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

yeah that is absurd. no one wants to watch that. except calls like that are how the league looks after its stars

dame was even surprised, he was already countering cos he knew he got beat to the call

beat to the *spot

feel like that was just a bad call but they are calling the game too tight imho

its bad when they call those but then miss the more obvious hacks and holds on the perimeter

it’s a contact sport iirc

on occasion

The NBA and NBPA, as part of CBA negotiations, have discussed tying the league's postseason awards to how many games players appear in during a season, sources told The Athletic. It's one way NBA is trying to solve the issue of star player availability. https://t.co/uWKqRdMpMU

— Mike Vorkunov (@MikeVorkunov) February 14, 2023

democratic party ass solution lol

opportunity zones for winning the mvp

thats totally gonna work and is not open to circumvention

they should just have an attendance award, like a high school

yeah this stuff comes from a genuine place but all it's going to lead to is guys starting games and then committing a foul immediately after tip off and walking off the floor and what not

maybe they'd try and tie it to minutes as opposed to games but i'm not sure that incentivizes playing in more games as much as it does playing more minutes in the games you do choose to play in

there's pretty obvious ways to do mpg & gp as combined metrics

what if they just added a bunch of worse teams so some of the games aren't as hard

it reminds me of trying to protect against hacking... the hackers are always gonna be one step ahead. teams will find the loopholes in any rule very easily

also established veteran stars like kawhi, PG, jimmy, the warriors guys will prob just be like "ok fine we don't care about awards anyway." kawhi and jimmy to pick two already essentially voluntarily remove themselves from all NBA and all star consideration w/ their rest schedules even tho there isn't any rule in place yet. they asked jimmy about not making the all star team and he said "me no care" lol... he knows what he needs to do if that stuff mattered to him but it doesn't anymore

younger stars w/ more to prove already play above what i imagine the threshold would be, they're gonna pick their spots to rest just like they already do. and guys like giannis and lebron who just seem to wanna play every game are not gonna care either way

the league is trying to legislate its way around an existential problem w/o really getting to the root of it imo

yeah everyone knows what the solution is but they dont want to do it for obvious reasons

most of the voters already have a number in their heads anyway. bill and zach always talk about it.

if they want to go full mckinsey the league should push for salaries to be contingent in some way on playing time, like a player who misses games would not collect salary for the games missed but that money would still have to be paid out by the team (and count against the cap) and put into some sort of insurance pool that is then divided among all the league’s injured players evenly. the players would never agree to something like this obviously

right, just like the owners would never agree to paying into an escrow fund that paid out bonuses based on games played, which would prob be the easiest solution. the league has enough money to do that itself but would also refuse, i'm sure. at the end of the day nobody on either end actually wants to give up money so we'll never get a more proactive solution than silly rules changes from the league

I mean call me a boot licker but paying players extra to play games they’re already getting paid to not play seems like an absurd solution

I feel like the stars would just turn around and negotiate to be paid a comparable incentive payment to not play

players shd just skip the games and go straight to making highlights for ig and tt

nba finals determined by view counts

I mean call me a boot licker but paying players extra to play games they’re already getting paid to not play seems like an absurd solution

well it's not exactly the same thing...bonuses for stats benchmarks are sort of like performance bonuses in some corporate jobs, but i don't know of a job where you get a bonus for working your allotted number of days/hours.

but either way i think exhorting the players to play with money is missing the point--the teams with the best players are generally supportive of playing those guys between 60 and 70 games a year, and i'm sure the smart ones have already priced that in to their planning and projections. so why are we doing carrots and sticks with the individual players? i can't think of a reason other than "it's easier to try that first."

like would the clippers be happy if kawhi suddenly decided he needed to play 72 games a year to get some sort of bonus? i don't think they would!

well it’s not a question of what the teams want

tbf the teams do make the rules

yeah that gets to who exactly is advocating for high profile players to play more and why this entire thing is probably noise just like the upper spending limit was noise

but it’s not like players are refusing to play, right? it’s teams and coaches choosing to rest their playoffs.

