What's wrong with the NBA and how to fix it

1. The current CBA makes for quite a bit less flexibility. Compared to twenty years ago, it was quite a bit easier for teams to pull off trades and to drop malcontent players.

The system now is so rigid that you’ve got teams like the Pacers losing money while they’re forced to pay $10M to a guy who engaged in a high speed gun battle through the streets of the city I live in.

2. Twenty years ago, the refs were still not good, but they were not so individualized, old, and fat as they are today. They’ve grown powerful, and the league damaged its credibility by downplaying the Donaghy scandal instead of responding to it by coming down like a ton of bricks on anything that threatened the integrity of their game.

By not doing that, they damaged their brand going forward.

3. The economy sucks, and people (and businesses) are being careful with their money. This leads to reevaluating what are really good purchases for their entertainment dollars and what aren’t. In a good economy, lots of bad mistakes covered up and go unnoticed because people are buying even if the product isn’t that great. When the economy sucks though, you tend to see more frequently which guys actually know what they’re doing and which don’t.

4. As a lesser point, I think the NCAA system that feeds the NBA with most of its players is very corrupt, and this feeds into the image problem in the NBA. To go through the NCAA system, I’d guess that the vast majority of players had to break rules. That leads to these guys being used to breaking rules when they get to the NBA, and seeing the system as an adversary. Which typically isn’t what we want to root for as fans.

So the way to fix this stuff is pretty obvious:
1. The new CBA should:
A) Further relax the trade rules (maybe make 30% salary matching instead of 25%). This will allow more teams to change their direction quicker when they need to.
B) It should impose shorter contract lengths (5 years and 4 years instead of 6 and 5?). Again, this reduces somewhat the likelihood of continuing “bad marriages” where the team and player are stuck in a relationship where nobody’s happy. Because that just pisses us off as fans.
C) Reduce the cap penalty for buying out players. Limit it to one year, rather than the remaining years on the contract, and limit it to 50% of the money owed. Again, this will facilitate movement and change.
D) Increase and make more explicit the terms under which teams can cancel player’s contracts. It shouldn’t be so hard that the Pacers couldn’t cancel Tinsley’s deal or the Warriors couldn’t cancel Sprees or the Wiz can’t cancel Arenas.
E) Dead and permanently retired players should never count against the cap.

2. They need a top-down wipe of the officiating. Get rid of all the entrenched clown referees. We shouldn’t know their names. We shouldn’t need to know their names. Get the league office out of the mix. They shouldn’t, really, have any communication with the refs. Instead, develop a system of outside evaluation. Find refs who deviate from the accepted uniform means of calling things (either by calling certain things differently or by treating certain players differently or by treating the game differently in different situations) and replace them if they don’t change.

3 and 4. I tend to think the league will basically be ok, but the long-run outlook of the game isn’t all sunshine. They have a lot of competition for your entertainment dollars. One approach I’d consider for them to strengthen basketball in the US is to consider a plan to bypass the NCAA entirely and start developing a true, minor league system. You do this in conjunction with: demoting the smallest market teams if they appear unable to compete to a lower division.

My crazy idea for divisions and restructuring

The NBA Division I starts out as the league’s best 20 teams. Two conferences of 10 teams, 2 divisions of 5 teams each.
The NBA Division II starts out as the leagues worst 10 teams. Two divisions of 5 teams each.

The 4 division winners and 8 next best teams from Div I make the playoffs.
The 2 division winners and 2 next best teams from Div II make the playoffs.

The Div II teams that make the playoffs advance to Div I the following year and the 4 worst teams from Div I are demoted to Div II.

Each of the 30 NBA teams gets an affiliate NBADL team that's openly partnered with an NCAA university, if they so choose. Via this partnership, players get openly paid by the NBA, but in addition get a paid scholarship through the league. Each team must be composed of X number of college students and work out a rule to ensure some continuity: e.g. "Freshman/rookie and 2nd year minor leaguers can only be called up before the first game or after the last game of the college season"

 

For the last 20 years, I've always thought that this would be the best way to run the NBA.

1. No more than 30 teams in the league, but less will work, while 30 is ideal.
2. Divide the League into 3 Divisions, Division 1, Division II, and Division III.
3. Have the best teams play each other more often than they play the worst teams every single year, so that that teams like the Lakers, Spurs, Jazz, Celtics, and teams that are traditionally in the Top-10 of the league every season play each other more often (6 times a year) than they play the lesser teams (2 times and 1 time a year). This would make for a greater number of "high-rating" games available to television throughout the year. The television season can then begin at the beginning of the season and continue throughout the season generating more interest and more money because there will be "premium" games on television all the time.

