Early last year, I wrote a post about how I’d fix the NBA. Looking at the slate of MLK Day games (13 in all), I assumed NBATV would be running buzzer to buzzer coverage, looking in on the competitive games and tight finishes. But right now they’re running a documentary about Dikembe Mutombo. Go figure. Anyway, here’s an excerpt of that post:
The lottery idea was actually the way the NBA used to do things, and they should go back to it. Tanking at the end of the season is one of the biggest problems with today’s NBA.
As for the length of the season, I wouldn’t stop at cutting just four games. I’d go with a 66-game season. Every team would play each of its division rivals four times (16 games) and all the other teams twice, once at home and once away (50 games). Cutting back on the regular season would make it matter again. Right now, it’s rare for a regular season game to hold much significance.
Fewer games would also mean more schedule flexibility, so I’d set it up so that NBA teams would only play on certain days, say Tuesday (to avoid Mondays during football season), Friday and Saturday. That means there would be 15 games on each night, so NBATV could bounce around from game to game like the Red Zone Channel catching the best action and furious finishes. This would generate interest in the league and make fantasy basketball more appealing. Fantasy football is something that has really helped the NFL increase its popularity over the last decade.
Lastly, I’d cut guaranteed contracts down to a max of four years to re-sign a team’s own players and three years for free agents. This would limit the impact of mistakes, and while I agree with Houston GM Daryl Morey that it’s not a system that favors the prepared, it would increase parity by allowing teams to recover from mistakes more quickly, which is another thing that makes the NFL so popular. (Mediocre teams would benefit from a lottery system that would give equal opportunity to win the #1 pick to all of the non-playoff teams, so you win some and you lose some.)
Of course, this is all a pipe dream. David Stern exudes confidence and whenever someone asks him about something that’s wrong about the NBA, he spins it the other way. They aren’t going to cut the regular season back because it would mean less revenue at the box office for the owners. That means that my idea of “NBA Nights” will never happen, and that means that fantasy basketball will continue to flounder.
The league is doing well enough that Stern and the owners will be reluctant to make any significant changes to the structure. The four-year max contract is a possibility, however, as the owners and players have to agree on a new CBA and shorter contracts are one of the things that the owners are pushing.
