Community Shootaround: Potential NBA Schedule Changes

This morning, ESPN’s Zach Lowe and Adrian Wojnarowski reported that serious discussions were transpiring between the NBA, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) and their television partners about making dramatic changes to the NBA season.

Those modifications apparently include: a reduced regular season schedule (which seems savvy), a postseason play-in tournament for lower seeds (which sounds fun), a conference finalist reseeding (all 16 playoff teams should be reseeded, in this writer’s opinion), and a midseason playoff tournament (which feels pointless and desperate).

One of the big elements on the table is shortening the regular season game count from 82 to 78. Since the 1968/69 NBA season, the 82-game regular season has been the norm.

The league played as few as 60 or 61 games (it varied amongst the 11 teams) in its inaugural 1946/47 season. The game count gradually grew, reaching 72 by the 1953/54 season, the end of the George Mikan‘s Minnesota Lakers dynasty. In the 1959/60 season (year three of the Bill Russell-era Celtics reign), the tally expanded to 75 games. The next season, that number hit 79, before stabilizing at 80 from 1961/62-1966/67. For one lone season (1967/68), the NBA had an 81-game regular season before making the pivot to its current 82-game schedule when it expanded to 12 teams.

Under the leadership of commissioner Adam Silver, the NBA has already taken steps to reduce the grind of the 82-game schedule. It shrank teams’ preseason commitments. It has taken pains to decrease back-to-back games. The NBA experimented with shortening game lengths from 48 minutes to 44 minutes.

Knowing what we know now about the “load management” era, where certain superstars opt to avoid playing in at least one game of a back-to-back tilt and teams liberally rest healthy players in advance of the playoffs, is reducing the full game tally the right move?

Business Insider’s Cork Gaines has noted that Bill Simmons of The Ringer has long advocated for a schedule reduction, arguing that modern NBA players actively try harder during the regular season than their predecessors in the 1980s and 1990s. Simmons also has been a proponent of a play-in tournament in the past.

How many games should the NBA season last? The Ringer’s Rodger Sherman proposed a radical shortening, to 58 games (so that every team players every other team exactly twice), after watching injuries befall several core Warriors in the 2019 NBA Finals.

This writer votes for reverting back to the 72-game model, completely excising the preseason, and eliminating back-to-back games. The latter two items were not discussed in the Lowe-Wojnarowski report this morning, but I’m hoping they are given fair shrift during these upcoming negotiations.

If the season is condensed much beyond 72 games, the opportunity exists for this era’s players to make unfair statistical gains on prior player generations. A midseason tournament seems like a method to placate middling franchises with meaningless award hardware. Essentially, it would only yield the equivalent of a “Conference Finalist” banner for its “winning” team.

What do you think? How many games should the NBA season last? Would you eliminate back-to-backs and/or the preseason? Would you be interested in watching a midseason tournament?

Head to the comment section below to weigh in with your thoughts!

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