NBA State of Play – Rule Changes – Trends – CBA – Schedule Reform – Load Mgmt – etc

The NBA is formally exploring how it might use its 75th anniversary season as an opportunity to test some of its bolder initiatives -- not only a mid-season cup and postseason play-in tournament, but also a reduction in the 82-game regular season schedule.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/27059802/sources-nba-talks-fewer-games-season-event

really seems like theyd have a hard time convincing ownership to buy into any of that. but maybe just start simply but eliminating back to back games completely.

f the owners players start their own coop league and institute all my beautiful ideas

Bill Simmons
‏
It’s important to remember that they settled on 82 games for no real reason. The right number is 72 (play everyone twice + your conference one extra time). The ten extra games are about wear and tear and greed.

Go to 72 games, do a single elimination play-in tournament for the 7/8 seeds, make the first round Best of 5 but the 1-seeds get 1-2-4-5 at home, and stretch things out so the Conference Finals last 3 days longer so teams are more rested.

It's greed. (good) teams will still make plenty of profit with 5 less home games, though I would feel bad for staff such as vendors, ushers etc. Personally I'd pay $5-10 more for a ticket if that's what it took to go to 72 games.

This is why a players run league would never work:

I do NOT understand how and why Jeff Green keep signing these 1 year deals for the minimum. This is now 3 years in a row. He’s never injured, He’s never been a problem in the locker room, He’s athletic, he can shoot the 3, he can guard multiple positions and he’s not old 🤷🏾‍♂️.

— DWade (@DwyaneWade) July 3, 2019

tbf the nba only figured out not to give jeff green big contracts 3 years ago

hmmm

Sources: The NBA Board of Governors have passed the implementation of in-game challenge flags for head coaches for the 2019-20 season.

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) July 9, 2019

this was a good read on player empowerment
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2844770-it-doesnt-matter-even-best-nba-franchises-cant-compete-with-superstar-whims

man no iggy no shaun end of an era

Sources: Warriors are waiving guard Shaun Livingston, who is guaranteed $2M of his $7.7M salary for season. Livingston, 33, is determined to continue playing and becomes one more valuable free agent candidate for contenders. He’s won three NBA titles and reached five Finals.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) July 10, 2019

rong thred

that shams tweet had me scared for a second that there was going to be a literal flag which would have been the worst thing in the world.

Should be just like football where they throw a beanbag on the floor in a snit.

brad shd have to keep it in his sock to show proper respect to belichick

interesting 3than 5tr@u55 article here

https://theathletic.com/1276780/2019/10/10/the-nbas-dwindling-viewership-and-precarious-outreach-plans/

The NBA’s dwindling viewership and precarious outreach plans

By Ethan Strauss 7h ago 154
Every year, roughly a month before the season starts, the league’s beleaguered head coaches meet in Chicago and communicate directly with a source of their many woes. Most fans have never heard of the annual National Basketball Coaches Association meetings, but they are one of the NBA’s major rituals. All who can make the journey show up, mingle and speak with league officials on what rules are bound to govern their working lives. There are briefings, communication with referees and ultimately, a speech from the commissioner.

The annual speech isn’t available to the public, so it tends to contain franker messaging than you might find in Adam Silver’s news conferences. This year was no exception. While the NBA has publicly indicated that there’s been a dropoff in ratings, that message gets conveyed with subtlety. In person, with the coaches, Silver was blunt, according to sources at the meeting. Viewership is down, said the commissioner, down so significantly that he badly needs the help of the men present. They must do what it takes to aid the occasionally intrusive TV broadcasts, even if that means going outside their comfort zones.

This fits with a common push-pull dynamic behind the scenes of the league, where the NBA asks for more inside access from coaches who would prefer to jealously guard their focus and privacy. Coaches don’t just resent the feeling of being spied on by TV cameras; they fear the consequences. Once a communication with a player goes public, it opens them up to scrutiny, while changing the nature of how that message might get received.

For example, Steve Kerr and the Warriors were not happy when ABC captured and televised a private conversation the coach had with Kevin Durant in Game 5 of the 2018 Western Conference finals. The speech from Kerr on how KD might learn from Michael Jordan’s playoff game foibles made for great television, but the last thing the Warriors wanted was a public showing of criticism toward KD, however constructive and however couched. Going forward, the league is hoping to forge a process that avoids such mishaps. Of course, with the continued cooperation of the coaches.

Coaches might not like Silver’s request for access, but they appreciate the manner in which it is communicated. Silver is seen as proactive and open-minded. Feedback is welcome, even if it isn’t always implemented.

“This guy gives out his phone number and tells us to call him!” one coach said, in disbelief. “David Stern would never do that.”

The previous commissioner’s old NBCA speeches did not welcome such participation, especially the one given in Chicago, shortly after the NBA had signed its 2007 national TV contract. According to multiple coaches who were there, Stern communicated the importance of the TV side having access to locker rooms. Then-Chicago Bulls coach Scott Skiles raised his hand and told Stern, after a preamble of “no disrespect,” that the locker room was his “sacred space.”

Based on multiple coaches’ retellings of this legendary league story, Stern dispatched the response with withering sarcasm.

“Well, let’s see,” the smiling commissioner began. “On the one hand, we have eight billion dollars from our broadcast partners. And on the other hand, we have … Scott Skiles!” Stern then lit into him, telling Skiles in so many words and curses to shut up and that he didn’t want to hear any more out of him. Skiles went quiet, as did the room.

“He was neutered,” one coach relayed of Skiles. “Scott thought he was brave. And after Stern was done with him, he wasn’t brave no more.” All the coaches in the room got the message. Commissioner Stern wasn’t asking. He was telling. And woe be unto whichever clipboard clinger flouted the dictate.

When asked about the incident recently, Skiles told The Athletic, “I no longer do interviews about basketball. But whatever you are referring to is completely false. The commissioner never went at me or anyone in a harsh manner. You’ve gotten incorrect info.” Last week, Stern himself said, “No recollection at all. Not denying.” Make of that what you will.

