Malaise Has Overrun the NBA’s Regular Season; Here’s How to Fix It
The NBA regular season has a stakes, intensity, and interest problem, and it needs radical solutions to turn the tide.
Other than major trades and splashy free agent acquisitions, the most talked about feature of the NBA is its ever-growing malaise — and yes, unfortunately, the malaise is discussed even more than the product on the floor.
Players (or more accurately, players in partnerships with their respective organizations) do not care about the NBA’s regular season. Most fan and pundit speculation circles around the fact that teams ultimately want to manage their way to a championship, and the NBA’s regular season can seemingly only derail that goal by causing injuries or fatigue for when, “the real season (playoffs) begin.” This has contributed to the controversial strategy of load management, in which relatively healthy players rest games strategically throughout the season. And the length of the NBA regular season cannot be ignored in this equation. Its 82 games provide plenty of runway for teams to manage themselves into playoff position, even as players take games off (literally and figuratively) or teams simply decide to not put forth their best effort on a given night. Why go hard every single night? There’s plenty of time to make up the difference in the standings, and organizations are ostensibly singularly focused on the playoffs, from training camp until the season concludes.
Considering all of the aforementioned bugs of the NBA regular season, it’s not surprising that viewership is down year after year. Why should the fans care if the players or organizations don’t? And to be fair, why should the players and their respective organizations care about the regular season if there’s little incentive for them to do so, other than the fact that fans want a stronger product (a complicated situation for teams, as their fans are also clamoring desperately for championships and deep playoff runs)?
Put simply: the NBA’s regular season has a stakes, intensity, and interest problem. These problems aren’t new. In 2019, Ben Golliver wrote an article for The Washington Post entitled, “The NBA isn’t surprised its TV ratings are way down. Radical change already was afoot.” The NBA desperately needs to address its critical shortcomings if it wants to blunt the festering apathy and generate real, heart-pounding excitement.
I believe I have a set of solutions that will add stakes, spur intensity, and generate significant interest in the NBA’s regular season. I’m going to provide a light outline of the solutions, and before you close your tab and dismiss them outright, I suggest you read the rationale for the proposed changes and why they will work to fix the NBA’s woes.
Expansion: The league must expand to 32 teams.
New Divisional Alignment: 4 divisions, each comprised of 4 teams, in each conference.
New Schedule Format: Teams will face their division opponents 5x each throughout the season (15 total games), their non-division conference opponents 3x (36 total games), and their non-conference opponents 1x (16 total games). In a 32-team league, this creates a 67-game schedule.
New Playoff Seeding Rules and Play-In Tournament: Division winners are automatically in the playoffs and guaranteed one of the top four seeds (their record will then determine seeding within the top four). The New Play-In Tournament will include six non-division-winning teams (based on record):
The 5th overall seed will play the 10th overall seed and the 6th overall seed will play the 9th overall seed.
The 5th and 6th seeds are automatically in the playoffs if they win Game 1. However, if the 5th and/or 6th seeds lose Game 1, a best-of-three game series is automatically triggered and the result of Game 1 would count towards the series score (leaving the 5th and/or 6th seed in a 0-1 series hole with Game 2 on the road and a potential deciding Game 3 at home). Games 1 and 3 will be home games for the 5th/6th seeds, while Game 2 will be played on the home court of the 9th/10th seed if the 3-game series commences.
The 7th overall seed will automatically play the 8th seed in a best-of-three series. The 7th seed will have Games 1 and 3 at home, while the 8th seed will host Game 2.
The three series will result in three winners. Who gets the 8th seed, you ask? I have two solutions and I’m not married to either. The NBA can go the NFL route and provide a Bye Round to the 1st overall seed in each conference. The alternative is that the 8th seed is determined by differential score (think the group stage in the FIFA World Cup).
Once the tournament winners and the differential scoring winner are determined, the final 5th-8th order will be determined based on the teams’ regular season record.
Is that a lot to digest? Possibly! It’s a striking difference from today’s NBA and some of the new rules could be quite jarring and potentially polarizing, especially the proposed playoff format. Now, let’s dive into the thought process behind these proposals.
If you couldn’t tell, the NFL was a significant influence in crafting the proposals. It’s no secret that the NFL is the league that every other North American league envies. Its regular season ratings are staggering. An oft-cited statistic is how NFL regular season ratings dwarf the NBA Finals. Yes, the NBA Finals. The popularity of the NFL rarely seems to be in doubt, and fan sentiment about the quality of the product is broadly positive (to be clear, the NFL isn’t without issue, though much of it is rightfully spotlighted on head trauma due to the violent nature of the sport itself).
But how did the NFL get there? The alchemy is much more complex, but for our purposes, and what many people reference to frame the success in a short and sweet fashion, the NFL’s regular season ratings dominance is built on the fact that each team only plays 17 games (with an eventized programming schedule — Sundays, Monday Night Football, and now Thursday Night Football), thus giving each game significant stakes and meaning.
