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Opinion

NBA Double Dribble: Time is right to expand teams, cut matches and bring in mid-season tournament

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Expert
26th January, 2023
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Simply reducing the number of matches in the NBA season will not solve the problem of stars taking games off. 

If teams think they’ll get a competitive advantage by resting their best players, it won’t matter if each team’s 82-game schedule becomes 72, 62 or even less. 

A player like LA Clippers occasional forward Kawhi Leonard will still consider it an advantage to enter the playoffs with fewer games under their belt than his opponents. 

Cutting the schedule means reducing the revenue that comes with 82 games for 30 franchises. 

Kawhi Leonard fends off Jae Crowder

(Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images)

The NBA Commissioner reports to the 30 team governors (they changed the name from owners a few years ago to try to avoid the negative connotations that come with that – it hasn’t worked).

To paraphrase Bill Gates’ remark to Homer in The Simpsons, billionaires don’t get rich by writing a lot of cheques. 

They won’t vote for anything that reduces their cash flow even though the value of the teams they own have gone through the roof in the past decade. 

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Two ways to financial offset a reduction to 72 games would be to add two teams and bring in Commissioner Adam Silver’s long-mooted mid-season tournament. 

Adding two franchises would kill two birds with one stone – those new markets would bring in extra income streams and expanding to 32 teams means a mid-season tournament could be a straight elimination process with two rounds bringing it down to quarter-finals then semis and a decider like in the final stages of the college March Madness set-up. 

And right about now would be the perfect time in the season, the dog days of January, to put the regular season on hiatus for a fortnight so teams could duke it out for the knockout trophy. 

Games should count on a player’s season stats but to give the tournament its own flavour, the NBA should use the Elam Ending in mid-season tournament games. Teams play as normal for three quarters and then the first side to reach 24 points from the leading team’s score is the winner. 

Higher-ranked teams during the regular season should get home-court advantage by the time the draw is done but the final could be solved off to the highest bidder, Super Bowl style, potentially in foreign markets like London, Rio or Paris. 

Give it a Road to Wembley feel. 

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And you would hope that for the teams who bomb out early, their players will get a mid-season rest, reducing their need to take matches off at random. 

The NBA should have been proactive a few years ago on expansion. The league has been static for a decade – perhaps the pandemic delayed any serious movement on this front, perhaps not. 

Seattle is odds-on to return as the 31st franchise, the Sonics should never have been given the flick. 

Mexico City would be a great addition to give the NBA a third country but players being reluctant to relocate south of the border. Las Vegas is probably going to get the 32nd franchise when the NBA gets around to it although there is a push for Vancouver to again get another chance. 

There is plenty of talent to go around for two more franchises. The massive uptick in international players this century has given the NBA a much deeper talent pool. 

Distributing the players evenly is always a sports league’s biggest challenge but with draft concessions and a blank salary cap to fill, the new teams could quickly gain traction in their respective markets. 

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Irrespective of when or whether the NBA expands, the schedule has to be refined. 

(Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

If the NBA cut back to 72 matches they could pretty much play the same timeline from mid October until June and eliminate the need for teams to play on back-to-back nights – most sides have to do so around 10 times each season. 

The issue flared up again when Golden State benched their starting five for their only trip to Eastern Conference opponents Cleveland for the year. 

Warriors coach Steve Kerr apologised after the game and used the chance to reiterate why he thinks the length of the season needs to be cut. 

But even in a shorter season, coaches will still circle a date in the schedule and write off a match by resting several stars rather than giving them a game off one at a time over the course of a few games.

Fines don’t work for coaches or franchises. If teams continually sit several stars in the same match for “workload management” or whichever other euphemism they come up with for “can’t be bothered playing”, then after being hit with massive fines, they should start losing draft picks and then get docked in the wins column. 

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If the NBA is serious about fixing this problem, this would be a no-brainer.

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