Fast-forward to this fall, when Silver didn’t blow a gasket on any coach in Chicago, but he could be forgiven for feeling the impulse. The modern NBA has many issues to sort out. They are well buoyed by a lucrative national television contract, signed at perhaps the height of the TV rights bubble, that grants the league an annual payment of $2.66 billion until 2024-2025. In the meantime, for all its coverage as a fun, modern league, the NBA’s TV ratings are sliding in the United States.

For so long, ascendance has been a dominant theme of NBA coverage. The league’s fans are so young, the sport’s never been more popular, etc. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar submitted one such example of this argument back in a December 2017 article for The Guardian titled, “The NBA, and not the NFL, is the league of America’s future.”

In it, he wrote, “This prediction has nothing to do with the athletes themselves, their level of skill, their heart, or their commitment to their sport. Professional athletes are generally the highest expression of what the human body is capable of doing and therefore inspiring to the fans to reach higher and strive harder. In that way, no sport is superior to any other sport. But when it comes to professional sports, some are more inspirational, more exciting and more entertaining to the general public than others and those sports take on a symbolic meaning for Americans. They come to represent our core values. They represent not just who we are, but who we want to be.”

Abdul-Jabbar said this at perhaps the height of NFL pessimism. The article came during a brief epoch of NFL ratings declines that happened concurrently with fans dividing into pro- and anti-Colin Kaepernick camps. The NFL has since rebounded from its swoon, seeing ratings gains last season and early this season. The Lakers legend could still be right in the end, but I suspect he’s wrong about a sport’s popularity reflecting a kind of noble aspiration.

The resilience of American football reminds of Warren Buffett’s investing strategy. Buffett has become the third-wealthiest person in the world while establishing stakes in Dairy Queen, See’s Candies and Coca-Cola, among other junk-food providers. In theory, these brands are behind the times and primed for a fall when an ever savvier population switches to the healthier diets they aspire to. In reality, human beings can’t get away so easily from their base instincts. In our inevitable weak moments, we will falter, furtively mainlining refined sugar in between Instagram posts of our gym workouts. Similarly, it appears the better angels of our nature cannot win out against the violence of football. The American population is drawn to the game on a visceral level, and no amount of “60 Minutes” stories on CTE will topple the nation’s favorite sport.

Meanwhile, it’s the NBA that’s struggled of late. If the NBA is “who we want to be,” then the American people are only so interested in our goals. It took a while for the league to hit a snag, to be sure. LeBron James saved the NBA from its post-Jordan nadir. Then he chose South Beach and became a compelling, ratings-friendly villain. His return to Cleveland mended broken hearts, concurrent with the Warriors’ rise. The latter dynamic fueled some of the best nationally televised ratings the league had seen since MJ.

While the Warriors’ dynastic run buoyed national TV ratings, many other teams saw declines locally. Based on the Sports Business Journal’s annual check-ups, in the 2014-15 season, 16 of 27 measured teams saw year-over-year declines in their local ratings. In the 2015-16 season, 17 of the 27 teams measured saw declines. In the 2016-17 season, local ratings dropped 14 percent overall. Those ratings bounced up 3 percent in 2017-18, only to fall back down 4 percent last season. It’s been a rough half-decade overall.

Recent playoffs paint a slightly prettier picture, though one almost completely propped up by the Warriors vs. LeBron and the Cavs dynamic. With LeBron’s Lakers missing the postseason, the first three rounds of last season’s playoffs saw a sharp 14-percent drop from the prior playoffs. Fortunately for the NBA, James will probably make the postseason cut this time, flanked by Anthony Davis. Unfortunately for the NBA, there are some less auspicious developments at play. Kyrie Irving left an ardently followed Celtics team in big-market Boston for a big market in Brooklyn that’s only ever yielded small-market viewership. Kevin Durant followed him there, and is out for the season. The Warriors, that dependable ratings machine, are a much worse team this season, with Klay Thompson recovering from an ACL tear. Historically hyped No. 1 pick Zion Williamson fell to New Orleans, one of the league’s smallest markets, rather than to the forever dormant Knicks.

It might sound like sacrilege, but it’s more than likely that the NBA is losing domestic popularity now and in the near term, despite its ever-sold narrative of a perpetual ascendance. Yes, the NBA is young, steeped in the social media zeitgeist and theoretically primed to take over when those other dusty sports die out. No, this dynamic isn’t yet resulting in demonstrable viewership growth in America.

What about cord-cutting?
Bring up the NBA’s ratings declines and someone might cite cord-cutting as an excuse. Aren’t all the leagues suffering? Yes and no. It’s more difficult to command big audiences in prime time than it was in the past, but certain sports have fared better than others. Baseball has seen recent ratings declines similar to the NBA, but, as previously mentioned, the NFL has seen viewership gains of late and college football has held steady.

For a quick and dirty comparison, look at average NBA Finals viewership over the years versus average Super Bowl viewership. In 1998, Michael Jordan’s last Finals registered as the most watched in NBA history, yielding an average viewership of 29 million. The best Finals viewership since Jordan happened in 2017, the year of Kareem’s article, when the Durant-led Warriors first took on LeBron’s Cavs. That Finals yielded an average viewership of 20.38 million. Impressive, but roughly down 9 million from that high in 1998. Keep in mind, the U.S. overall gained 50 million in population between 1998 and 2017.

For contemporaneous contrast, the January 1998 Super Bowl drew an average of 90 million viewers. Nearly two decades later, the February 2017 Super Bowl drew an average viewership of 111.3 million viewers. In short, the NFL has added 10s of millions in viewers to its championship since the 1990s, while the NBA has remained flat at best and dwindling at worst.

What about streaming?
Well, maybe the NBA, with all its millennial fans, suffers more from cord-cutting than the NFL. Perhaps all those people who used to watch games on TV are now watching games on other devices. The NBA usually casts such growth in relative terms. According to the league, digital viewership increased 47 percent versus last year.

Here’s the issue. While digital certainly is a growth market, the vast majority of people still prefer watching sports on traditional television. Streaming numbers are difficult to come by, but within North America, they are often not so impressive, compared to overall viewership. To cite a positive NBA stat, 15.9 million Canadians watched the Raptors win Game 6 of the NBA Finals on TSN. To give you a sense of how niche streaming can be, only 143,000 people viewed the TSN live stream for that same game. In other words, the televised Raptors Finals clincher had 111 times the audience of the livestreamed version. Given that conversion, it is highly doubtful that, in the U.S., TV ratings declines are being compensated for with digital gains.