i think it’s on a case by case basis

the league has fined teams for mass benching players for national TV games but they’d never be able to ratchet up to a price that actually mattered

you could also pretty easily incentivize at the team level to play guys

this is all a question of when you turn on TNT or ESPN or go to the arena do you know that the stars on each team are actually going to be playing. so yeah if we go by what the owners want paying bonuses for playing in scheduled games would never happen… we also wouldn’t have free agency and the players would be flying coach on southwest. most of the owners would be happy not even hitting the salary floor. practically speaking what the owners want does matter of course, but again this is an existential discussion about the point of the sport that is best off with little input from the owners who would be happy to just outright steal their customers money if they could. the league and the owners combined could come up with such a bonus system and barely make a scratch on their own bottom lines

you could also pretty easily incentivize at the team level to play guys

ok so why haven't i heard any proposals to do it this way?

but also, all this talk of incentivizing anyone to play somewhere in the area of 82 games keeps missing the point. the regular season has too many games!

I thought this was interesting from a recent article I read about this stuff:

At the end of the 1989-90, Stern was fining teams for resting players. On the last day of that season, the Lakers chose to rest James Worthy and Magic Johnson against the Blazers for a nationally televised game, even though the Lakers and Portland were locked into their playoff seeds (Portland ended up winning by 42). Jerry Buss actually apologized for the resting, though Pat Riley was defiant that it wasn’t worth the risk stating that he had “an obligation to our management” to protect his stars. The NBA said the fine was “for failing to play two healthy players who are normally starters.” Riley had fought this battle before. In 1985, the Lakers were also fined for not playing Magic or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a season-ender against the Kings.

but it’s not like players are refusing to play, right? it’s teams and coaches choosing to rest their playoffs.

― Piven After Midnight (The Yellow Kid), Tuesday, February 14, 2023 10:28 PM (one hour ago)

agree w/ jordan that it’s case by case, which is why I really don’t think a bonus system is going to move the needle here. kawhi isn’t getting out of bed for a few extra bucks to play in a random tuesday night TNT game, and the team obviously isn’t going to care if their star does or doesn’t get a bonus. (I assume you’d have to not make this count for the cap.) this is really why the only real solution is to address the root cause and just to reduce the number of games

which is why if you’re going to avoid actually addressing the problem you’d do better imo by disincentivizing players from missing too many games while also making sure the owners don’t benefit from that. you miss more than 10 games, you forfeit a game check for each additional game you miss but get a payout from the insurance pool which is financed by those forfeited salaries and by luxury taxes. the players full salary still counts against the cap to discourage teams from paying players under the table to miss games. also deals with malcontents like kyrie or jae crowder. at the end of the season the surplus from the pool goes to rookies or to some charitable cause or something

obviously there are a lot of holes in this proposal, for example how to do treat end of the bench guys who are suiting up but not getting run, obviously they shouldn’t be penalized. (though maybe their insurance pool payouts are actually bigger than their usual game checks.)

just ban zones again. less movement on defense, less stress on everyones joints, and the stars get to cook. everyone wins.

the answer is fewer games of course but that ain't happening.

lmao get a grip

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver unveils streaming experience of the future via the NBA App - and you can be in it! pic.twitter.com/FKYJvskf0H

— NBA (@NBA) February 17, 2023

that is.....something

lol thats pretty funny

rashad has hella vertical for his age impressive

gonna be a lot of people scanning their dicks for this

As long as there's such vast sums of money at stake the league is going to tinker with every aspect of the "product" to maximize its profits and growth potential, while the teams, coaches and players will game every change to the system every way they can think of to maximize benefits to themselves. Pro sports are a very pure form of capitalism in that way.

With #NBA as our first professional sports league partner, we will bring select live @NBA games to fans in #SharedReality at our immersive entertainment venues in LA & Dallas, with more venues to come, bringing fans together in person & closer to the game.https://t.co/5uVWs820mz pic.twitter.com/aTsKd6klUv

— Cosm (@experiencecosm) February 17, 2023