Here's how you do it while keeping things balanced and fair throughout the league every season:

Division breakdown:
D-I....Top-10 teams
D-II...11-20 teams
D-III..21-rest of teams

16 teams make the playoffs:
The Top-8 from D-I, The Top-5 from D-II, The Top-3 from D-III.

How it's determined who is in each Division every year.

The first year will be based on overall record from the year before. After that, the bottom 3 teams from D-I drop to D-II. The Top-3 teams from D-II advance to D-I. The middle 3 teams from D-II stay where they are. The Top 4 teams from D-III advance to D-II. The bottom 4 teams from D-II drop to D-III. The bottom 6 teams from D-III stay where they are.

This way, no team can drop two divisions in one year just because they had a rash of injuries. Not only will there be 16 playoff spots to play for every season, but there will be incentives throughout the league to the very last game so that a team won't tank games or play half-heartedly like they do every season. Every year in the NBA the teams that clearly aren't making the playoffs start losing at a greater pace than before. The last 25 games of the year are always a case of the haves-and-have-nots. With all of the incentives to play for, there will be more fans in the stands at half of the arenas in the league. Half the league is going bankrupt. They need television money and incentives for the fans to show up. This idea solves both problems.

Here's how you do the schedule, assuming there are 30 teams, 10 in each league (which is why 30 is an ideal number):

Each team plays 6 Intra-Division games with the other 9 teams (54 games).
Every D-I team plays each D-II team twice (20 games).
Every D-I team plays each D-III team once (5 home and 5 road alternating each season if a D-I team faced a D-III team the previous season. 10 games).

That's 84 games for the D-1 teams, 74 games for the D-II teams, and 64 games for the D-III teams.
Every D-II team plays each D-III team once (5 home and 5 road alternating each season if a D-I team faced a D-III team the previous season. 10 games).

That's 84 games for the D-1 teams, 84 games for the D-II teams, and 74 games for the D-III teams.
Every D-III team plays every D-III team one more time plus one team two more times splitting home and away. (10 games.)

That's now 84 games for every team. Cut out 2 pre-season games. They're useless, anyway.

What you end up with:

Division-III: 10 teams playing each other 64 of the 84 games, making it likely that 4 of the teams have better than .500 records and one or two more will be .440 or better with only 4 teams worse than that. The really bad teams will win more games. That will be more fun at the arena, causing more people to attend. People who go to games like to see wins. Reaching the playoffs, which is what is always on the mind of internet posters, isn't what's most important at the end of the game to people who are paying for a ticket. They want to go home having seen a win. Also, if a team is in the Top-3 from D-III then, they not only get into the playoffs, but they get in with an attitude of winning by both the fans and the team as they will likely have .550 records or better. Fighting for that 4th-place finish in D-III will also be fun as that team advances to D-II next season where 5 teams reach the playoffs (where the D-II Division has two of the five teams with home-court in the playoffs). The D-III playoff teams will be seeded 13, 15, & 16 respectively. That top team is probably going to be pretty good, be up-and-coming, and has a chance in the playoffs not having to play one of the Top-3 seeds. It got to be in D-III because it either didn't play well the year before, had some key injuries, was too young, or just wasn't very good. Whatever the reason, those reasons don't exist anymore and it's now an exciting team to watch. This would not likely be the case in the existing format of the NBA. Winning breeds confidence and this team has won a lot of games this season.

Division II: 10 teams playing each other 54 times, and the Top 4 or 5 teams are likely to be some pretty good teams while playing each other 6 times a piece. Again, 4 of the teams should be over .500 with one or two other teams playing between .440-.480 and with a lot more to play for. The Top 5 teams reach the playoffs, seeded 7, 8, 10, 12, & 14 respectively. In addition, the Top-3 teams reach Division-I next year, the team that finishes 6th gets to stay in D-II, and the bottom 4 fall to D-III, so there's incentives aplenty for all in the Division. There will be plenty of good games that could be put on television from this Division matching the top teams against either the #1 team in D-III, against another top team from D-II, or against most of the teams from D-I.

Division I: 54 games against the best teams in the league from the year before (Top-7 from D-I and Top-3 from D-II) for each and every one of the 10 teams in this division. That's 540 televisable games, plus so many more when they are playing against top Top teams from D-II and the Top one or two teams from D-III. Teams in this Division are seeded 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9 & 11 respectively with the top 6 obviously earning home court in the 1st Round. Even though the Top 8 teams make it to the playoffs, only the Top 7 stay in the Division. The bottom 3 will go to D-II the next season. So, you really want to stay in D-I and increase your chances for making the playoffs next season where there are 8 teams getting in versus 5 teams in D-II.

Playoffs are the playoffs. Even if the D-III 3rd place finisher pulled off a miracle and won the NBA Championship, that team still just goes to the D-II division the next season.