Time zone effect
The league has admitted to a recent ratings drop, and it mostly attributes the decline to LeBron heading West, outside the preferable Eastern time zone. Silver explained, “Fifty percent of television households in this country are in the Eastern time zone. And so if your West Coast games start at 10:30 at night in the East, you’re invariably going to lose a lot of viewers around 11, 11:30. I mean, you can just chart it. You see how many television households turn off around 11:15, 11:30 at night, just because people have to get up for work in the morning.”

That explanation doesn’t quite explain everything, given the team James joined. The Lakers might be the league’s biggest brand. Their market includes not just Southern California, but Hawaii and Las Vegas as well. A superstar joining the Lakers shouldn’t be what tanks TV ratings.

Still, there’s something to the idea of correcting suboptimal game starts. Silver, in a proactive move, has gotten behind shaping the schedule to account for those pesky Pacific start times. The league has announced that nationally televised 10:30 starts have been reduced from 56 last season to 33 this one. The Lakers will go down from 19 nationally televised 10:30 starts to 10 in the upcoming season. We shall see if it works.

What about social media?
#NBATwitter is a thing. Much of the ascendence narrative comes with praise over how the league dominates social media platforms. One slight issue: Such dominance does not appear to gin up much interest in watching the actual games. The NBA sells games, not feuds between stars and not news of transactions. Games. You know, the contests Allen Iverson so desperately wanted us to talk about.

Perhaps all the off-court drama helps the NBA in some peripheral way, but it wouldn’t be so inconceivable to think that it’s hurting. As Pat Riley was fond of saying, “Keep the main thing the main thing.” Is the NBA doing that when so much of its coverage is devoted to something other than the games themselves?

Deus Ex MaChina
This all brings us to China, the country that currently threatens to wipe away massive sums of NBA money in response to one tweet from a general manager. For those who haven’t been tracking this ever unfolding international incident, Daryl Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, retweeted an image with the words “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” in support of the semiautonomous territory’s months-long pro-democracy protests on Friday, just as the Rockets began a preseason trip to Asia. Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta disavowed the tweet, himself tweeting, “Listen … @dmorey does NOT speak for the @HoustonRockets. Our presence in Tokyo is all about the promotion of the @NBA internationally and we are NOT a political organization.” Morey deleted his Hong Kong support retweet, but the incident did not end there.

On Sunday, the Chinese Basketball Association announced that it was suspending cooperation with the Rockets. Chinese companies pulled Rockets sponsorships. Tencent Holdings, the massive company that owns China’s online streaming rights to the NBA, announced that it was wiping the Rockets from its platforms. Tencent’s streaming deal, which hangs in the balance of this dispute, pays the NBA $1.5 billion over five years. Sunday night, the NBA released a statement stating, among other things, “We recognize that the views expressed by Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey have deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China.”

On Monday night, Steve Kerr was asked about the issue, to which the normally loquacious coach offered little comment, saying, “It’s a really bizarre international story. A lot of us don’t know what to make of it. It’s something I’m reading about like everybody is, but I’m not gonna comment further.” The no comment would come to be mocked by President Donald Trump in a press conference two days later.

On Tuesday, Silver gave a clarifying statement that supported Morey’s right to free expression. This happened the same day that Chinese broadcaster CCTV announced that it would not be airing the NBA’s upcoming preseason games in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

This hardly encapsulates all that has happened in the last half a week, and there’s surely more to come. The implications of the Morey affair are massive, touching everything from international politics to the outlook of the NBA’s BRI. It’s worth wondering how we got to such a fraught, precarious moment in the league’s history.

While domestic interest in the NBA flatlined, the NBA contented itself with chasing viewership abroad. The struggles of the post-Jordan era might have been distressing, but the NBA had this big, lucrative project that was sure to make up for it all and then some. Advertising the league’s popularity in Iowa was so drab and unrewarding when stacked against a magical megaphone that blasts the game out to a billion-plus.

Current events show that this plan, thought to be wondrously successful until about 15 minutes ago, included some significant risks. Morality issues aside, the NBA is dealing with a top-down authoritarian regime that can scuttle the entire arrangement in a blink. Just like that, all the NBA’s years of investment and planning can be wiped away. This has always been so, yet almost never discussed. Now we know. The NBA’s golden goose can ghost. No longterm plans based on China’s continued NBA involvement can be completely trusted.

Thanks to the squeaky wheel dynamic, coverage of this current standoff tends to focus on China, or as Nets owner Joe Tsai (who was born in Taiwan) put it, “the way hundreds of millions of Chinese NBA fans feel about what just happened.” Less often are we asked to consider how Americans might feel about this mess. All the coverage on the NBA’s delicate handling of China’s umbrage might miss a larger dynamic at play: The American public’s opinion has chilled on the country the league so ardently courts. When the NBA made its initial forays into the world’s second-largest market, the conventional wisdom was that this was yet another step toward China’s inevitable liberalism and general allyship with the United States. This hasn’t really happened, but NBA officials have followed the old script, endlessly broadcasting their China inroads as some form of higher diplomacy to an American public that sees little reason to swoon.

A Pew poll released on Aug. 13 detailed that only 26 percent of Americans conveyed a favorable view of China. This represented a steep drop from 2017, pre-trade war, when 44 percent of Americans conveyed a favorable view. From the Pew report, “Americans also increasingly see China as a threat. Around a quarter of Americans (24 percent) name China as the country or group that poses the greatest threat to the U.S. in the future, twice as many as said the same in 2007. China is tied with Russia (24 percent) as the country or group most cited as a threat to the U.S.” Keep in mind that this polling preceded this current controversy. The current numbers could easily be even less China-favorable.

