NBA State of Play – Rule Changes – Trends – CBA – Schedule Reform – Load Mgmt – etc

i havent read anything, has any type of format been leaked or proposed for that?

dont think theres been any concrete info but iirc they were talking about not increasing the number of games which then it stands to reason that at least the teams that didnt make it to the champ game would be playing fewer games, obvs big speculation but makes sense to me

i do think there is some awareness that they play too many games but obvs the owners dont want to give up gate/local broadcast revenue, this could be a good compromise if it juices the national tv deal

less games wont ever happen so just find a way to stretch the season or maybe less 3-4 day breaks?

its possible you gotta believe

but in the short term yeah they wld prob have to lengthen the season to eliminate back to backs think the other demands on the arenas hockey games concerts etc make perfectly spaced games impossible

they already did it once why not keep going

I’m 100% against the mid season tournament until the league figures out the stars sitting situation, completely grotesque bullshit imo

your best players play 75% of the time even when they’re not injured, everyone agrees there’s too many games, now you want to start a new tournament because we all watched soccer that one time and liked it, give me a break

if it doesnt result in more games played i dont see the problem it will prob be a big success etc

maybe the good players will/should just sit out the tourney and take a couple weeks off in the middle of the season lol. i just cant imagine the stakes of this thing meaning enough to the players but we'll see

thats the big question is how does the league convince teams to not throw the tourney for rest purposes

the soccer teams already do that!

one thing u could do is the games count as regular season games, you have enough rest baked into the tourney no back to backs, then youre risking one loss for the opportunity for five wins, or maybe less if theres a knockout phase, either way the winners would get a nice boost in the standings, plus some other prize

the question is…why

How would the NBA's In-Season Tournament work?

According to Charnia, the NBA would play "Cup games" throughout November.

The eight teams with the best records in those games would advance to a single-elimination tournament in December. The other 22 teams would continue their regular seasons.

All In-Season Tournament games would count as part of the 82-game schedule. The two teams that reach the final will end up playing play one extra game during the regular season (83 total).

they should do a thing where at the end of the year, the top teams play in a "play-off" tournament

wtf, sounds like a scheduling nightmare... and whats the incentive

lol xp

imo lengthening the season would help to some degree but idk if we can ever turn back the clock on the concept of load management aka "lengthening guys careers is good" and "the playoffs matter way more than the regular season." those things are just kinda inarguable. if the league reduced the schedule to i.e. 72 games i'm not sure that would really change the mentalities of franchises & older stars. lebron really takes pride in playing every night and being on the floor when ppl are paying to see him. kawhi or jimmy butler or whoever don't & i'm not sure the league can legislate that out of them

one thing the league and the owners *could* do is provide a monetary incentive above and beyond salary to entice players to be on the court more. the league and the owners *could* i.e. create a fund to pay out a 10% salary bonus to every player in the league who plays x% of games or something like that. or pay max players 500k for every national TV game they play in. but i highly doubt either the league or owners would be willing to put their money where their mouth is on this issue, or would want to spell the capitalism out so explicitly. but why lie? money talks, we all know that.

the midseason tournament might be a roundabout way of doing this if the prize for winning is money instead of a trophy nobody will care about... but i bet we get a trophy nobody will care about

I think lebrons stated motivations aren’t his actual motivations… which is to break every stat record and make them unbreakable for others

maybe! either way in a macro sense he cares about his legacy and that’s why he plays

nobody will ever explain in a clear and clean manner to me why this in-season tournament is not an abomination to god and man that literally nobody but kia executives and adam silver will ever give a shit about

i think the single elimination part of the tourney could be fun, a lil novelty to kick off the season before the christmas games, its a marketing gimmick for sure but could work to get people talking and interested, i see it more or less as "no big deal" and "maybe a bit of fun"

if the league reduced the schedule to i.e. 72 games i'm not sure that would really change the mentalities of franchises & older stars.

Steve Kerr on the Warriors sitting their big names in Cleveland tonight

“I feel terrible for fans who bought a ticket expecting to see someone play. It’s a brutal part of the business. It’s why I’m going to continue to advocate for 72-game seasons.”

Full soundbite pic.twitter.com/P0ZGbv1DNE

— Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) January 20, 2023

i think every game you reduce it by is an improvement until you reach the ideal number of games which is prob like 50

60. play every team twice and get rid of divisions/conferences

yeah playing every team twice makes a lot of sense

every team twice would be 58

yeah i’m pretty opposed to any of this stuff that doesn’t get toward 58, and i’ll hold out judgment until i see it but i definitely haven’t seen the brilliant incentives that are going to make players care about this tournament.

if you win you get seven fouls a game for the rest of the season

if you win you only have to play 58 games that year

the ultimate prize

the owners would shut down the league before they reduce games and give up revenue. there would have to be an entirely different economic model. maybe in like 20 years when cable TV is fully dead things will be different

i mean they could build a more profitable business with fewer games but that would take vision

Once Elon takes over

there is certainly value in scarcity and while it would take some time and thought i don't believe that 17 home games per team of gate receipts is some sort of insurmountable amount of money to recoup

but if we're thinking long-term, what happens today with back to backs has to be among the worst consumer experiences out there and could be really destructive over time, like if you want alienate a well-off casual fan in cleveland just get them to pay secondary market prices for this game against the warriors where no one is playing.

sorry 12 home games

turning on the tv seeing two teams playing in unrecognizable alternate uniforms and also you dont recognize the players because the stars arent playing is a bad experience

tbf i do think the nba is generally excellent tho it would be better if healthy players played and also if a teams uniforms all more or less had the same color scheme

yeah, the nba is in a good place now which is exactly why they should get after some of these issues now

tbf i do think the nba is generally excellent tho it would be better if healthy players played and also if a teams uniforms all more or less had the same color scheme

― lag∞n, Friday, January 20, 2023 10:07 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the two most important issues

Making the season into a big double round robin is a great idea

Then you wouldn’t even need playoffs

that's how the EPL works but they obviously have other tournaments that their teams go to which adds interest, so you would still want the playoffs to have some kind of tourney element.

to me the big thing that does is get to the ideal of each team playing 2 games a week, you do one on weds/thurs and one on fri/sat, you give the season some structure as opposed to having no idea what each team's schedule is week to week, and every game becomes an event because it's really hard to blow off games in that format.

i agree that would be the ideal, and each game becomes more of an anticipated “event” a la the NFL

but it’s not just 17 games’ worth of tickets and hot dogs - it’s all the ad money that goes with those games

there would still be more than enough games for the national tv deals which is the big money. and local tv is going to look very very different in a few years anyway.

Just someone fix league pass.

538 wants in on the post-up party

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-nba-teams-are-bringing-the-post-up-back-to-life/

Thinking about post-ups in a vacuum, however, misses what makes them so valuable in the current NBA. The league is shifting away from static plays of any kind, and toward a fluid state of multiple actions layered on top of one another. The post-up as a primary playcall, with a ball handler dribbling downcourt and dumping the ball into the post, where a center promptly battles another center before shooting, is finished; that precise sequence has happened only twice this season.x
Once by Jokić and once by Andre Drummond.

this is wild. to think kendrick perkins used to get this play called for him to start every game!