With LeBron James and Dirk Nowitzki offering support this week, the volume on the call for a shorter NBA season has grown noticeably louder.
Player exhaustion is a genuine concern in basketball, as stars try to balance 82 games, up to four rounds of seven-game series in the play-offs and the occasional off-season international tournament.
It’s not medically clear what kind of strain a shortened season would relieve, but the simply mathematical fact is that more games means more opportunities to get hurt.
Already this off-season, the NBA has lost Paul George for the year to a gruesome injury he suffered in a warm-up game with Team USA. Last week Kevin Durant, the reigning MVP, went down for at least a few weeks after fracturing a bone in his foot in a pre-season game.
Would a shorter season have prevented either of those? That, of course, is impossible to say; still, for a league that sees its popularity tend to ebb and flow based on the quality and marketability of its stars of the moment, less wear and tear during the regular season might offer some kind of insurance for the NBA’s most valuable properties.
It’s an issue worth exploring, and the league has tacitly acknowledged as much with its experiment to cut a minute off each quarter and play a 44-minute game in the pre-season.
But, as LeBron was widely quoted saying on Wednesday: “The minutes don’t mean anything.
“We could play 50-minute games if we had to,” James added. “Once you go out and play on the floor it doesn’t matter if you’re playing 22 minutes or 40 minutes.
“Once you play it takes a toll on your body.”
The question, then, is if there’s any way to reconcile the intangible benefits of a shorter season with the very tangible benefits – that is, money – of more games.
I think there might be an answer, and I think it lies in Europe.
The cup system, particularly notable in football, you might be surprised to learn also exists in European basketball. The Spanish Copa del Rey? Barcelona and Real Madrid play for that in basketball too. The German DFB-Pokal is mirrored by a BBL-Pokal.
The NBA could remove, say, 10 regular season games – which in theory would mostly eliminate the kind of lacklustre games that are played once play-off positions are settled and stars are resting anyway – and replace them with five rounds of what could be a highly entertaining league-wide knockout tournament.
Thirty teams, two byes for the previous season’s NBA Finals participants, and from there it’s pretty straightforward.
The players get a little less mileage on their legs, teams get a whole new title to play for and the league gets 29 high-profile, meaningful games added onto its schedule.
You could even incorporate the final into all-star weekend, playing the somewhat stale exhibition all-star game on Friday, the regular skills competitions on Saturday, and then staging the NBA Cup Final, a real actual game with a title on the line, as the Sunday showpiece.
If it grew enough and became enough of a marquee event in the middle of the slow North American sports winter, it very well could be enough to offset the revenue of the lost games.
It’s not a novel idea. Grantland’s Zach Lowe has written the league’s kicked it around internally. But it’s one commissioner Adam Silver should embrace as a possible reconciliation between player exhaustion and revenue concerns.
It would also, well, be a lot of fun. Only a small handful of teams will genuinely have a chance for the NBA championship this season, but any team could emerge with a title out of a single-elimination tournament.
And it certainly works as a revenue generator for the NCAA.
Silver is generally understood to be forward thinking and unafraid of experimentation. There’s no other way to replace the revenue of four or five or ten or however many regular season games unless you introduce something else that can, obvious as it sounds, generate revenue.
A cup lets Silver scale down and build out. The players win and, if the league does it right, the owners can win too.
In the contentious world of NBA labour relations, it would be a radically rare accommodation.
jraymond@thenational.ae
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