America’s relationship with China is too complex to fully parse here, but both nations have recently caught and punished accused spies of the other. This is not, currently, the most harmonious dynamic between nations. The issue for the NBA is that trend lines suggest an escalation of tensions, not a relaxing. Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 on confronting China and the aforementioned polls suggest at the position’s popularity. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, perhaps Trump’s challenger in the upcoming 2020 election, has sharply criticized China in the past, most recently over Twitter per this particular incident. Based on the tweets of Democrat and Republican politicians alike, there was a bipartisan consensus of disgust directed toward the NBA in the immediate aftermath of this incident.

How sustainable is that dynamic going forward? Even if China, its bluff called by Silver, comes back to the NBA, there will likely be more issues. The Morey mishegoss might come and go, replaced by another news story, but what prevents another unforeseen international incident? Remember, this all happened over one deleted tweet.

There may be no fixing this. Even an improvised solution that immediately saves the NBA’s multibillion-dollar marriage to China could be doomed to inevitable failure based on the bigger dynamics at play.

So, if the league’s China relationship is inherently unstable, how does it recover? Does it look for the next superstar in India, as the New York Times suggested the NBA so desperately wants?

Perhaps the answer is in that room, back in Chicago. Much as the coaches might wince, mic’d up segments have the potential to gloriously augment the viewing experience. The NFL is, to borrow a phrase, light-years ahead of the NBA in that respect. The NBA’s domestic product, whether it be League Pass, NBA TV, or some of the postgame shows of its broadcast partners, needs to be sharper. Two decades of the NBA studying abroad has correlated with a lot of slack in its domestic TV products. Stateside, there’s not enough high-quality TV coverage that’s pertinent to the actual game, especially now that David Griffin has left the studio to run the Pelicans. The league would benefit from the kind of coverage that lets fans know that games are actually interesting.

In the meantime, in the aftermath of the Morey affair, the NBA needs to ambitiously grow the game at home as a bulwark against getting leveraged like it was in this incident. Other leagues have wrapped themselves in the American flag, for better or for worse perhaps, but these sports at least recognized where they were rooted and what domestic customers respond to. The NFL has a slickly produced series titled, “America’s Game.” It’s hard to envision the NBA ever doing that, even if the sport this nation nurtured has just as much a claim to the title.

The NBA has constantly advertised its ambitions beyond America. To be an NBA news consumer is to hear endlessly from the league on how they might conquer China, India and beyond, but little as to how basketball might become the favorite sport of its home country. Silver said, during the 2017 Finals, “It frustrates me that there are no Chinese players in the NBA right now,” adding, “There’s probably more basketball being played in China than anywhere else in the world. And more NBA basketball is being watched in China than anywhere else in the world.” Silver then went on to talk about consulting with Yao Ming on developing great Chinese international teams that might win big in future Olympics and World Cups. An understandable view from a corporate perspective perhaps, but a little strange to hear an American commissioner so openly pine for China’s success in the Olympics. One wonders if, based on the U.S. ratings, American customers can sense the National Basketball Association’s apathy towards its own nation.

There’s nothing bad about spreading the gospel of your sport beyond borders and receiving the privilege of players like Dirk Nowitzki, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Yao Ming inspiring fans here. Indeed, that’s all fantastic. The challenge is remaining solid within your sphere of immediate influence, growing within what you know. The challenge is keeping the main thing the main thing. When you’re embroiled in a conflict that’s 7,000 miles away, you couldn’t be farther from it.

The NBA's going to survive, even if ratings are down 15%. The owners, players and networks may not make as much off the sport as their greed would like, but if future rookie contracts and max contracts for all-stars have to take a 15% haircut and 'only' 17 million people watch the NBA Finals, then boo-fucking-hoo.

The business end of the sport only interests me in terms of competitive balance within the league. Whether the NBA conquers the world, signs a 40 billion dollar tv contract, and Zion becomes a billionaire or maybe just a half-billionaire is nothing I really care about. That's not hoops. That's just raw capitalism doing its maximum profits thing. Let me find my tiny violin so I can serenade them.

The combination of cable companies dropping RSNs and a moderate loss of China business would be rough

From a fan’s perspective what we should worry about is a dramatic loss of revenue causing a lockout

A lockout would have to wait until the next CBA was being negotiated, but aiui the ultimate basis of player compensation is a fixed percentage of league revenue, not a fixed dollar amount, so a lockout over decreased league revenue would seem to be illogical, unless the position of the owners was that they want a bigger share of the shrinking pie. If so, fuck 'em.

well that is what they would want, and i agree with your stance, but it’s not good news for all of us who enjoy watching basketball.

The position would be that they’ve committed to contracts they can no longer pay

I don't imagine revenues will fall to the extent that the owners would be unable to pay the cost of staying in business without abrogating their player contracts. But if keeping the doors open and the lights on required renegotiation of player contracts, then it would be smart for the player's union to do so, rather than kill the league altogether. A lockout almost certainly would be about the owners extracting terms favorable to themselves, not because the players insist of holding them to "contracts they can no longer pay".

I like this but my twist would be to make *all* shooting fouls worth a single 2-point free throw, including "and ones" on made baskets. Since fouls are more common on 2-pointers than 3-pointers, that would further increase the expected value of 2's relative to 3's. https://t.co/dx2r7q5j5p

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 20, 2019

Todays column: Get rid of Nate Silver

i actually have to tip my hat to him here for going big

heres the hollinger article

Hollinger: The three-shot foul is a bad rule, badly enforced, with bad side effects— It needs to go

By John Hollinger 5h ago 138
When can we say an NBA rule change failed?

I can think of four potential reasons: When the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, when the officials have difficulty calling it correctly, when it encourages behavior it was originally designed to discourage, or when it takes the game in a worse direction.

In the case of the three-shot foul, we’re a perfect 4-for-4. It’s a bad rule, badly enforced, that encourages bad behavior and stylistic monotony.

The three-shot foul has been around almost as long as the 3-pointer itself. At first, it wasn’t a big deal – three-shot fouls were extremely rare. Two things changed that. First, players slowly realized that the three-shot penalty was a completely outsized response to a minor crime and modified their behavior accordingly – beginning with the exaggerated side leg kicks of Reggie Miller. This move, theoretically outlawed in 2012, remains a popular way of duping refs into a three-shot foul.

