The way the NBA has been acting gets us frustrated. The NBA Cup? Lottery reform? The All-Star Game? The Play-In Tournament? It’s all so unnecessary and none of it is any fun. Yes, the NBA has real problems, but they have done nothing but institute half measures to fix them while inventing other issues for fans to gripe about. Can’t we simplify things?
NBA Cup
The mid-season tournament has entered the US sports consciousness due to the rising popularity of European soccer. The FA Cup and the Copa del Rey act as mid-season tournaments during the Premier League and La Liga but this is not really true. Those two federations are just the top leagues in all of English and Spanish soccer. While the Cups include teams from these leagues, they are eligible to more than 700 English teams and more than 100 Spanish ones. These are truly national tournaments. The NBA Cup is just a regrouping of NBA teams with no real distinction. Oh, and they make the courts look ridiculous.1
Why are the teams doing this again? This makes them the champions of what exactly? You can’t just say that something is important without it having any stakes at all. The NBA has simply declared that we should care about something that doesn’t seem to exist for any real reason save one, Emirates. The NBA found a nice way to create extra money where none previously existed. That makes all the fans feel better about it, right?
Lottery Reform
I understand the point of the weighted lottery in theory. You want the worst teams to get better draft picks so they can get better talent. In practice though, this leads to tanking and the league is against this, again in theory. I say in theory again because the league is the teams and the team owners pay Commissioner Adam Silver’s salary and tell him what to do. They are the ones authorizing their own teams to tank by sitting their good players.2 Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that they don’t want tanking to be a viable option.
What did the NBA come up with? Three separate proposals with different tiered weights and smaller rules that attempt to prevent teams from being motivated to lose a lot of games. Why must it be like this? Is simplifying things to a non-nuanced flat lottery for the non-playoff teams that hard? Even the non-playoff teams and the first round losers? Not only would that add serious intrigue to the lottery process, but it would completely eliminate the benefits of trying to be bad. Yes, an almost-good team could possibly get a great player, while a bad team might not, but isn’t that the point? Why ostracize the middle class here? Give them a reason to try to be mediocre. You think Bulls and Kings fans wouldn’t love this just as much as fans of the Jazz and Nets?
Want to really get nuts while keeping it simple? Why not have the lottery the same day as the draft?
The All-Star Game
The All-Star game is a joke and no one seems to want to participate in the game itself or the former marquee event, the Dunk Contest. The NBA has tried different formats to try to spice things up, including this year’s US vs the World which somehow ended up being US vs US, but nothing has worked. They don’t want to scrap it all together like the NFL has done with the Pro-Bowl, but they know they need change.
In my quest to simply things, why not make this as easy as possible instead of trying to complicate it with captains, countries, and a losing fight against malaise? The NBA has 4 divisions. Pick 8 All-Stars from each one and play games up to 50 or just two 12-minute halves. Winners face each other in the Finals. An NBA game is too long for even NBA players to keep their focus, but give them a short-term goal with bragging rights and it will probably be better than anything else.
Want to get nuts again? Have them play at the same time, right next to each other. TV can broadcast them back-to-back utilizing an in-Arena break before the championship.
Play-In Tournament
That brings us to right now, the Play-In Tournament. Why is this a thing? Is the motivation for teams to try to play harder to get into the top-6 or to have more teams want to qualify for the playoffs? The seeds of this idea seem to come from the NCAA tournament which developed a First Four system to expand the field to 68 instead of the usual 64. This has always been a cash grab that takes the fun and prestige away from teams that have validly qualified for the tournament.
Yes, the Heat and Hornets put on a show last night, but all this did was take drama away from the end of the season and give the top-6 teams the added advantage of extra rest. Plus, the season for the Heat came down to one of the least cautious humans in the league (LaMelo Ball) purposely injuring Bam Adebayo. Is that what we all wanted? Over in the west, the Warriors are in a tournament they have no business being in, yay! If they win the next two games, is it really worth it to have their 37-45 ass in over the 45-37 Suns?
All the NBA has done is extend the season by an extra two games. Why do we want to extend the playoffs to the 17-20th “best” teams in the NBA anyway? Regardless of what happens, the top seeds should roll over these also rans. Even if they don’t, the play-in would have nothing to do with it other than possibly making it easier.
We all know the real reason for the PIT, Amazon Prime. That’s right, you need an Amazon subscription to watch these games. Amazon is paying over $20b during this media rights cycle for a piece of the NBA including this tournament. It is essentially their preseason for playoff coverage. They even lost their own signal last night in overtime. Do fans want it? Not at all. Does it make money? It already paid for itself.
In the End
Is the NBA in a better place because of any of this? Is it a better product for the consumer? Has any interest been gained through these additions and tweaks? The answer is a resounding no. If anything, a casual fan is put off by the constant changes, confusion, and expense to watch on all the different networks. My friend was asking me if the Sixers are in the playoffs. I had a long response but no real answer. He had a very simple answer: What the fuck? Well done Adam Silver. You’re trying to be cool, but look like a fool to me…
Philly Front Office 
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