Yesterday, I suggested a fix for a problem facing the NBA in the Spring of 2024. Today, I want to focus on another issue facing the league now; and once again, I will provide a potential way to improve the status quo. Let me repeat a data point from yesterday:
- The Iowa/South Carolina championship game for the women’s NCAA basketball tournament a couple of weeks ago had a TV audience more than double what any regular season NBA game drew.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but TV audience size and TV exposure are vital signs for the viability of the NBA. And the statement above would not have been thinkable in the Executive Suites of the NBA merely 3 or 4 years ago. Nonetheless …
The audience-size issue relates to a couple of things:
- NBA basketball is regional/local and not national. The Lakers, Celtics, Knicks when they are good, Bulls when they had Jordan and Heat when LeBron first took his talents there have/had ”national appeal”. The rest of the league and the rest of the time, the enthusiastic interest is local and not much more.
- There are far too many regular season games that are rendered meaningless early on into a season. And in many NBA markets, lots of those myriad meaningless games are available on TV. It is hard for anyone beneath the “rabid fan” descriptor to get excited about most if not all of those contests.
I cannot prove this next assertion with cold hard facts, but my sense is that the sporting public in the US has grown tired of the formation and dissolution of so-called “Super Teams”. When LeBron /Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh created the first “Super Team” and won a championship, it was noteworthy, and it drew attention. However, after so many hypes and subsequent underachievements, fans seem to have reacted with yawns instead of roars. The latest flameout of a “Super Team” would be this year’s Phoenix Suns. When Devin Booker, Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal assembled themselves in Arizona last summer, Booker said:
“I don’t know how other teams can guard us.”
Well, the Suns just got swept from the playoffs by the Timberwolves and most of the reaction has been akin to “Ho hum…”
The NBA should – – but will not – – cut the regular season back significantly. Some have suggested cutting it from 82 games to 72 games; I have suggested several times in the past that the regular season should be 58 games long; every team should play a single home-and-home series against every other team in the league and that should define the regular season. I am not the least bit sanguine about the league cutting the season back to 72 games; I would be gob smacked to learn that anyone in league management had even uttered the words, “fifty-eight games” in any context other than as an uproarious joke.
The NBA mavens know this is a real problem. They contorted themselves into “Twister-like” postures to create the wonderous “In-Season Tournament” back in November of 2023 with the clearly obvious purpose of getting some fans to give a rat’s patootie about a game between the Rockets and the Hornets sometime proximal to Thanksgiving. I can recall exactly two things about that In-Season Tournament:
- The Lakers won it.
- The games were played on garishly painted courts making them immediately distinguishable from an ordinary regular season game.
That’s it; that’s what I recall; that’s the list.
So, let me suggest here a way to create some meaning for some of the games featuring bottom feeding teams. Let us be candid here; in the 2024 season, the hopes and aspirations for the Pistons, Wizards, Hornets, Blazers and Spurs de-materialized sometime around Thanksgiving 2023. They were playing only to decide how many – – or how few – – ping pong balls they would have in the lottery drawing for the first pick in this year’s draft. None of these teams or their fanbases could have thought that any of these five teams would be “making noise” in late April 2024 let alone in June 2024.
However, playing for ping pong ball population in a jazzed up popcorn machine does not get fans’ juices flowing, so let me offer a “Secondary Post-Season Tournament”. Instead of ping-pong balls determining draft order, let teams decide it on the court. Ten teams in the league do not make the play-in round to the “Championship Playoffs”. So give them some post-season action of their own where the more you win the better your draft pick.
The “Secondary Post-Season Tournament” – – please don’t call it the Booby-Prize Tournament – – could be single elimination, double elimination or best of three series; I think I prefer double elimination but it is not a strong conviction. The idea here is that the top draft picks are determined on the court so there is no longer any advantage to “tanking” a season which happens despite the NBA’s protestations.
- [Aside: I know that having ten teams in the “Secondary Tournament” makes for awkward scheduling, so perhaps you increase the play-in round for the “Championship Tournament” from ten teams per conference to eleven teams per conference?]
Such a secondary post-season tournament has two advantages:
- It makes late season games for teams that have no real way to make the “Champiionship Playoffs” into something meaningful that might be worth following for fans.
- It incentivizes winning games in the “Secondary Post-Season Tournament” to win those games and not tank them since it is the winners who benefit directly from the game outcomes.
Finally, if you don’t like my suggested “fix” for this NBA problem, you might enjoy this words from “Mythbuster” Adam Savage:
“I have some ideas on how to fix that. They’re not very good ideas; but at least, they are ideas!”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………
Bingo! A great suggestion.