Worsening matters, recent points of emphasis from the league have made it illegal to breathe on shooters increased protection for shooters, essentially guaranteeing the shooter no contact from takeoff to landing, no matter how bizarre a path he took en route. That change, in particular, has brought on a barrage of three-shot fouls from shooters jumping forward and adjusting their landing point to collide into a closing defender, or dangling legs at the last minute, hoping to catch a body.

It’s not just James Harden either. Here’s Bryn Forbes, for instance, coming to a nice controlled stop in transition and then suddenly vaulting forward on his shot and jackknifing his legs so they can catch Kevin Huerter.

If you want more examples, believe me, I have them.

My modest proposal is that the league goes back to a two-shot foul penalty for the first 46 minutes of the game. In the last two minutes, when several other minor rules also change, it can keep the three-shot foul to prevent egregious intentional fouling by teams with three-point leads.

Why would this improve the game? Let’s go through the weaknesses, one by one.

Penalty doesn’t fit the crime
This is by far my biggest gripe, and it’s a crucial component to understanding every other reason the three-shot foul is awful. I don’t think a lot of people fully understand how absurdly rich the 3-shot reward is for a common shooting foul.

Pardon me while I take you through some my math. It won’t be terrible, I promise.

First things first — 3-pointers barely produce any more points than 2-pointers, on average. The league hits 35.2 percent of its 3s and 52.0 percent of its 2s last season, meaning both shots produced nearly identical expected returns – 1.04 points for 2s, 1.06 points for 3s.

From that perspective, giving an additional shot for a shooting foul on a 3-pointer compared to a 2-pointer makes no sense — the shooter wasn’t likely to score more points on the initial shot.

But the return on a shooting foul for these types is now radically different. Using league averages, the expected return on a 3-shot foul is 2.33 points – three times the league average free throw rate (76.6 percent), plus a small dollop for the possibility of an offensive board on a missed third shot. (Only about 11 percent of missed free throws are rebounded by the offense, and only 23.9 percent of them are missed in the first place. Ballpark the average ROI on an offensive board is 1.2 points, leading to whopping 0.03 point increase. In reality, teams try much harder on the offensive glass when awful foul shooters are at the line, but we’ll ignore that for the sake of methodological clarity here).

That contrasts with 1.56 points on a two-shot foul.

In reality, the ROI on a 3-shot foul is even better because of who draws those fouls. News flash: Andre Drummond and Dwight Howard aren’t getting fouled shooting 3s. Only threatening 3-point shooters draw these whistles, and most of them are very good free-throw shooters too. Additionally, second and third free throws convert at a slightly better than than the first one. As ESPN’s Kevin Pelton recently reported, players league-wide shot 87.1 percent on the third shot of a three-shot foul last season, compared to just 80 percent on the first attempt.

As a result, the expected ROI on 3-shot fouls isn’t 2.33 points, it’s actually more like 2.56 … a full point higher than the two-shot foul.

In fact, check this out: That return on a three-shot foul is so excessive that, on average, committing one is about as bad as committing a flagrant! The second shot on a flagrant can’t be rebounded, so the two shots on average are worth 1.53 points for the offense. The team then inbounds on a dead ball, which is the lowest efficiency initial condition for offense – yielding 1.07 points per possession last season, according to our Seth Partnow. That brings our total for the trip to 2.60 points.

So a three-shot foul hands the offense 2.56 points on average … and a flagrant gives it 2.60. It’s basically the same. Yikes.

To see how extreme a penalty it is, however, you need to understand not just the absolute value, but also the marginal value. A typical possession was worth 1.10 points in 2018-19 (I will use last year’s numbers for this exercise given the early stage of the season). As noted above, the average two-point shot was worth 1.04 (the league shot 52.0 percent on 2s), and an average 3-point shot was worth 1.06 (the league shot 35.3 percent on 3s). Offensive boards added an additional 0.13 points to the expectation on 2s and 0.18 on 3s. So that’s a marginal value of 0.07 points for a 2 (1.04+0.13-1.10), and 0.14 points for a 3 (1.06 + 0.18 – 1.10).

But a three-shot foul? Not only does it more than double the value of a possession, from 1.10 points to 2.56 points, but also its marginal value of 1.56 points dwarfs that of common fouls. Let’s see here how a 3-shot foul changes things:

Marginal value of shot types, 2018-19
Three-shot foul 1.56
Two-shot foul 0.46
Average three-point attempt 0.14
Average two-point attempt 0.07
A two-shot foul produces a 0.39-point marginal return relative to just letting the guy shoot. That’s a fair penalty. The return on a three-shot foul, however, is 1.42 — nearly FOUR TIMES as much.

Again, the outsized penalty is a huge reason for this rule’s awfulness, because it influences all kinds of other behavior. A lot of it is subtle — for instance, here’s Damian Lillard with an attempt he would never consider if it weren’t for the fact that he might get three shots. Certainly he’s not trying to make a 3-point shot here.

This happens a lot, actually. A huge chunk of three-shot fouls are the result of players playing against the rules rather than the opponent — either guards like Lillard leaning into an ugly heave after turning the corner on a screen, or catch-and-shoot specialists kicking a leg out to reach out and tag a defender. Maybe he doesn’t get the call every time, but it’s the outsized return that makes the attempt worth the investment.

And here’s the beautiful basketball that same play yields when it doesn’t work:

It even impacts areas you wouldn’t consider — such as the coach’s challenge. From an ROI basis, far and away the best use of it is to challenge a leg-kick three-shot foul and turn 2.56 points into an offensive foul — to the point that coaches should probably save their challenge for three quarters in case one of these comes up.

More contact, not less
Because of the outsized return on 3-shot fouls, and that players KNOW about the outsize return, they’ve modified their behavior accordingly. Rather than avoid collisions when they rise up for a jumper, smart players seek it out. As a result, a mission designed to protect shooters and reduce contact (and hopefully injuries) has had the unintended consequence of increasing it. Several players — not even elite ones — have quickly adopted the habit of kicking their non-shooting leg out and forward in hopes of attracting a three-shot foul, creating conditions for ankle sprains rather than removing them. It’s exactly what the league was originally trying to prevent.

