How to Fix the NBA
The NBA can blend the best of the NFL and MLB
This year has been full of swan songs for the Association. After a golden decade where the NBA seemed a legitimate challenger to NFL supremacy, the league instead seems destined to fall back into the MLB/NHL/MMA cultural relevancy tier as soon as LeBron James and Steph Curry retire.
But the NBA can be saved. Basketball should be the biggest sport in America. Americans loves basketball. They just want it in a better package. Luckily the NBA has a unique opportunity: they can combine what people love about the NFL and MLB in a single package.
The MLB package is:
Have tons of inventory (games) because the sport allows it + they were the only show in town for a century.
Focus on local ticket sales because baseball games are a fun, family-friendly, in-person experience.
Focus on local television rights since people only care about their team. Baseball doesn’t have the cultural cachet to drive national viewership.
The NFL package is:
Have scarce inventory because the sport forces you to.
Punt on local ticket sales because football is an awful in-person experience1.
Focus on “event-izing” your games so you can own national TV for 5 months. Make all games on Sunday. Drive viewership to a premiere matchup (SNF/MNF). Give every team a chance to win their division. Become the national religion.
The NBA can have both.
Let the NBA be a local sport for most of the year
Keep the regular season as is. Every NBA journalist fixates on cutting games from 82 to 65-75 games. This is the NBA media luxury socialism. The regular season is an accessible indoor event for families. It will never compete with the NFL regular season, so don’t bother cutting inventory and revenue. If somebody isn’t bought into an 82 game season, a 74 game season won’t convert them. Let the kids, corporate events, and season ticket wackos have their fun.
Make the NBA Playoffs more like the NFL Regular Season
The playoffs are the more valuable ratings opportunity for the NBA. The inventory goes down, individual games mean more. Here’s where the NBA can run the NFL’s playbook:
No more 7 game series. In a sport with 200 possessions per game, why do we need 7 whole games to determine a fair winner? It’s exhausting watching the same teams go back and forth. I personally only tune in once a series is at game 5 or 6.
Instead, make it a round-robin tournament:
Play every team in your conference twice. Random draw 4 cross-conference games. No more playoffs without seeing the matchups we waited all season for.
All the games are played on Thursdays and Sundays.
Owners don’t lose playoff game revenue (a non-starter) and bottom seeds are incentivized to get in the playoffs instead of tanking: they’re getting 8 sold-out home games.
The 6 teams with the best record advance to a single elimination tournament.
Make the Finals a single elimination tournament.
You need single elimination to have real stakes. The Super Bowl. The FIFA World Cup Final. March Madness. Olympic Gold Medal matches. The essence of sports drama lies in the unforgiving pressure of elimination. When victory and defeat are absolute, we witness the raw, unfiltered truth of athletic character: who elevates their performance when facing extinction and who crumbles under the weight of legacy and pressure. This psychological drama, more than any statistical achievement, is what etches sports moments permanently into our collective consciousness.
The NBA has more cultural capital than all any other sport, but squanders it. For me, the “series finale” of the NBA was 2016 Game 7. It was the most important sports moment of the decade. The NBA has never come close to the same cultural cachet since. This tournament would make that an annual appointment. The entire world stops to witness basketball at its most consequential and dramatic.
One last note: play the last game in Madison Square Garden and call it the Michael Jordan Classic.
Besides tailgates in a handful of cities.