National Basketball Association

How to fix the NBA regular season schedule

Published May. 12, 2015 12:50 p.m. ET

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By Sam Quinn

Serious question: Could a team comprised entirely of injured players on playoff teams win the championship? Here’s the likely rotation:

PG: Chris Paul/John Wall/Kyle Lowry

SG: Wes Matthews/Chandler Parsons

SF: Paul Millsap/Chandler Parsons

PF: Kevin Love/Pau Gasol/David Lee

C: Al Horford/Tiago Splitter

They’re certainly lacking for wing depth, but damn does that team have point guards and big men. There shouldn’t be this many injured players in the playoffs. As of right now, Golden State is probably the closest team to full strength and they’re missing a $15 million power forward. Every other team is either missing an All-Star-caliber player (Cleveland, Washington, potentially Chicago), playing with one or more severely hampered All-Star-caliber players (Memphis, Atlanta, Los Angeles Clippers) or are so thin that they’ve resorted to starting Jason Terry at point guard (Houston).

It’d be naïve to blame the schedule for all of this. It might just be a fluke; the season has had 82 games since 1967–68 and this level of attrition is still pretty rare. In fact, logic would dictate that teams should be healthier this season because of how many of them have started following the San Antonio model of resting players. But it hasn’t played out that way, and almost two rounds in injuries are as prevalent as ever.

Regardless, the players seem to agree that an 82-game schedule is too long. Spacing out fewer games over the same time period would logically help players stay healthier. The only pitfall is money, specifically the amount lost in both television and ticket revenue by reducing the number of games.

As always, I have a plan to fix the schedule while also limiting the financial ramifications. It would essentially create a flexible schedule, ranging from 71–75 games that attempts to make each of those individual games worth more than one of the 82 on the current schedule. Here, point-by-point, is that plan:

Step 1: Switch from a record-based seeding system to the NHL’s points-based seeding system.

More on this later. For now, just know that we won’t be awarding points for overtime losses.

Step 2: 54 Games Will be played against a team’s own conference, 15 will be played against the other conference (69 total).

These numbers represent four games against each team in your own conference and one against each in the other. Yes, I’m aware that 15 is an odd number, so teams would rotate between playing seven and eight out of conference games at home each season to ensure fairness. Why are these the specific totals?

Playing four games against every single team in your conference helps build rivalries, making those rivalry games more valuable financially.

But the nonconference games? Those become more valuable the more rarely they are played. Imagine knowing that Cleveland and Golden State were only playing once in the entire season. You’d probably watch that game, right? And let’s say you knew a team like Cleveland or Golden State was only coming to your city once every other year, wouldn’t you want those tickets even more? It turns these games, even smaller ones, into events. They only come once per year. To fans without League Pass, it might represent the only chance they’ll have all year to watch a certain team, making them far more likely to watch those games and generate revenue. It even adds value to the NBA Finals. Before interleague play became ubiquitous in Major League Baseball, the World Series was the only opportunity AL and NL teams had to play against each other, to see how the two leagues stacked up. In a small way, this system would do that for the NBA Finals, making them feel more like a clash between two champions from different leagues than simply the last two teams standing.

Step 3: Game 70 becomes the flex game

What is the flex game? Exactly what you’d think. On the final day of the regular season, all 30 teams play and their opponent and destination is determined by the league. This is true of all teams except those playing under the following circumstances:

The idea here is to create a final day of the regular season filled with much-watch games, essentially giving the league an extra day of playoff revenue. Maybe two big rivals are forced to play a fifth game. Maybe two MVP candidates get to settle it on the court. Maybe the league decides to force the best team in each conference into a Finals preview. Who knows. Anything could happen. It would be must-watch television.

Step 4: Institute a midseason tournament.

The tournament would be seeded based on record to that point in the season, with the higher seeds playing at home. The 15 first-round winners advance, with teams re-seeded every round by record. We obviously couldn’t send only 15 teams forward, though, as 16 would be needed to maintain a single-elimination bracket. The 16th team would enter with a buy-in. The price of admission? Your unprotected first-round pick.

The team with the best record that lost in the first round would be offered a chance to re-enter the field as the No. 16 seed by surrendering their first round pick in the upcoming draft. If they don’t have it? Too bad, opportunity lost. If they decline, the next best losing team has the same chance, and so on in that fashion until a team decides to buy in (if every team declines to use their first-round pick, then second-round picks are used, and then cash bids).

We’ll get to where that first-round pick goes in a minute, but first, let’s talk about the losers. Rather than being eliminated outright, the 14 teams that don’t advance wait on the end of the second round of the main tournament to begin a loser’s bracket. The same buy-in procedures apply, except with a second-round pick maximum and that two teams have the chance to re-enter the field.

Now, remember that points system we mentioned earlier? Here’s where it comes into play. A regular season win, under normal circumstances, is worth one point. Nothing special there. But the idea of a tournament like this is that the competition is presumably getting harder and harder as it goes. Furthermore, we want to ensure that teams treat these tournament games as more valuable than typical regular season games to maximize TV revenue. Therefore, we have to apply more value in the standings. The way to do that is to grant more points for wins later in the tournament. To ensure a system that is beneficial but doesn’t make the rest of the regular season meaningless, here is the tiered system we would use:

Round 1 victory: 1 point

Round 2 victory: 2 points

Round 3 victory: 2 points

Round 4 victory: 3 points

Round 5 (championship) victory: 5 points

Additionally, that first-round pick used as a buy in? It is awarded to the team that wins the tournament. As for the loser’s bracket, the winner gets two points and the runner up gets one, with no other points awarded for victories in that bracket. The runner up of the main tournament gets the loser’s bracket buy-in.

Aside from creating a marquee midseason basketball event and giving us some great, impossible-to-predict matchups, the best part of this tournament is the strategy it creates. If a team wants to go all in and try to win for one of those picks and a higher seed, they can go for it. Or, if the team is older, they can choose to rest their players and sit out of the loser’s bracket, using the time allocated for the tournament as a sort of second All-Star break to keep their team fresh.

Of course, it might not be as necessary. This schedule as a whole is designed to keep teams fresher for the playoffs while simultaneously making the regular season more interesting and valuable. They can approach it differently, especially when it comes to the tournament, but overall the idea is to make sure that the regular season more exciting and the playoffs healthier while being realistic about the finances of the situation. It isn’t perfect, but this system heads in the right direction.

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