It’s remarkable to see how much players’ behavior changes on 3-point jump shots versus two-point jump shots. The clip above with Forbes is a great example, but it’s not hard to find others. In fact, it’s not hard to find them with Bryn Forbes (or any other volume 3-point shooter, for that matter) … and you can actually see it the most in clips where players aren’t fouled. Here is Forbes searching out contact with his right leg, hoping he can tag Terrence Ferguson and create a 3-shot collision.

For a more egregious example, here is T.J. Warren’s submission into the pantheon, just praying he can get a piece of Cedi Osman with his right leg:

Now that you’ve seen it NOT work, here’s what it looks like when it does. Kelly Oubre was awarded three shots for this bit of ridiculousness:

More subtly, here’s Kemba Walker rising up with his left leg well behind him and behind the 3-point line. George Hill’s feet never totally cross the 3-point line, yet somehow “foul” Kemba’s left leg by being in position to receive Kemba’s love tap. For a right-handed shooter, this is, um, not natural:

For a more common example, it’s possible James Harden would have been fouled on this play by Dillon Brooks anyway, but he sticks out his left leg to make sure of it.

OK, fine, let’s talk about Harden
In particular, his left leg. Here’s another one. In real time it looks like Jimmy Butler annihilated him. Zapruder it and you see Harden rise up for a normal shot before he sees Butler and plays tag with his left leg.

And again, more blatantly, here he gets the Nets’ Taurean Prince with a piece of extended-leg absurdity only highlighted by Brooklyn’s monochrome court palette.

Finally, let’s give credit where it’s due. Shout out to Tyler Ford, who nabbed Harden here on his leg kick. Not all heroes wear capes. I don’t think it’s an accident that he made the call from behind the play and a bit away from it — the ref on the sideline is actually too close to see both the hands and feet of the shooter. More on that in a minute.

The Refs can’t call it correctly
Another unintended consequence of the three-shot foul is that it highlights how awful the officials are at calling it. It’s not their fault — it has to do with their position on the court and the impossibility of what’s asked of them.

We’re giving a huge reward on a play where a significant portion of the calls are just flat-out wrong.

You think I’m just going to pull more Harden clips? Think again. Here’s our very first three-shot foul of the season, an egregious leg kick by New Orleans’ Kenrich Williams that should have been an offensive foul (if not a flagrant); the dude basically tripped Pascal Siakam in midair.

Sideways leg kicks by shooters are very difficult for officials to see due to the geography of the court. We don’t want officials standing in the middle of it, for good reason. But most 3-point attempts either come from the corner, or from the top of the key — the two places an official standing at the coach’s box is mostly like to be looking from a straight-on vantage point. That gives them little to no depth perception to see if a leg is kicked sideways or straight out, making them suckers for preying shooters. We can’t always see it from the camera angle, either.

Props to Eric Dahlen, who missed the Williams call above but nails Forbes with the left leg maneuver on a very difficult to see call here:

The other issue that comes up is that sometimes the officials are too close, particular on wing 3-point attempts. They can’t possibly be looking at both hands and feet when the players are right on top of them, so they have to guess. Here’s a clip where Tom Washington ends up with both the shooter and defender right in his lap and essentially has to blindly extrapolate whether the shooter’s leg got clipped. Combined with Harden’s left-leg voodoo, you can guess the result.

Before we finish, I should point out something else — I’m only pointing out one kind of error in these clips. Officials also struggle to correctly identify three-shot fouls for some of the same reasons I’ve listed above, something the Rockets outlined last spring before the Golden State series in their Magna Gripe-a missive to the league office. Again, these are huge calls (or misses) because the penalty is so severe.

Is this the game you want?
Hey, all you midrange jumper fans — now is your chance to chime in. All we’ve done with the three-shot foul is further incentivize every single team to tilt even more toward the same monolithic outcome of spreading the floor and shooting a ton of catch-and-shoot 3s.

With defenses disincentivized from challenging the shot, and the occasional super bonus of a 3-shot foul juicing expected returns from the strategy, teams would be crazy NOT to go in that direction. Anybody who wants to see some stylistic distinctions left in this league should at least be thinking about how to favor the 3-point shot a bit less. Changing the three-shot foul is one obvious, lightly intrusive means.

So, summing it all up: The three-shot foul creates a massively disproportionate penalty to the crime committed, on a play type that officials have difficulty calling correctly. It also likely creates more contact and injury potential rather than reducing it, and incentivizes both boorish behavior and stylistic monotony that make the game less entertaining. The league can go back to three shots in the final two minutes to eliminate intentional fouling incentives late in games; we already have several other rules that change in the last two minutes.

But for the first 46 minutes, it’s clearly a bad rule. And if you still don’t think so, let me leave you with this magical piece of basketball from Trae Young as my parting gift:

Simply changing it to a two-short foul would eliminate a lot of the worst incentives and cheap foul-hunting, while also introducing a more fair penalty for a shot that isn’t any more valuable than 2-pointer at the time of release.

The three-shot foul stinks. It’s time for it to go.

thats really good

agree 100%

twolves announcers were talking about this 3pt 2ft thing during todays game

2ft is far too close for the 3pt line

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/28145944/sources-nba-considering-reseeding-conference-finalists-postseason-play-in

all for conferenceless playoffs but the in season tourney just seems like a novelty to distract from the fact that individual regular season games dont matter, they shd fix that fundamental problem

yeah not in favor of the tournament thing

the most important reason to go to the single 2-pt foul shot is to eliminate the lamest part of the game, which is the dead time between free throws and the high fives. very against the high fives

the high fives suck

nfl teams play 16 games a year and make way more money than the nba, the march madness tv contract is bigger than the entire nba contract, nba shd think about these things

scarcity creates ~value~ heads up

The NFL plays as many games as they can without the average career length being 2 years

yeah I'm not sure the two are really comparable

after reading more about the proposal I think I hate everything about it

it's really telling that their brilliant ideas actually result in a scenario where some teams might play *more* than 82 games.