In the end, there would be about 600 marketable regular season games that people would want to watch. The ratings for 6 Celtics-Lakers matchups and 6 Lakers-Cavaliers matchups and 6 Lakers-Magic matchups, etc. would be a goldmine for the NBA in terms of television revenue. They could have Saturday Night NBA games on one of the Networks. It's the least watched evening in all of television, so it wouldn't hurt a major network to put a Lakers@Celtics game on @ 6:00 EST and a Miami@Utah or Orlando@Portland on @ 8:30 EST. They could do that every Saturday Night from the last week of October throughout the season. They could then have mid-week games on like they do now on TNT/ESPN/NBA-Network.

Television revenue would increase as would ticket revenue, where the NBA is struggling mightily. That's mostly because most teams suck most of the time, and that's because they're always comparing themselves to the Lakers, Cavs, Celtics or the Magic. Those comparisons wouldn't be made under this type of system. It's the same system they had in Major League Baseball for decades. It worked just fine. It's better suited for today's world where you want televised games to always be premier games.

If this had been the first year, then the Divisions would have been broken down like this:

Division I:

1. Cleveland Cavaliers
2. Los Angeles Lakers
3. Boston Celtics
4. Orlando Magic
5. Denver Nuggets
6. San Antonio Spurs
7. Portland TrailBlazers
8. Houston Rockets
9. Dallas Mavericks
10. New Orleans Hornets


Division II:

1. Utah Jazz
2. Atlanta Hawks
3. Phoenix Suns
4. Miami Heat
5. Philadelphia 76er's
6. Chicago Bulls
7. Detroit Pistons
8. Indiana Pacers
9. Charlotte Hornets
10. New Jersey Nets


Division III:

1. Milwaukee Bucks
2. Toronto Raptors
3. New York Knicks
4. Golden State Warriors
5. Minnesota TimberWolves
6. Memphis Grizzlies
7. Oklahoma City Thunder
8. Los Angeles Clippers
9. Washington Bullets
10. Sacramento Kings

Think of the ratings those Top-10 teams would create playing each other 6 times a piece this season. There will always be one or two, maybe even three or four down teams in the Top-10, but for those down teams, there would be 8 teams to watch among the other two divisions that are up-and-coming. In this case, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Toronto, Phoenix, Miami, Utah, Atlanta, and I'm sure a couple of others might throw their hat in the ring this season, and if this scenario was the real one, then even more would be trying to throw their hats in the ring.

This would be an exciting league, and it'd be better off than the crap that we get from College Football on Saturdays sometimes, and the junk that's on Saturday Afternoons and Nights during the Fall (infomercials and ladies golf). Those mid-week on the West Coast and Mountain time (@ Los Angeles, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, Portland, Utah, Phoenix and Denver) games are never watched by most of the nation (East Coast and Mid-West viewers in the Eastern Time Zone (Ohio and over). This way, they'd all get one game from those time zones per week on a Saturday evening that ends before the 11:00 news, and there could be one scheduled on a Friday evening the same way because if it's a premier game among the elite teams, then it makes more sense for the networks to show it from 8:30-11:00 on Friday Evening. They need to not have TV Timeouts in these games, too, so that they don't make the broadcast too long and bore the viewers (3 hours is too long to sit and watch anything), and so that the games don't overlap (the game that starts at 6:00 needs to end before 8:30 instead of the 8:45 that's going on now with ESPN and TNT....marketing people are the dumbest people in the world as they never ever have a clue what their market wants.) From 1970 to 1980 NBA games lasted 2:10. You could set your watch to it. And, they shot 10 more free throws per game and took 20 more field goal attempts per game. That's not an exageration. That's what happened. There's just a billion-gazillion stop-gaps of too many reasons that need to be eliminated. The NBA game is really, really boring and the main reason is because of people like Nate McMillan who want to control everything and turn every posession into a one-on-four move by Brandon Roy. Let them play, Nate. It's a lot more fun. This basketball that's been watched the last 2 weeks has been the best all year and it's because you have had less control, and have been forced to let the guards run the team instead of you.

 

MkeDC, I didn't even read your post until I had completely written and posted mine. I had no idea what your post was about. All I saw was the title of the thread.

I see we think alike. They really need to Tier the NBA so that the better teams play each other more often and they play the lesser teams less often. That way, there'd be more premium games to put on television. There are so few games on TV, it's as if the NBA doesn't even exist. That's mostly because you only have the Top Teams playing each other 2 times a season right now, maybe 4 times. That's just poor, poor marketing.

Stern's really been doing a crappy job the last 10 years.

 

this is a very long post , but loved it

 

70 games seems more reasonable. Also, I like the idea of relegation, but i'm not too sure most NBA fans would like watching say, the Lakers or Celtics (with a season riddled with injuries) completely destroy NBDL teams night in and night out