To improve basketball the NBA should shorten the regular season

On Sunday, the Boston Celtics beat the Brooklyn Nets 95-90 at Barclays Center in an experimental preseason game that lasted just 44 minutes. The purpose of the exhibition was supposedly to see if a shorter game clock would improve the quality of play.

What it actually achieved was to reignite the argument that the best way the NBA could improve its on-court product would be by shortening the regular season – no individual games.

The idea behind the one-off preseason game, if it was anything other than a marketing stunt, was to make the game more entertaining, punchier and to improve “the flow”. The game lasted 44 minutes rather than the usual 48, featured 11-minute quarters and had two fewer mandatory timeouts. While it’s subjective to say that any of this made the Nets/Celtics game more entertaining, it certainly took up less real-world time. It was around 17 minutes shorter than an average full-length game.

Basketball fans, however, aren’t clamouring for shorter games as much as they are for just better overall product. It’s hard to pinpoint what that means but most would probably appreciate the following: fewer meaningless games on the schedule after teams have clinched, fewer games where tanking teams put inferior lineups on the floor in an effort to lose and, most of all, fewer games where star players are playing at a lower level, or absent altogether.

Players get overworked during the course of the regular NBA season, which runs 82 games before even factoring in the (also lengthy) postseason. The biggest stars, of course, end up playing the biggest minutes, which increases the chance of fatigue and injury. As Mike Wise from the Washington Post puts it: “The point is, you don’t get hurt when you don’t play. And premier NBA players, by and large, play too much.”

This is why, over the course of the long season, we’ve seen play-off-bound teams like the San Antonio Spurs and Miami Heat rest their veteran players, even at the cost of a regular season victory or two, just to keep them fresh. This is why teams don’t play their starters at the end of the regular season after postseason seedings are all but set. If the NBA were really committed to improving the quality of the game, the best thing they could do, for both players and fans alike, would be to get rid of these games in the first place.

Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James, always unafraid to use the platform he has as the game’s best player and biggest star, brought up the subject of a shortened schedule after the league announced the Celtics/Nets preseason game:

It’s not the minutes, it’s the games. The minutes don’t mean anything. We can play a 50-minute game if we have to. It’s just the games. We all as players think it’s too many games in our season.

Eighty-two games are a lot. But it’s not the minutes. Taking away minutes from the game isn’t going to shorten it at all. Once you go out and play on the floor, it doesn’t matter if you’re playing 22 minutes … or you play 40 minutes. Once you play, it takes a toll on your body.

James, of course, was talking about the schedule from a player’s perspective, but Dallas Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki mentioned the impact of scheduled back-to-back games has on the quality of the games themselves:

I think that you should never have to play at the highest level if there is two consecutive nights and flying in between. You obviously make it work. We have the best athletes in the world, we feel, but I think it hurts the product some. Last year, some teams get here for the fourth game in five nights and we’ve been sitting here on rest and just blow them out.

Almost as soon as James and Nowitzki made headlines with their comments, former Chicago Bulls legend and current Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan responded with a mix of criticism, self-aggrandisement and economic realism:

I love both of those guys, but as an owner who played the game, I loved playing. If I wasn’t playing 82 games, I still would’ve been playing somewhere else because that’s the love for the game I had. As a player, I never thought 82 games was an issue.

But if that’s what they want to do, we as owners and players can evaluate it and talk about it. But we’d make less money as partners. Are they ready to give up money to play fewer games? That’s the question, because you can’t make the same amount of money playing fewer games.

Jordan is being a bit selective with his memory here when talking about his playing career here – after all he did retire not once but twice during his prime years – but he’s absolutely right from the perspective of an owner. As Nowitzki himself pointed out in his comments, “every missed game means missed money for both parties ... that’s why I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.”

The next time the league and the players are at the table will most likely be in 2017 when players have the chance to opt out of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement. When that happens, it’s hard to imagine that the owners or the NBA Players Association will be motivated to have serious discussions about reducing the number of games, and thus revenue, for the sake of improving the on-court product.

So, is that the last word? Well, Yahoo! Sports analyst Kelly Dwyer has proposed a somewhat unconventional compromise: keep the 82 game schedule but make the regular season longer. The problem, may be less about the number of games and more about how the league, perhaps trying to prevent overlap between other sports, tries to fit too many of them into a too tight timespan.

There’s no reason, Dwyer argues, the NBA season couldn’t start earlier in the year, reducing the number of the dreaded back-to-backs and allowing players more time to rest and rehab injuries:

The NBA should be playing games right now, though. Games that count. It doesn’t like the idea of competing with the baseball play-offs, and Turner won’t like the idea of the potential for TNT and TBS to be splitting the eyeballs of sports fans ... but the NBA should have tipped off on Tuesday. Not two weeks from Tuesday.

If the idea of making what is already a long season even longer isn’t appealing, there’s a very easy way to lengthen the meaningful part of the schedule without actually making it longer. After Sunday’s experimental shorter game, Tony Parker of the San Antonio Spurs has suggested that the NBA could keep the 82-game schedule while reducing back-to-backs with one simple change in the similarly overlong preseason:

I think what [should be changed] is to play four preseason games instead of eight, and those two weeks you can help spread the season. That would be better. Because everybody arrives in shape at training camp. Everybody’s here since the beginning of September, even the guys playing overseas, we arrive in shape.

As NBC Sports Sean Highkin points out “This is an entirely reasonable idea with virtually no downside.”

Well, here’s the “virtually” part: teams make money off of those exhibition games as well, reducing their number might be a non-starter as well. Which brings us right back to the original dilemma. It’s hard to think that the league is going to make any decisions that could mean a real or even perceived short-term reduction of profit.

So, it’s likely the NBA schedule will remain as is, not because it’s best for the game but because it’s not in anybody’s economic self-interest to make changes. But, hey, maybe they will tinker around with a 40-minute game next October and see what difference another minute per quarter could make.