there's not much to say about the in-season tournament idea other than it's a really stupid idea that no one will care about. bill simmons couldn't have even thought of this

the play-in games basically risk a 10 seed potentially advancing over a 7 seed with something like 10 more regular season wins, which makes me wonder what the point of the regular season is. it could encourage resting. and then you could have a 9 or 10 seed playing a 1 seed and making the first round even worse

the reseeding is a good idea but they should just do it 1-16

they're just throwing darts because they can't fathom that fewer games is the solution

why does there have to be any solution? I know viewership is down this year but hadn't the league been doing great? have they considered that maybe it's temporary because the warriors suck and 2 of the 5 best players in the league are injured?

not really a ratings guy but i would think that the two LA teams being good would mean the league had higher hopes for this year than what they're currently getting. i thought i heard that local broadcast ratings are down all over the place so it's not just national showcase games. while they're in the current round of tv contracts they will be doing great. problem comes when they need to renew in a couple years if ratings still aren't strong.

regardless of ratings, seems like we're hitting a crest of dissatisfaction with the 82-game schedule. the nba is more or less proposing to shuffle it which makes no sense to me. the midseason tournament is inane, i can't believe they're actually putting it out there.

also "load management" is al over the media, not great press!

xp it’s actually bad that both of the Los Angeles teams are really good because East Coast markets don’t watch West Coast games

Bill Simmons was 1st guy I heard talk about midseason tourney

yeah

wasn't the original simmons plan to do a tourney for the 8th seed?

makes me wonder what the point of the regular season is

i think this about most american sports, tbh

its to enjoy a bit of sport

the nfl regular season is pretty perfect in that its fewer games and fewer teams making the playoff make it function almost on a playoff level

baseball i have no idea what goes on in the head of baseball watchers but having different pitchers on different days breaks up the monotony somewhat i guess

playoffless euro soccer is def the most rigorous system for picking the best team there will be no upsets but its kinda a bummer not having the "playoff atmosphere" they compensate for that by adding excitement w promotion/relegation and seeding for various other tournaments and with singing and rioting

another thing about euro soccer is theres like 9 teams across 5 leagues who have any chance and if youre a fan of a different team u just have to hope a russian oligarch improves yr fortunes

also each country has its own league so the best players dont play each other

baseball i have no idea what goes on in the head of baseball watchers but having different pitchers on different days breaks up the monotony somewhat i guess

it's better as a pre-TV, pre-night games sport. wandering over to the local stadium in your ratty suit and hat to check out your local squadron, the lush grass spread before you, it's a nice way to spend a summer day in the city.

oh going to the game is nice dont get me wrong and tbh i used to be a baseball watcher myself but i dont remember what i was thinking about now

also each country has its own league so the best players dont play each other

― lag∞n, Monday, November 25, 2019 12:06 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

there shd be one eurowide super league w promotion/relegation from the respective country systems

(and plz dont tell me theres already the euroleague i know the difference between a tournament and a league)

wasn't the original simmons plan to do a tourney for the 8th seed?

― call all destroyer, Monday, November 25, 2019 11:48 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah he came up with the bottom seed tourney at the end of the season iirc, never heard of this mid season thing till now

feel like he also talked abt the midseason thing or at least ive heard of it somewhere before

i have now thought a bunch about these proposals and listened to some pros and cons and honestly i don't care for any of them. they don't offer any meaningful progress toward making either the regular season or the first round of the playoffs more competitive.

the play-in for the bottom of the playoffs is....fine. it will make the end of the reg season slightly more interesting and in theory reduce tanking at the top but i do wonder how the incentives will work out over time (e.g. if you're the 10 seed don't you really want to stay in the lottery even if you're playing well down the meaningless stretch at the end of the season?) but the first round 8/1 and 7/2 matchups will still suck and be worthless regardless of the outcome.

reseeding the final four is dumb and a very tactical response to an unfortunate situation from two finals ago. i still like the romance of having to go through a conference rival and seeing those matchups play out over a number of years. also the two teams in the finals have only played each other twice which adds some intrigue. the league needs to take the long view on this.

the tournament--here are the pros i've heard:

- there are ~10 teams right now with no winning tradition that would go all-in to win it
- gradually over time interia will cause people and teams to care
- it opens up the possibility of reducing the number of games even more over time
- what the hell, nothing could be worse than the current regular season

it's telling that they can't even find a good time in the schedule to do it. where they've landed is probably the best bet but it's still really early and a lot of teams are just figuring out how they want to play.

my main thing is that even if you believe that ultimately it will become something that matters, the first couple years are going to be so, so bad. players aren't going to take it seriously. coaches are the most conservative people in the game probably and i doubt any of them are going to want to push their guys hard to win something in early december. i see it being awkward and weird and public perception could just render it d.o.a.

it's also the most roundabout possible way of trying to address lack of interest in the regular season. it doesn't make the non-tournament games matter more. it doesn't address load management. it sure as hell isn't going to make the season *feel* shorter or fix the slog that is march and april. the format is going to be confusing to casuals. the rumor that they're looking to do it at neutral sites is insane.

finally, maybe, just maybe, looking to european soccer with its own longstanding traditions and issues is not the best place to find inspiration to fix engagement in a relatively young american sports league. the reason the play the FA cup is because they've been playing the FA cup for 150 years, and afaik the only cool thing that happens in the FA cup is when a team from one of the lower divisions makes a run--the same thing that happens in the NCAA tournament which is also impossible to replicate in the nba. meanwhile, they conveniently do not look at one of the best features of the premier league which is that each team plays a home and home and every game feels like an event.

both the play-in and the midseason tournament are Really bad ideas imo. its classic fudging the results of a process instead of fixing the process to give better results

having fewer teams make the playoffs seems good but giving a whole round as a bye also seems dicey

mb go back to best of 5 first round with byes for the top 4 teams

i'd love to see them do something closer to the nfl first round. the top 2 teams in each conference have no reason to play a first round series, they're not losing it.

why did they go to 7 games in 1st rnd? was that after nuggs beat the #1 seed in 94??

its was a while after that iirc

it changed in 2003. $$$$$

the problem with first round byes is that’s two weeks off in which teams lose momentum and just get cold

go back to the early 80s playoff system imo - 1st round is best-of-3 and the top 2 in each conf. get byes

to me the current playoff structure is not the problem, or at least not one of the problems that needs to be addressed first

i think the first round is a problem. they play 4 series that are perfunctory.

agree w Spottie but also feel like changing playoffs is easier to accomplish than changes to reg season would be

letting fewer teams into the offs wld increase the intensity of the regular season im thinking

would also give even less teams hope or a shot at even one round of playoff revenue.

