It’s “We Have to Fix the NBA!” Season. Again.

The NBA All-Star Break, also known as the “how do we get people to care” invitational, is officially over, and the only person happier about that than the collective basketball-watching community is Commissioner Adam Silver.

The only conversation leading up to the event was “tanking has BROKEN the regular season!”

Then the All-Star Weekend has to change its format every year because the stars ultimately just want a break to rest. The fans are apathetic towards the other events because it’s either people you don’t know or people who don’t care. It’s just far too much gloom and doom around a league that constantly is trying to fix itself despite having as much talent as it does.

This is usually around the time that Adam Silver peruses NBA Reddit to see some of the most absurd ideas to make the regular season, the integration of rookies, and the television product matter more, as well as every podcaster and writer comes up with wacky ideas of their own to “fix” the league. Baseball was one of the slowest sports without a clock and made radical changes to make the game exciting and faster-paced, no questions asked and no bad ideas, and it worked out well for a sport that has a 162-game marathon of a season.

It appears the common suggestion to shorten the regular season is out of the question. Owners and players care far too much about the salaries, revenue, and historical statistics. There needs to be a hierarchy of what we consider historically significant and not a dealbreaker to the basketball we know and love, as well as what we need to look in the mirror and say, “We can do away with this, ultimately.”

Let’s take a look at what COULD be done, what SHOULD be done based on popular suggestions, and what it could look like.

First, let’s look at tanking and the draft.

No Draft

Not having a draft feels kind of sacrilegious, since there have been so many draft moments, and the other major sports all have them, but no single player’s addition impacts a team as much as in basketball. The argument against it is “well, this is what we’ve always done,” and that the draft prospects would have free rein to go join the large markets or winning teams, and the bottom-feeders and small market teams would remain bottom-feeders if the draft prospects just had free agency.

You know what abolishing the draft would also do? Motivate internal changes. If you’re a loser business that no one wants to go to, you’re forced to look in the mirror. College athletes are not choosing to live in Lawrence, Kansas, instead of playing for Pepperdine, because of the location. They’re playing because the Kansas Jayhawks are a well-done and winning university that hires great coaches. Free agents aren’t flocking to LA, Miami, or New York anymore, as we might have assumed; we just had Oklahoma City and the Indiana Pacers in the Finals! Additionally, there just aren’t enough minutes to go around on each team; if college prospects are coming out, not everyone can choose the same team, because they’ll want to play basketball somewhere, including in small markets that are well-run. 

Soccer and college athletics seem to be doing pretty well without a draft!

Make the Draft Order Based on Win % After a Certain Date

This has been thrown out as a suggestion: fix the NBA lottery with a points system that rewards teams for wins after either being eliminated from contention or by a certain date on the calendar. It sounds great in theory, in that the teams that did try towards the end of the year, either via trades, not egregiously benching starters, or simply getting better and still competing for next year, are rewarded, and you see the vision for them to get out of the gutter for next year. 

The problem is that not every team losing a lot of games right now is shamelessly benching starters to lose; the Kings still have Domantas Sabonis, DeMar DeRozan, and Zach LaVine, and are losing not because they’re not trying, but because they’re just a bad basketball team. Those teams would stay in the gutter.

A Committee Eye Test

Credit: Rob Gray-Imagn Images

College Football literally has a selection committee of a bunch of dudes who gwhor in a ballroom in Dallas to decide who to take to the playoffs, with a couple of qualifiers. If we had a committee of people deciding who the most DESERVING teams of the top picks are, not necessarily the worst, it’s pretty easy to tell based on just being at a sports bar and watching the basketball that’s played in the regular season.

Sure, you’d get into more “this league is corrupt, and the lottery is rigged for these teams” debates year after year, but the product that the loser teams put on the court to impress the committee and go out swinging and look like they’re trying on and off the court would improve the regular season games that matter by building a resume.

Have the Draft Immediately After March Madness With Eligible Players

Baseball has its draft midseason after the College World Series, and the players become immediately eligible. Can you imagine if AJ Dybantsa just plays March Madness and is immediately added to a team midyear to make a postseason run? How entertaining would that final stretch of games be for teams that could add a franchise-saving rookie for the final 20 games, potentially?

Now, let’s shift to some fixes about the actual entertainment product that could add an extra element of entertainment.

Custom Court Dimensions

Baseball already has the custom ballpark dimensions where, in some places, it’s easier to hit a home run than others, and it would add an entirely new statistical category to shooting splits. Teams could strategize their roster construction based on where their three-point line is placed on the court. It’s an extra element of chess and nerd-dom, and the NBA is one of the few leagues where it doesn’t feel like there is a genuine difference between home and away. Even in college basketball, playing a game at Cameron Indoor Stadium vs the Dean Dome is significant enough to win or lose games.

Flex Nationally-Televised Games

Football has done this so well that we don’t have to spend each week watching third-string quarterbacks play against losing teams in the solo spot, unless there are non-negotiable circumstances like a holiday game. There are enough regular-season games in the NBA that the calendar should be reviewed throughout the season so adjustments can be made. Oklahoma City without SGA and Milwaukee without Giannis on a losing team should not be the only games where Amazon Prime sends its A-crew.

We missed the Hornets-Pistons brawl because the big game was… BUCKS MAGIC! When you’re flipping through channels in the regular season in the NBA, the non-League Pass owner is going to want to see games that are marketed towards the stories of the season.

Fix the In-Person Experience

Have you been to an NBA game in person, really? It is a cesspool of in-game music, random challenge breaks, and entertainment not relevant to basketball, and incessant noise where you can’t talk to the person next to you during stoppages or gameplay.

It is short-term TikTok brain gratification compared to the other sports leagues in that it feels like it’s lost the plot on the actual basketball on the court. Keeping it simple would make it far more entertaining.