The NBA Just Broke Itself, So We Can Fix It

An opportunity as we enter the era of supernova teams…

Now I’m no NBA expert — though sometimes I play one on Medium — but it doesn’t take an expert to see that what’s happening this past week — and really, for the past few years — is insanity. It just takes being a fan to see that the competitive balance of the league has been destroyed. I mean, we just wrapped up a Finals in which two teams, the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers, played each other for the fourth straight year. In what other major sports league does that happen? In no other league.

Certainly, this wasn’t supposed to happen in the age of free agency. And that was supposed to be the point — well, at least half the point.¹ But a funny thing happened on the way to parity. Super teams, uh, found a way. Be it through the desire to play with friends, or the magnanimous contract gestures to do what’s ‘best for the team’, or the favorable tax structures in some states, or the ability to make more money off the court than on it, or just good old fashion “tanking” — Voltrons have formed in Golden State, Houston, Boston, Philadelphia, and seemingly soon, Los Angeles.

This is where everyone will be quick to point out two things. First, this is nothing new. Each decade in the NBA has had one or more “super” teams. Second, that this is ultimately good for the NBA. See: said “super” teams of years past.

These are both fair points to some extent. But as always, there’s nuance here.

First, I think we can all agree that while there have been “super” teams in the past, it was more a fluke in an overall less talented and largely static (in terms of players switching teams) league. This is not the same thing. Second, I agree that this will be a good thing for the league in the short term. And probably even a very good thing as it looks to continue to expand in places like Asia, where fans can coalesce around these supernova teams. But in the long run…

…people will get bored. I know it seems impossible now. But it will happen. Maybe the fan bases of those five teams remain engaged. And maybe those fanbases expand to be large enough. But to everyone else, it will be boring. And the NBA is and should be in full-on growth mode. Because it has a real shot at becoming the most popular sport in the U.S. and could one day rival soccer in large parts of the world.

Anyway, this is why LeBron James joining the Lakers,²³ and then Rajon Rondo joining him, and perhaps Kawhi Leonard joining them is a good thing. And why DeMarcus Cousins joining a Warriors team that has won three of the last four NBA titles — and a team that won a record 73 games in the year it didn’t win — is potentially a great thing.

It gives the NBA an excuse to make some huge changes.

But, but, but. Everything is going great, right? Well, yes. But also no. The product itself is great in a number of ways. The game is good. The stars are amazing. It works pretty well on TV. It works even better on social media. There’s an excellent base from which to build. But the NBA is far from perfect.

First and foremost, the season is far, far, far too long. Almost laughably so. Not baseball comically so, but still. 82 games is a loooooonnnnnngggg regular season. And we don’t have to have anyone say this, we can see it in teams basically only pretending to play large swaths of the season. The best ones rest players for the playoffs. The worst ones rest players to miss the playoffs and enter the lottery with the best shot of “winning” by losing.³ It’s a broken system that is maintained solely because that’s the way it has always been.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver — who is by all accounts the most forward-thinking of the big league commissioners — should use this supernova team situation as an excuse to rethink some fundamentals of the game. First and foremost, the regular season should be cut down by a number of games. I would argue maybe even half, but that would never happen when ticket sales are on the line. So let’s say by a fourth.

How does a ~60 game season sound? It sounds great, actually.

I would also augment said regular season with at least one and perhaps two “tournaments”, just like they do in the NCAA, with beginning of the year showings, then end of the year conference tournaments. These would be played for both bragging rights but also for playoff seeding.

And yes, they should blow up the East/West split of the leagues — at least when it comes to the playoffs. Those should be seeded NCAA Tournament-style, 1 to 16 ranked by record mixed with the aforementioned tournament (maybe conference tournaments to have a “King of the East” and a “King of the West” team?) outcomes. The abundance of talent now in the West with LeBron’s move should make this exceedingly obvious.

While we’re at it… and since the World Cup is top of mind right now, I might also take a page out of that playbook and drastically cut back on the number of ads shown in the TV experience of the game. When I said the game is pretty good for TV, that just means it could be better. A game with commercials only at halftime isn’t feasible, least of which because the players would undoubtedly be exhausted by the time we got there. But what about only at the end of each quarter? Timeouts would still exist, but you could cut to the mic’d-up huddle during those, sponsored by some brand, of course. And there are too many timeouts anyway…

I mean, we are already adding sponsorships to the jerseys soccer-style. Let’s take some other learnings… Let’s speed up the games themselves with less unnatural stoppages. And yes, disincentivize the fouling at the end of games.

Again, things are good in the NBA right now. Perhaps even great. All this player movement is exciting. Everyone is talking about it. But all of that is the reason why now is the right time to make changes. Don’t wait for the game to break, do it from a position of strength. Use the formation of the supernova teams to blow up the league as we know it, and let the game re-form stronger.