This is why the most popular proposal for fixing the NBA regular season is shortening the season. Bill Simmons, the most popular podcaster covering the NBA, frequently proposes shortening the regular season to either 75 or 72 games. It’s worth noting, however, as recently as February 26th, 2023, Simmons stated on his podcast that he believes the NBA regular season has become “[devalued]” and the product is so poor that the NBA should consider a “60-game” season “so that the regular season games are just more important where you have to play because you have a much smaller sample size.”
In the aforementioned article, “The NBA isn’t surprised its TV ratings are way down. Radical change already was afoot,” Golliver cites an NBA proposal to cut the regular season from 82 games to 78 games and quotes Adam Silver as saying that “games that are meaningful are more likely to draw ratings.”
The idea that “meaningful games equate higher ratings” is not only logical, but important to get a proposal to shorten the season to pass. No proposal goes through without the approval of the NBA’s owners. Another not-so-secret is that NBA owners are strongly opposed to reducing the amount of games played because that means less ticket revenue. In 2022, ticket revenue comprised 22.38% of total revenue. Owners don’t want to give up revenue, even if it means improving the product. But if they could be convinced that less games would lead to higher ratings and thus more advertising revenue (like the NFL enjoys), so that the league could mitigate the ticket revenue losses, then the owners would likely approve such a proposal, especially as it’d improve the waning fan sentiment about the on-court product. If the owners could be convinced that the ad revenue would actually surpass that of the ticket revenue, then it’s a done deal.
And that’s why this isn’t a done deal. Shaving 4, 7, or even 10 games from each team’s total is marginal. A 78-, 75-, or 72-game season isn’t adding more meaning or stake to each game in the season, and that’s what the NBA needs to significantly boost its ratings. Load-managed players are already missing about 10-15 games per season. Teams would still have plenty of breathing room to ease through stretches of the regular season without the heightened intensity that each game of the NFL’s 17-game regular season provides.
Daryl Morey and Kobe Bryant agree.
When Colin Cowherd suggested a 74-game regular season, Morey said, "You’re too timid, but you gotta go farther. I like 58 (games). Every team plays every [other] team two times. The playoffs, I 100 percent agree, shorter is better."
“You can’t [just] lose five-to-10 games,” Bryant said. “If you’re going to do it, you’ve almost got to go quality versus quantity. If you’re going to shorten the schedule, then you’ve got to shorten the schedule and look to enhance your TV numbers substantially…because now every regular-season game is worth a s**t.”
They are absolutely right. This is how the league needs to view season length in regards to significantly increasing ratings and ad revenue. As Mike Ehrmantraut said, “no more half measures.” But their radical schedule-length proposals are still missing something.
Let’s return to the NFL for a brief moment. In addition to the short schedule, the NFL also has robust division rivalries — teams despise their division cohorts, take tremendous pride in winning their divisions, and can guarantee themselves home-field advantage in the first-round of the playoffs by sitting atop their division. Not only does the NBA have a long season full of meaningless games with incomplete, load-managed rosters, but its replete with divisions that most fans cannot name, let alone list along with their accompanying teams (again, unlike the NFL and how, for example, so many fans are inundated with the history of the storied NFC East and the iconic franchises that comprise it).
This is why I believe the formula for the NBA must include a new playoff format and play-in tournament, rewarding division success, as well as a new schedule format that is heavily weighted towards division play, in addition to shortening the schedule.
This new format will stoke division rivalries unlike anything we have ever seen before in modern NBA history. As of this moment, divisions are useless. With the new playoff format, along with the heavily weighted schedule towards intradivision play, fans will actually know the name of their team’s division and which teams comprise their favorite team’s division. And more importantly, fans will passionately root for their team to win the division…because it means their team will avoid the new play-in tournament. Winning the division will carry extraordinary purpose and meaning. Fans will care! Also, the NBA has famously been searching for new ways to create measures of success for fans outside of winning an NBA championship, and this wrinkle to the playoff format would provide a level of prestige to winning a division that doesn’t currently exist.
With these proposals, there is no room for coasting or load management. We all know that teams are always preparing for when “the real season (playoffs) begins.” If an organization wants to guarantee its spot in the postseason for a shot at the Larry O-Brien trophy, it will go hard each and every game. If the division is out of reach, there is still plenty of incentive to have the best record possible, as the odds of winning in the new play-in tournament seriously decline with each and every seed.
Before I conclude, I would like to address some potential questions on some of the details of the proposal:
Why expand the league?
