Shorter season + round-robin play-in could be the answer
It has been widely reported that viewership ratings of the NBA regular season have been in secular decline. The reasons are seemingly plentiful, including increased politicization, the sheer length of the season (i.e. 82 games), the growth of other on-demand entertainment options, tanking for a brighter future, and increased player absences. On the last point, despite the league’s claim that injuries have been level in recent years, data show a more disturbing trend.
If the regular season had been highly attractive for die-hard homers and fantasy league participants alike, the trend of more injuries and ‘load management’ absences of key players likely negatively impacted interest in the regular season from fans on both ends of the spectrum. If we look at more experienced players with key roles on their respective teams, this ‘absence’ trend is worrisome. For players who are at least 22 years old and averaging at least 20 minutes per game, absences (defined as missing more than 20 games per season) have increased by more than 150% since the early 1980s, despite the number of teams having only grown by 30% over that time period (see chart below). Moreover, longer careers and ‘old’ age do not seem to be culprits, as the average age of these absentees has been consistent over time at between 26 and 29 years old, which are considered prime physical years.
So if the importance of the regular season is eroding, and the playoffs are more insulated from decaying fan interest, perhaps there is a simple fix:
- Shorten the regular season
This step goes without saying. The 82-game season appears to be too long for many fans especially with coaches increasingly resting players in hopes of winning it all in the playoffs or tanking for a top draft pick. This is not surprising given a championship is the ultimate measure of success for any organization. On the other hand, revenue gained from hosting games are still highly valuable to franchises, as they make money through TV, merchandising, sponsorships, tickets, and other related sources. Given this, one would have a tough time arguing for the elimination of the current regular season for some other format without a proven track record.
On balance, the league could just go with shortening the current format from 82 games to 66 games (equivalent to roughly 20%), which will create some scarcity value to otherwise less meaningful games. Under this proposal, each of the 30 teams would play every non-divisional team two times and divisional rivals 4 times per season. While a shorter season in and of itself does not fully fix the underlying issues of perennial tanking and excessive player absences, the next 2 steps should help address these issues and add meaning to the regular season.
2. Implement a round-robin play-in tournament
The NBA inched toward this concept during the COVID shortened season with the 1-game play-in involving the 7th through 10th seeds. However, this seems conceptually flawed as including a greater percentage of teams in the playoffs would simply result in more mediocre matchups that fans don’t care much about. In my view, the lowest seeded teams are actually not sufficiently ‘punished’ or ‘handicapped’ for finishing within what is essentially the bottom half of the league. Thus, my proposal would be to divide up the top 8 teams per conference in the following manner:
- The top 2 seeds from each conference earn byes from the round robin play-in tournament. During most years, this set-up should greatly incentivize the top 4 or 5 seeds to win games down the stretch in order to gain valuable resting time and minimize the odds of injuries by avoiding the grueling play-in schedule that’s described below.
- Seeds 3 through 8 from each conference play 10 round robin play-in games. Each seed plays the other seeds twice, with each team to host 1 of the 2 games against a given opponent unless the teams in the matchup are separated by more than 2 seeds. If the teams are separated by more than 2 seeds, the higher seed hosts both games against that opponent. For example, the 3rd seed would play 1 game at home and 1 on the road against the 4th and 5th seeds, but would host both games against the 6th through 8th seeds (see figure below).
- The two play-in teams with the best records would then move on to the conference semis against the top 2 seeds and play traditional 7-game series against the top 2 seeds. The top 2 seeds host 4 of the 7 games against the new 3 & 4 seeds.¹
This format should greatly incentivize teams to toil during the regular season to avoid the steep penalty of playing most of the play-in games on the road. Moreover, the throwing of games late in the season to create preferred playoff matchups would be more or less eliminated. Furthermore, owners may be ok with the small penalty of hosting fewer games overall for assembling a below-average team in a given year since the financial value of qualifying for play-in games is likely much higher than that of a regular season game.
3. Tweak the lottery odds of play-in teams to minimize tanking
I argued recently that replacing the draft with a rookie bidding process would help increase competitive balance overall, but let’s assume that the draft format stays intact for our purposes here.
That said, instead of the lottery teams being just those that are outside the top 8 records from each conference, the league could assign nominal odds to the 6th through 8th seeds in each conference. These odds should be quite slim and only slightly below the odds of teams that narrowly miss the play-in tournament altogether.
Currently, the odds of landing a top 4 pick are quite low outside of the 9 worst teams. The 10th worst team currently has a 13.9% chance of landing a top 4 pick, with the remainder of the lottery teams only having between 2.4 and 9.4% chance of landing a top 4 pick. In my proposal, the odds could be recalibrated such that the 6th through 8th seeded teams would have, say, 2 to 3% chance of landing a top 4 pick, while the 11th to 14th worst teams would have, say, 3 to 5% chance of doing so.
Shrinking the dispersion of odds for the 10 ‘middle tier’ teams should help to prevent more teams with reasonable probabilities of making the robin round tournament from tanking, as the odds at a top pick is not much better than if they made the play-in as a lower seeded team. Under this format, only 6 to 8 teams may be highly motivated to tank for decent odds at a top pick during most years, which makes for more competitive playoff runs late in the season. Moreover, the concept could be taken one step further by compressing the odds of the worst 10 teams to discourage tanking even more.
[1] In case of ties in team records among top teams during the play-in tournament, head-to-head records and point differentials can be used as tiebreakers to determine which 2 teams advance to the next round.
