An NBA Adrenaline Shot
The Liev Schreiber-led TV show Ray Donovan ran for 82 episodes. Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor 82 years ago. And an NBA season consists of 82 games. If any connection between the three things sounds entirely arbitrary, it’s only because it is.
Just like the length of the NBA season.
Why exactly 82 games became the standard, nobody knows, but reducing that number to infuse greater consequence into superfluous, early-season matchups would invariably cut into the league’s annual $2.6 billion in revenue from national broadcasting rights, not to mention local TV deals.
Hence, the 82 game slog remains the 82 game slog. Wealth wills it so. But for about the first 3 months of the season, much of the league’s audience really doesn’t care. With shortening the season off the table. . .
Enter: The NBA In-Season Tournament!
An idea tossed around the league offices for over a decade according to Evan Wasch, the NBA’s Executive Vice President of Basketball Strategy and Analytics, the In-Season Tournament signifies the league’s most dramatic attempt yet to alleviate early-season apathy.
“We took from this international soccer concept that games could count for more than your regular season,” explained NBA Commissioner Adam Silver during a Washington Wizards versus New York Knicks “Tournament Night" broadcast. “They can also be on this parallel track and count for your cup competition as well.”
The Tournament begins with six randomly drawn groups of five intra-conference teams. Each team plays their group members once on “Tournament Nights” held every Tuesday and Friday of November, and point differential is used as a tie-breaker to help determine seeding. The six top seeds from each group, along with one wild-card team per conference, advance to a single-elimination knockout stage. The semi-finals and championship are held in Las Vegas, and—controversially—the head coach and players of the winning team (largely multi-millionaires) are awarded $500,000. Winning assistant coaches share a pool of 75% of the head coach's earnings while the players and coach of the runners-up receive $200,000, those who lost in the semi-finals receive $100,000, and those who lost in the quarter-finals receive $50,000.
Oh, there’s also a trophy, medals, special courts designed by a four-year-old who was recently gifted their first pack of markers, and an Oceans 11 inspired advertising campaign starring Michael Imperioli to promote the whole show, because why not?
So is it all a bit contrived? Perhaps. A bit convoluted? Maybe. Is the cash prize an uninspiring culmination to such a grand exhibition? Bucks point guard Damian Lillard says no.
“You got guys on two-way contracts, guys who are trying to earn their stay, and that prize in the end could change their family’s lives,” said Lillard following a win over the Knicks in their first Tournament game of the season. “You don’t want to make everything about money, but…even if it’s not for you individually, it’s something you can do for the next person.”
Lillard’s point is well-taken, channeling sentiments of brotherhood and selflessness. Unfortunately for the NBA, fans watching at home don’t care about any of that stuff. They need something more tangible to their fandom.
They need play-off stakes.
By awarding automatic home court advantage for the duration of the playoffs to the winning team (they can keep their cash reward as well), the results of the Tournament immediately affect all fans of all teams. Even if a fan’s own team has been eliminated, the heightened stakes of the Tournament would do much more to retain their interest than a cash prize they see nothing of.
Expanding the number of teams that qualify for the knock-out round would similarly invigorate the contest. Group play tends to be the most boring phase of any tournament as the real mayhem begins in the knock-out rounds. Increasing the number of knock-out games begets an increase in tournament chaos, creating greater potential for more classic NBA moments. (For evidence supporting such a hypothesis, see March Madness).
And finally, the league cannot air future Las Vegas semi-final matchups at 2 p.m. pst on a Thursday. Understandably, they want to host the semi-final and championship games back-to-back in the same T-Mobile Arena, much like the NCAA’s Final Four. But in Las Vegas, 2 p.m. constitutes the crack of dawn, and many fans across the country will be busy with work and school. Let your fans watch your product; play the game later.
Ultimately these proposed amendments and the In-Season Tournament at large, though a valiant effort to make November through December basketball more engaging, are a mere distraction from the one true solution: a shorter season.
But to quote 1987’s Wall Street, “Money's only something you need in case you don't die tomorrow,” and as the NBA has no plans to dissolve itself in the next 24 hours and call it an eventful 77 years, they’ll continue to run as profitable an enterprise as possible, meaning as many broadcasts as possible, meaning as many games as possible.
If the NBA wants to establish the In-Season Tournament as not just an effective adrenaline shot in the early stages of the 82 game marathon but as a permanent fixture of their billion dollar operation, Silver, Wasch, and Co. will need to make some adjustments. But so far, it's not a bad start.
