Tag: Bill Simmons (Page 6 of 16)

      How to fix the NBA

      February 24, 2010 /

      Commissioner David Stern exudes confidence, even when he’s telling the press that the NBA is going to lose an estimated $400 million this season. Bill Simmons thinks that teams regularly screw over their fan bases by unloading good players at the trade deadline, tanking games late in the season to get a better lottery pick, all without any discount to the season tickets. If a team gives up on the season, why do the tickets remain the same price?

      Here are a few of his ideas to fix this model:

      Any team that misses the playoffs cannot raise ticket prices the following season. Miss two straight playoffs, season-ticket holders get a 5 percent discount for renewals the following season. Miss three straight, it goes to 10 percent. Miss four straight, it jumps to 25 percent. Miss five straight, it jumps to 50 percent.

      Let’s say the 2009-10 Clips knew that, if they missed the playoffs a fourth straight year, they would be looking at 25 percent discounts across the board. Is there any way they keep Dunleavy? No. Is there any way they dump Camby at the deadline? No. Financially, it wouldn’t make sense.

      If I were running the NBA, eliminating the illusion of regret would be my biggest initiative. I would give every nonplayoff team the same odds for winning the lottery, just so these teams wouldn’t destroy six to eight weeks of a season for paying customers. Then, I would cut the season by four games, guarantee only the top 12 playoff spots, then decide the seventh and eighth seeds in each conference with a double-elimination tournament for every nonplayoff team that I call the Entertaining As Hell Tournament (see my 2007 column for the gory details). Boom, we just killed the tanking and salary-dumping issues.

      Couldn’t that work? Has it even been discussed? Wouldn’t it generate a ton of interest and extra revenue? Wouldn’t you watch? Wouldn’t it put a ton of pressure on teams to stop shutting their best guys down or giving away contract-year guys for no real reason? You can’t give away Camby! We need him for the Entertaining As Hell Tournament in April! And who knows, maybe a wacky 7-seed would gain momentum and pull off a Round 1 shocker in the playoffs. You never know. It’s never a bad thing when those three words are involved.

      Ticket discounts for non-playoff teams, equal opportunity in the lottery and a double-elimination tournament — these are all good (albeit fairly radical) ideas. 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.)

      The problem with Stern is that he’s too conservative in his thinking when it actually comes to the structure of the NBA, its regular season, and its postseason. He helped to usher in a new, more free-flowing game when the league passed stricter hand-check rules, and he has made the NBA an emerging global business, but when it comes to a relatively boring regular season, playoffs that are too long and too inclusive, and a lottery system that encourages tanking, he’s not very open-minded about trying something new.


      Photo from fOTOGLIF

      Fantasy Basketball, NBA

      Bill Simmons on Tiger’s statement

      February 19, 2010 /

      I have to hand it to Simmons. He turned this around pretty quickly. It’s a good read…

      Say this much about Tiger: People give a crap. I don’t know anyone who didn’t watch this morning’s speech. There isn’t another athlete — not one — who could have made the world stop from 11 to 11:15 like Tiger Woods did.

      And with that, we’re done with the positives. I thought it was a borderline train wreck. It amazes me that Tiger learned little to nothing from the past two months. The control freak whose life slipped out of control dipped right back into control-freak mode, reading a prepared speech in front of a hand-selected audience of people, taking no questions, talking in clichés and only occasionally seeming human. Everything about it seemed staged. Everything. When the main camera broke down at the nine-minute mark and Tiger had to be shown from the side, I half-expected to see that he was plugged in to the wall.

      Whatever. I was going to leave it alone. After all, that had to have been a humiliating experience for the guy. But listening to talking heads praise that ludicrous speech pushed me over the edge. Someone actually said, “It came from the heart.” It did? Was it C3PO’s heart? I thought it seemed like an automated response from Microsoft’s new “Cheater’s Confession” program.

      Let’s look at the facts. Tiger cheats on his wife relentlessly and brazenly. She find out somehow. This leads to him crashing his car in the wee hours of Thanksgiving night. Scandal. Cover-up. More women come out. And more. And more. Tiger disappears like Jimmy Hoffa. Elin stops wearing her ring. Tiger stays hidden. Rumors swirl. By hiding, by not saying anything, Tiger enables every rumor and negative story to gain steam. When he sneaks away to a sex rehab clinic for 45 days, neither Tiger or his representatives acknowledges rumors that he’s there. He emerges with a staged jogging photo op; one day later, three other photos of Tiger hitting golf balls, even seeming jovial in one of them, hit the wires. And then, today’s prepared remarks. That came from the heart. Just as long as you didn’t ask a follow-up question.

