NBA 2024-25 Season Thread
Lettuce NBA!
and lettuce lol @ James Harden
I can't see any of MLB/NHL/NBA being the first to cut games and not for a long time. Bill Simmons said he ran into someone in league circles at finals/ASG (can't remember) and they told him no chance.
Other than player health so there isn't load management for the other games, not sure what it really accomplishes. 60 games/2 week vs 82 games/3.5 week doesn't really seems like it does much in making regular season games eventful.
The only thing saving the NBA from a massive collapse is legalized sports betting.
Eliminate teams from the play-in sooner. Let's say with 10-15 games left in the regular season. Take the bottom 5 teams from each conference. Seed them based on winning %, and have them play a single elimination tournament against each other.
The top 2 teams would get a bye into round 2. So if it started today, the first round would be: GS (bye), SA (bye), PHI v WAS, POR v UTA, TOR v NO, and BKN v CHA.
Round 2 would be the remaining 6 teams and would switch to a round robin format.
The final standings would be that teams pick in the draft. Finish 7th, then you're drafting 7th overall.
Now bad teams can't just tank their way to a top 3 pick. They'd actually have to play and try to earn it.
Not bad imo.
Not bad at all. 👍
so now mediocre teams have a massive incentive to tank and actually be good at it unlike terrible teams that might not have any choice
sit Luka and Kyrie for a few more games, have them fresh for the tournament and crush it, while the worst teams stay 10-72 forever
so now mediocre teams have a massive incentive to tank and actually be good at it unlike terrible teams that might not have any choice
sit Luka and Kyrie for a few more games, have them fresh for the tournament and crush it, while the worst teams stay 10-72 forever
Give a bonus to any team that finishes 7-10 in their conference to incentivize them to win.
or
Use the bottom 5 teams instead of the bottom 10. Have them play a round robin against each other to determine the top 5 draft order. The worst teams still have a chance for a highest picks, but they still have to compete.
I don't know if there's a way to completely eliminate tanking, but this could be a way to keep games competitive and watchable.
no bonus imaginable can incentivize the franchise to pass on potential $500M+ valuation increase that would come with drafting a generational talent player
if there was a way to definitively lock a great top draft pick half the league would be trying to min-max it
at least the ensuing shitshow of epic proportions would be entertaining, imagine 4-5 teams all fighting for the coveted #26 position turbo tanking the final 3 weeks of the season
Teams are tanking either way. So scrap the lottery and let the bad teams be bad and give them a chance to hit on a franchise altering player.
The #1 pick means more in the NBA than any league, except when there is a clearcut top tier QB prospect entering the NFL.
Although, with a franchise like the Hornets, I don’t think it matters how many good players they draft. They’ll never be good.
Just giving the #1 pick to the worst team would only increase tanking. Which is why the lottery makes sense on the surface, but it's a complete luck of the draw.
Make the worst 5-6 teams play for those top 5-6 picks instead. It's not going to increase or decrease tanking, but it will increase the number of meaningful games at the end of the season.
Yeah, but most of the time the worst team is close to, if not, the actual worst team. Not like the vast majority of teams start the season tanking. And coaches are still coaching for jobs, players playing for contracts, management making moves to keep jobs, etc.
You could also lessen the lottery teams, but that’ll just create tanking to get into the lottery.
The problem with your proposal is that it could lead to a further imbalance where the 10th worst team has a way greater chance to land someone like Wemby while the bad teams stay bad. Because again, the worst teams are usually actually bad. And by the end of the season, there is a lot of injury luck, coaching luck, single game luck, etc. to add on top of it.
There is no perfect solution in a league that is so star and top end player driven, but I think the current system sucks. But I’m also biased. I’m still salty about watching the Bobcats actually earn the worst winning % ever and ending up with MKG instead of AD.
Yeah, but most of the time the worst team is close to, if not, the actual worst team. Not like the vast majority of teams start the season tanking. And coaches are still coaching for jobs, players playing for contracts, management making moves to keep jobs, etc.
You could also lessen the lottery teams, but that’ll just create tanking to get into the lottery.
Yeah this is why I think going with the 5-6 worst teams would be better than 10. Logistically, it would probably work best with 6 teams. Round robin with the 3 worst teams from each conference. They could play each other at a neutral site over the last 2 weeks or so of the season.