The NBA has not added a team in 21 years. It is the longest period without expansion in NBA history. And the NBA has thrived for it! It is rarely cited as one of the reasons for the depth of talent in today’s NBA, but in my view, a significant reason that the NBA has such a deep talent pool today is the fact that it hasn’t forced expansion when the talent didn’t exist for it. Naturally, the game’s reach has continually increased, especially internationally, and by settling on 30 teams for two decades, the NBA has filled its rosters with enough talent that it can successfully absorb two more teams and not significantly dilute the quality of play on the court.
In my view, expansion is essential in any proposal to shorten the schedule. NBA expansion is lucrative for existing NBA owners because they would split the expansion fee between them. In 2021, it was reported that expansion fees would be, at minimum, $2.5 billion. However, Adam Silver said that “the reported numbers are very low.” With the recent sales of the Phoenix Suns at $4 billion and the Milwaukee Bucks at $3.5 billion, we could expect expansion fees at those prices at minimum (or even more). NBA owners would be much more willing to stomach a period of decreased ticket revenue if they were able to split a combined $8 billion or more.
Would NBA owners truly be willing to shorten the schedule?
The NBA currently showcases 1,230 games total. In a 32-team league with a 67-game schedule, the NBA would sell tickets for 1,072 games. That means the NBA loses 158 games. NBA owners will be highly reluctant to accept that reality…
However, with a 67-game schedule, each and every game would be meaningful, which, as Adam Silver said, would draw higher ratings and lead to increased ad revenue. In my view, it’s quite clear that a 78-game or 75-game season would simply be throwing money away. If that’s the alternative, owners should stick to the 82-game season if ticket revenue is their North Star. This is quite an important point that owners need to absorb: You will not recoup lost ticket revenue with a marginal shortening of the regular season schedule. NBA owners need to accept radical change. In a 67-game season, each and every game would be played with high intensity. Teams would no longer have enough runway to take games off. The margin for error disappears — and so does load management.
Side Note: I think the NBA should consider eventizing its schedule. Why not create a “24-Week” schedule in which fans know exactly which days their teams will play on certain weeks? It could be block-scheduled so that teams could either play on Monday/Wednesday/Friday or Saturday in a week or Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday or Sunday in a week, but at least there is a consistent cadence based on which day of the week your favorite team started playing (Monday or Tuesday). The NBA would only need 22 Weeks for its schedule to be played (3 games per week, except for one week that would require 4 games; this schedule format should allow for the elimination of back-to-backs as well). There would be All-Star Week, and each team would have a Bye Week. Also, this format would play well into the new concept that the NBA introduced this year with “Rivalry Week.” The NBA could add “Division Week” (all games only played within division) or “Interconference Week” (all games out of conference) or a “Playoffs Redux Week” (fill the week with playoff rematches from the prior season).
Why do the 5th/6th seeds get a “one-win-and-in” opportunity for the New Play-In Tournament and why entertain the complicated idea of differential scoring to determine the 8th seed?
The “one-win-and-in” for the 5th and 6th seeds is an incentive for teams to play hard all season and want to achieve as strong a win/loss record as possible (it also acts as a possible reprieve for those second place teams in hyper-competitive divisions).
Of course, with only three series’ in this play-in tournament concept, there is a need to determine the 8th seed — the three series only create three winners for four open slots. To be honest, I didn’t even consider expanding the play-in tournament because a play-in tournament that spanned from the 5th through 12th seed would only devalue the regular season, thus mitigating all this work to create higher stakes in the regular season. And again, I’m not opposed to providing a Bye Round for the 1st seed of the playoffs (like the NFL) and only allowing 7 teams to make the NBA Playoffs, which would undoubtedly create enormous intensity, as well as incentive for the best teams in the NBA to fight until the very end to get their conference’s best record. However, if we must have an 8th team in the playoffs, I love differential scoring as the tiebreaker between the three losing teams. This would add an extra layer of intrigue for fans, but also an unprecedented motivation for teams in the play-in tournament. No such thing as garbage time! Just like the World Cup, I can envision fans scoreboard-watching to see if their team, though losing, could bridge the differential scoring gap so that they could still squeak into the playoffs as an 8th seed. It would be fascinating, fresh, and a windfall for engagement.
Why all this “complication” and why not just shorten the schedule?
It’s clear that it’s not enough for the NBA to simply reduce games. It’s true that a shortened schedule will organically create more meaning to each, as Silver even surmises, and that, as Simmons said, “regular season games are just more important where you have to play because you have a much smaller sample size.” However, the pendulum has swung so far into the territory of indifference towards the regular season that the NBA needs radical inducements to generate excitement and interest from not only fans, but the players and organizations.
If these proposals are adopted, I can envision “chicken or egg” debates in regards to NBA fervor, “is it the players’ maniacal desire to win as many games as possible and defeat their hated division rivals that is stoking their fans’ rabid attitude or are the diehard fans and their unrelenting passion pumping up the players?” The answer won’t matter, just the first-class quality of the product on the floor and the record-high interest in the NBA.