      Read the rest here.


      Photo from fOTOGLIF

      Golf, Humor

      Correcting Bill Simmons, Part 6: Bill’s not-so-great NFL overtime idea

      February 9, 2010 /

      In his retro-diary of the second half of Super Bowl XLIV, Bill Simmons explains his seemingly infallible NFL overtime idea.

      9:25: Two straight first-down throws. Suddenly we’re on the Saints’ 36. I remember thinking, “Great, they’ll tie it, then whichever teams wins the coin toss will march down and score, and we’ll have to hear about how to fix overtime for the next nine months. Shoot me.”

      (FYI: I know how to fix it. Win the toss and score a touchdown, game over. Make a field goal on the opening drive and the opponent gets one possession of its own. From there, sudden death rules. Find a hole in that idea. You can’t.)

      Um, yes I can. Doesn’t his idea have the same problem as current system? The team that wins the toss still has the advantage. If Team A drives down and kicks a field goal, and Team B kicks its own field goal to tie the game, and now the game is decided by sudden death, doesn’t the team that gets the ball first (Team A) still have the advantage?

      Sure, if Team A kicks a field goal, Team B has an opportunity to win the game with a touchdown, but they still are at a disadvantage if the game is tied after each team gets a possession. This isn’t fair, seeing as both teams were equally effective on their first overtime drive.

      I like the blind bid idea. On a note card, each coach writes down the yard line at which he’s willing to take the ball, and whichever team that is willing to take the ball closest to its own goal line gets possession. Each team has an equal opportunity at possession and there is strategy involved. Do you have more faith in your offense or your defense? Would you rather take possession at your own 15-yard line or give the ball to to the other team at the 18-yard line?

      It’s fair and fun.

      Barstool Debates, NFL

      Bill Simmons’ Super Bowl XLIV pick

      February 8, 2010 /

      Like most of us, Bill Simmons fondly remembers when he’s right and quickly forgets when he’s wrong. For posterity, here is his Super Bowl XLIV pick:

      “For me, it comes down to this: I can’t pick against Manning in a big game. It’s just a bad idea. Hence, I like a relatively close game with Indy prevailing 31-23 (covering the 4½-point spread but hitting the under of 57½). Then we can spend the subsequent week wondering whether Indy could have gone 19-0. That will be a barrel of laughs.”

      — Bill Simmons

      If you were deciding between Simmons and Stalter, let’s hope you went with the latter. Stalter picked the Saints outright.

      Free Picks, NFL

      Bill Simmons on watching LeBron in person

      January 20, 2010 /

      The Cavs visited the Clippers recently, and Bill Simmons was in attendance. Here’s what he thinks of LeBron up close.

      To say the least. He’s the most charismatic athlete of his generation, only you wouldn’t fully know it until you studied him in person. Command of the room. He might dunk in the layup lines. He might try to make a one-handed half-court shot. He might call for an alley-oop and soar above his incredulous teammates just for the hell of it. Simply saying “bursting with energy” wouldn’t do him justice. It’s like watching a super-coordinated, mutant 4-year-old dealing with a severe sugar rush.

      I’m gonna go block Delonte’s shot from behind! HAH! He didn’t see me coming! Wait, I’m in the mood for an alley-oop. I need me some oop. Mo, throw me an oop. Ah, yes … it’s in the air … I’m jumping … DUNK! What now? I want to try a one-handed shot from the corner. Jamario, come play with me. Hold on, I just saw Baron Davis! Hey Baron! What up, dog! Watch this, I’m gonna make a half-court shot with my eyes closed … DAMN! Just missed it. You know what I really feel like doing? Jumping on Shaq’s back. Look out, Big Fella, eeeeeeeeeeee-yah!!!!!!!

      Jordan saved his legs before games, using that time to stretch, practice specific shots and butter up referees. LeBron can’t pace himself. Even when he walks from Point A to Point B, there’s no loping or strolling. He prances. He hops up and down. And if all these people are staring at him anyway, why not rile them up with a couple ridiculous dunks?

      On the chances of him leaving Cleveland at the end of the season…

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      NBA, NBA Finals, Rumors & Gossip

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