April 01, 2019
In a league where the regular season lasts 82 games only to set up a postseason where the best possible outcome means playing 16 more for the champion, it is no surprise that you don't get elite performances from NBA teams every night. They are all playing for something bigger and better down the road, and a mid-march loss to a team eliminated from the playoffs isn't moving the needle for a team like the Sixers.
March and early April are, without question, the absolute worst part of the NBA calendar. Some teams around the league reach full disinterest at this point of the year, jokingly referring to the current period as "the preseason" with the postseason on the horizon. And who can blame them? Legacies, contracts, and tenure hinge on postseason success. That was, on some level, the point of the Sixers' recent rebuild to begin with.
At this point in the year, fans have less and less reason to tune into or pay for tickets to games than they do at any other point. Keeping everyone healthy is the name of the game. To that end, on Monday night against Dallas, the Sixers will be without two of their best players in Joel Embiid and Jimmy Butler, and while the latter is sitting after picking up what looked to be a legitimate tweak the game before, resting hits overdrive this time of the year.
This is not a Sixers-only problem. Boston sat two of their best players in a game against Brooklyn over the weekend. The Bucks, with the No. 1 seed in the East on lock, have no incentive to play hard against teams like the Suns or Hawks. Pair the upper-class disinterest with the incentive for opponents trending the other way to pack it in for the year, and you have a pretty awful product this time of the year.
The question is this: is there a way to avoid this problem for the league? Can you make the regular season matter more, and is that achievable without screwing up a major feature of the league? Here are some ideas on the path forward, with some obvious pros and cons for each.
Cutting down the NBA calendar is probably never going to happen at this point. There is too much money owners would have to sacrifice in order to make this happen. Unlike the NFL, where the season is short enough that every game has the illusion of being a must-win, a 66 or 70 game NBA season would still have plenty of matchups that simply matter less.
But despite the league's effort to cut down on so-called "schedule losses" and limit back-to-backs, teams are still subjected to a gauntlet of weird quirks in the schedule every year. For the Sixers, their standout was a back-to-back that took them from Cleveland to San Antonio earlier this season, a mystifying travel schedule that led to a Spurs beatdown.
When a team is playing four or five games in the span of a week, it becomes harder for everyone to care about each individual game. The players are just trying to make it through to that next rest day, fans often want to spend their entertainment time on different things each night, coaching staffs are stretched thin trying to competently prepare for opponents as they come at you again and again.
There is a possibility that cutting the schedule down would preserve the same late-season shenanigans we see now. If a team like the Warriors decided to go out and give close to max effort over the first 55-60 games of a 70 game schedule, they could probably coast through the end of it as many others do now.
However, that would at least create a scenario where "superteams" have a bit more motivation to play closer to max level midseason than they do currently. At the very least, fewer games mean more rest for players, less wear and tear, more time for practice and instruction, more time to develop new strategies and counters on the fly.
And if fewer games on its own aren't enough to change the dull end to the regular season, how about an extra bit of incentive for high achievers in the regular season?
The NBA's decision to flatten odds in the draft lottery was made to disincentivize teams from tanking, even though it didn't really work if you look at all the rebuilding squads this year. What is strange is that they've never really done the opposite — offer a hefty reward to teams that dominate the regular season.
By offering the No. 1 and No. 2 seed a bye in each conference, you would be boosting the incentive to win in the regular season by quite a bit. That mid-March loss to the Grizzlies would no longer mean you're putting homecourt advantage at risk, it would mean you might miss out on a chance to give your players a multi-week recovery period in late April.
The Milwaukee Bucks, for example, would benefit from their dominance of this regular season with extra time to allow Malcolm Brogdon to rehab and get up to speed after his recent injury. The Sixers were not that close to a top-two seed last year, but in a world where they were, they would have been able to buy Joel Embiid a little more time to recover and get back in shape following an injury to his orbital bone that shelved him.
And once the results play out, the No. 1 seed in each conference would get to pick first from what is left. Giving a team this power would be great theater in a league where matchups matter and drama is king. Would a top-seeded Sixers team avoid the Celtics at all costs? Would an opponent view a selection as disrespect and use it as fuel for a surprising upset?
On the coaching side, you may not have certainty about who you'd be playing eventually, but you'd have a heck of a lot more time to go through film, consult your analytics team, draw up different strategies, and even go through them with your team on a practice floor. In theory, this all adds up to a better-prepared team, and with the benefit of knowing you could pick your opponent, you could get a lot of work done during your down time.
Whether or not a bye would be especially coveted in basketball, though, is certainly up for debate. There will always be a question of how you balance the rust factor vs. the rest factor, and a team that has to wait as long as a couple of weeks for their next opponent could struggle to get it going again by the time they face off in the second round.
One league executive I spoke to wondered how teams would respond to an interruption of habits and routines — without games to prepare for in the short term, would a high-achieving regular season team be able to sustain that same energy amidst a layoff? It's hard enough to keep a team firing on all cylinders with games to prepare for. When you're asking them to do nothing but practice, the battle for the spirit of the team gets tougher.
The NBA would also likely balk at the idea of their best teams and players disappearing into the background for an entire round. It's a star-driven league, and even if Giannis Antetokounmpo beating up on a team like the Heat or Magic in the first round is wildly uninteresting to me, it is part of how a nationwide audience gets to know new generations of players. And the league could theoretically be put in a position where they don't have a single interesting first-round series.
But as it stands, I don't think the league's best teams are properly rewarded for rising to the top in the regular season. Over 50 percent of the league makes the playoffs in a 30-team league. If you want to go out of your way to avoid rewarding bad teams, shouldn't you also offer more than homecourt to the best teams?
I am not the first or the last to float this idea out there. The rationale is simple: you're rewarding the best teams in the league with playoff berths regardless of where they play, and everyone is fighting for the same positioning across the board.
I'm not as gung ho about this concept as many around the league seem to be — I think there could be a fair amount of matchups in the middle seeds that teams want to avoid, which could lead to the same bouts of rest and punting games we see now. I also value the history of certain inter-conference matchups and what they mean vs. playing a more "neutral" schedule.
That said, had to at least toss this in there.
And here is the ultimate question in all of this: does anyone truly care about the league's downturn this time of year? I think the overwhelming thought would be, "eh." People like me who spend their lives writing about every game may be fed up by March, but many of you are focused on March Madness and the start of baseball right now. I get it.
This is the trapping of a playoff-based format. When your ultimate objective takes place in June, you can't realistically expect to give 150 percent during several games a week from October until then. It's taxing on the body, sure, but it's mentally exhausting on top of that, and learning to navigate the ebb and flow is part of the maturation process around the league.
The postseason is ultimately the league's most important period, and the basketball there remains high-level. Golden State's dominance of the postseason is a historic outlier that has made it necessary to rethink ways to make the regular season more interesting, but you can't govern the sport based on a once-in-a-generation team.
Watching thin versions of the Sixers or any other team in early April may suck, but we all accept it because it means we should get to see what the best version of the league looks like in a few weeks. When a regular season stretches across three seasons of weather and nearly seven months, a few weeks of letdown are not the worst thing in the world.
But for everyone's sake, let's get to that light at the end of the tunnel already.
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