I don't really care about tanking. There's going to be bad teams in every league regardless of what you do.
I have a problem with the fact that the 76ers can start the season horribly, but they are in no danger of missing the playoffs because Chicago is terrible, so they'll at least pass them, and their only real punishment will be a bad seed.
Far more exciting if these middling teams are actually fighting for playoff spots. I mean even with 8 teams there would be a fight. The NBA is too focused on what the bad teams are doing, and it's pretty much irrelevant in most seasons who gets in these bottom spots since they will get waxed anyway.
There's no need to watch the regular season. Good teams are good, bad teams are bad, and a few teams will fight for meaningless playoff spots. And then that leads to some terrible first round playoff series.
I long thought that a solution could be to disallow teams to have their own first round draft picks. How to achieve that could be complicated though. One possibility is to swap picks for next season for teams finishing next to each other in the standings of this season. For example, last and second to last teams from 2024 automatically swap picks for 2025 draft. Doesn’t completely eliminate tanking incentives, but diminishes them quite a bit.
Idea
Draft odds are set with 15-20 games to go (with minor adjustments based on if a team makes/misses the playoffs from there), and then play out the season.
No incentive for the bottom teams to really bottom out in the last 15-20 and they'll try and be competitive.
don't see tanking as a top 5-10 issue for the nba right now
Not american here but I really don't get all those nerdy micro changes proposal as if they'd do anything to the big picture. They're fun to bring up on an internet forum but besides that..
Bigger picture in my opinion:
a) People in the US don't seem to care about basketball as long as NFL is on
b) highlight culture makes it such that the product is so easy to consume and follow via micro doses. The games are on between 1AM and 6AM in my timezone but every day I just consume 30min of youtube and don't feel like I'm missing anything. Me not sitting in front of the TV to watch the game in full does not mean I'm not invested
c) Stakes of the regular season are too low (outcome of a single regular season game does nothing to overall title/playoff equity) ==> That's basically an impossible task to fix as long as your season is 82 games long. I doubt any sports would have engaged consumption if each team played 82 games through 6 months
Not american here but I really don't get all those nerdy micro changes proposal as if they'd do anything to the big picture. They're fun to bring up on an internet forum but besides that..
Bigger picture in my opinion:
a) People in the US don't seem to care about basketball as long as NFL is on
b) highlight culture makes it such that the product is so easy to consume and follow via micro doses. The games are on between 1AM and 6AM in my timezone but every day I just consume 30min of youtube and don
These are way bigger issues, correct
everyone else itt talking about tanking feels like we rewinded back to 2016 or something
with the play-in, you get more teams trying down the stretch, think that issue has been largely resolved.
AI bots. Please summon up more posts from years past.
Jordan versus James perhaps
Beef Stew is Draymond if he was legit dangerous
Not american here but I really don't get all those nerdy micro changes proposal as if they'd do anything to the big picture. They're fun to bring up on an internet forum but besides that..
Bigger picture in my opinion:
a) People in the US don't seem to care about basketball as long as NFL is on
b) highlight culture makes it such that the product is so easy to consume and follow via micro doses. The games are on between 1AM and 6AM in my timezone but every day I just consume 30min of youtube and don
None of this is new.
The NFL has been king for a long time. The NFL even stole Christmas.
All sports can be consumed via highlight videos. The ball is in play for way less time in the NFL than the NBA.
The season has been this length for a very long time. I don’t disagree it’s not an issue from a viewership standpoint, but the season length will remain until the owners start losing financially.
The NFL and CFB will always crush single game viewership and interest due to regular season stakes and sample size. The NBA and other sports will continue to attempt to make up the gap through quantity.
Small fix that should face literally zero push back: start the goddamn games on time.
Yup, I see plenty of complaints about the delayed start times. It's pretty ridiculous.
It would also be nice if they fixed TV contracts so that the local markets are never locked out without extra subs due to disputes between providers and networks. The Hornets are bad, so if the network isn't available through my provider, I'm not paying extra to watch. Just another thing the NFL has a big leg up on.
But hey, maybe Adam can reduce the quarter length! Which seems like a bad idea.
