Fixing The NBA
The Anthony Davis fiasco where he's clearly disengaged from the team he has 18 months left on his contract with, not giving effort, and being used as a pawn in LeBron's game has me fed up finally: time to fix the NBA.
The Problems
The regular season has gone as a competition.
What makes soccer such a great sport to watch is almost every match has stakes.
Stakes bring incentives to the teams, bring competitive fire to the match and draw in spectators.
Champions League, first place, relegation, etc all create big incentives. Even with Huddersfield gone, there are 7 teams in a relegation battle, 3 in the title fight and 3 more fighting for Champions League.
Gives us 65% of the league fighting desperately with huge incentives weekly.
In the NBA right now you have 11 teams locked into the playoffs but the big problem is the teams who aren't locked into the playoffs don't really care that much about making it.
The Clippers, Pistons, Wizards, Heat, and Pelicans traded away big parts of their teams because making the playoffs is not an incentive.
We all know about tanking, the incentive is much stronger to lose.
So right now we have a very small handful of teams who need to push to win nightly.
The playoffs may vary in enjoyment, but are clearly better than regular season despite generally half the playoff teams not really threatening a Final Four run.
To Fix
Regular season has to matter more.
3 tiers of 10
Regular season is 56 games long, 1 game against every team outside your tier and then 2 home and aways against the 9 in your tier.
After the regular season we'd have something like this:
Round 1 would have the 2 C teams host a Best-of-3 over 5 days.
Round 2 would have the 1st place C team and 2nd/3rd place B teams host a Best-of-3 over 5 days.
The top 4 A teams would then have home court advantage over the Best-of-5 or 7 round that begins then, with the final 4 and finals being a best of 7.
If you win the title, you get promoted to Tier A no questions.
If you make the final 4 you get promoted a tier, no question.
If you do not, then we go to the promotion/relegation series.
So assuming, Tier B teams 2/3 and Tier C teams 2/3 do not make the final 4, we would then have this set-up:
You could still name All-Stars but instead of the current farce, you simply gather the league for a 30-team single elimination tournament at midseason. The top 2 records from A get byes and you play the basketball version of the FA Cup.
Why Won't This Happen
Money. A 30% reduction of regular season games would probably mean an immediate reduction of ticket/TV revenue. Could you sell the increase in "playoff games" by 60% by including the promotion/relegation games and the midseason Cup games as a selling point? Maybe, but it's hard to predict that part. What isn't hard to predict is the regular season experience would skyrocket within 2-3 years incredibly. Every NBA night would be must-see TV with relegation, promotion, and crucial byes on the line. Finishing first in A would likely quickly become a point of pride as well.
How Would It Have Worked In Recent Years
Let's say we assigned original tiers heading into the 2017-18 season based on results over the past 5 years.
that looks like an NBA I can get behind. This year we'd see a Tier A of:
Houston/GS/Toronto/Boston/Cleveland/OKC/San Antonio/Portland/Utah/LA Clippers or Indiana.
Denver, Philadelphia and Milwaukee would be battling for a direct spot into Round 3 atop Tier B.
The draft: eliminate it. No incentives for tanking. Rookies are free to sign with who you want. Want playing time right away? You aren’t going to Golden State.
The complicated current financial structure would have to be phased out eventually to a simple cap (I’d be fine with no cap) where you pay double or triple for going over. But we want to incentivize teams to pay up for players if they want.