possibly* drop from the 1st pick to the 9th, or the 12th in given year. Take out the certainty safety net every gets, knowing they can only drop 4 spots max.
And don't punish teams for making the playoffs. Give them some small number of lottery combinations. It should never be in the mind of a team that it might be better to miss the postseason rather than to sneak into the last spot.
There are only three ways to win an NBA championship:
1. Be a big market franchise that can attract star free agents.
2. Be a small/medium market franchise that gets lucky and drafts a superstar in the mid to late 1st round.
3. Be a small/medium market franchise that is intentionally bad for half a decade, aggregates top-of-draft talent, and either gets a star in that process or gets enough above-average players to trade for a star.
The NBA will NEVER "fix" tanking so long as this is the reality. Ask an OKC fan if they regret tanking. Ask a Pisons fan. Ask a Spurs fan. Ask a Cavs fan. Ask a Magic fan. Ask a Rockets fan.
Fans want their team to tank if it means they actually have a chance at a championship. I lived in DC, and there is nothing worse (not even tanking) than the middling purgatory that Ted Leonsis put that fanbase through for over a decade.
I’m seeing a lot of great suggestions in the comments, but for me a lot of my waning interest is a function of the league’s weird schedule. The season starts right in the middle of NFL/CF season and during the heat of the MLB playoffs. That’s ridiculous. Start the season in late Jan/early Feb to coincide with the two weeks between the conference championships and the Super Bowl, and extend it further through the summer so people have a kinetic sport to watch in the dead zone before the NFL season starts. Then there’s the tip-off times. Games between Eastern Conference teams often don’t start until 8:30, even though 43 percent of the teams in the entire league are located in this time zone. Outside of the playoffs, I’m not going to stay up until midnight to watch my team live, sorry. The rest of the U.S. is beholden to the whims of five Pacific teams - as if we’re still waiting for those West Coast fans to get out of work at the mill so they can watch the broadcast on their four-channel TV. This is stupid. If you broadcast most games on weekday evenings (unlike football), and if you want more people to stay up to watch them, then start the games earlier. Voila, two reforms!
I used to say that the NBA should start on Christmas day, but now that Christmas belongs to the NFL, I'm not sure when it should start. Ratings would probably dip if the league went deep into the summer.
They will never reduce games. Impossible.
But I think the draft reform and all star selection process can be done.