The spurs and nuggets went to 7 games last year

The Cavs who made the finals in 2018 won their first round series in a game 7 by 4 points over the pacers.

letting fewer teams into the offs wld increase the intensity of the regular season im thinking

not only this but the shorter the series, the more important home-court is

The spurs and nuggets went to 7 games last year

― Matt Armstrong, Tuesday, November 26, 2019 5:32 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The Cavs who made the finals in 2018 won their first round series in a game 7 by 4 points over the pacers.

― de-mamba mentality (Spottie), Tuesday, November 26, 2019 5:34 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'd happily give these up if we could lose the 1-8 every year.

I do think it’s cool that the NFL has byes

more than half of teams making the offs is too much imo

i like the idea i heard somewhere that in the first round, a team that goes up 3-0 wins the series

one of the best features of the premier league which is that each team plays a home and home and every game feels like an event.

otm, the one home/one away game for each team is def a very good thing

jfc

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EK9DIJsU8AEPd3m?format=jpg&name=medium

https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/11/26/20983584/luka-doncic-giannis-antetokounmpo-lebron-james-schedule

can we fucking not? again, what problem are we solving??

too many regular season games, which will be addressed by adding more games

Clarity will come soon—

anyone want to tell these guys that the points system only makes sense for sports with a lot of ties?

theres nothing that will motivate players more than the prospect of another guy trying to take their job

The NBA continues to discuss draft compensation, potentially in the form of an extra first-round pick, as a reward for the winning team in the proposed in-season tournament for the 2021-22 season, sources tell @NYTSports

— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) December 24, 2019

it’s such a dumb idea all around

i hate it

its like when mlb decided to give world series home field to the winner of the freakin allstar game

"too many regular season games, which will be addressed by adding more games"

"we'll dig our way out!" "dig up, stupid"

So Dumb. What will teams that are in the tax going out do, tank the tournament because they don't want the pick ? Or teams trying to build cap room ? Be forced to trade it ? Draft and stash ? https://t.co/laxHWd9YMy

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) December 24, 2019

if theyre really gonna do it just give the winners of the tourney a million each and call it a day

end of the bench guys wld be rooting so hard lol

tourney is only for players who avg < 20mpg

this is the dumbest idea, like really who wants this

listen what if they give every winner $1m, refs swallow their whistles so it gets super physical, and theyve got live mics on the players who are encouraged to talk shit

oh and what about if the teams are different 8 teams total sort of an allstar+ type scenario

have captains who do a draft

Tallest v Shortest

im obsessed w my gritty allstar tourney now sorry in advance everyone

mb it shd be streetball...........

congratulations to lagoon who just invented the all star game

problem is none of the all stars care about a million bucks and probably do not want to play another x amount of games

I think it’d be best if we just forgot this idea got floated

congratulations to lagoon who just invented the all star game

― k3vin k., Tuesday, December 24, 2019 6:17 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

cld be the new allstar weekend get rid of everything else besides dunk and 3pt contests

lol xp wld be so much better thooooo

Winning team gets marijuana excluded from their drug testing AND an extra first round pick

First pick of this system gets nicknamed “big edible”

imo supermax contracts should be negotiated outside of the cba

the current cba is fine for the average player, but player contracts are open to abuse by the biggest stars because owners are unable or unwilling to enforce penalties for trade demands or other contract breaches. it is bad for parties to become accustomed to operating outside of the cba as it encourages uncle dennising and like behaviours.

imo a new form of contract should be available to a limited number of players which allows for much higher pay, better reflecting the true value of a lebron or other superstar. in return for the increased compensation the player would accept more risk eg the majority of the contract being contingent on performance criteria.

eliminate max contracts

max every contract
(tj) ford every stream

It seems to me the obvious problem is that they give max contracts to players like Andrew Wiggins, almost as a matter of course. This reduces the value of the max deals.

Maybe something similar to the nfl’s franchise tag would be better.

the franchise tag is awful for players, absolutely one of the worst mechanisms in existence.

as long as the NBA has a salary cap (and it always will) the lebrons and kawhis and stephs will never be properly paid or valued. wiggins was actually prob fairly paid/valued on his max deal, the problem is that a bunch of other guys on the max are way better than him and underpaid. in some free market uncapped scenario i bet wiggins would still be making roughly what he is now, but it wouldn't look as insane bcuz lebron would be making $50 million per year or whatever

what's interesting to me is that the CBA has not been able to accurately predict or account for shifts in player priorities. the owners really fucked up in the last negotiations... they implemented all these crazy rules to prevent player movement and they've all backfired. it turns out that being able to offer your best player $200 million a year before any other team doesn't mean that the guy is just going to say "ok :)" and then he's on your team for life... and if he does say yes your reward is an albatross contract that can sink your franchise with one bad injury.

i don't see a way for the brons or kawhis to ever be properly valued... their importance is just far too skewed, and ultimately capping their salaries allows money to flow to other players in the league, which can be bad for teams when they spend money on bad players but is good for the players. i think a good fix would be implementing some sort of permanent amnesty clause that you can use once every x number of years so that what's happening w/ the wizards basically is a bit more preventable.

also exceeding the salary cap for certain players has been built into the CBA for a while now, i feel like they could institute some sort of 1 use-only mega max that is capped at i.e. $25 million or w/e for cap purposes but above that the team can pay the player whatever amount of money they want.

the other big problem is that the contracts that are coming closest to properly paying the best guys are doing so on the downslope of their career. it's silly to me that various versions of the max contract (25%, 35%, etc.) are tied to service time.

Yah that big max should be available on those early prime years

as long as the NBA has a salary cap (and it always will) the lebrons and kawhis and stephs will never be properly paid or valued. wiggins was actually prob fairly paid/valued on his max deal, the problem is that a bunch of other guys on the max are way better than him and underpaid. in some free market uncapped scenario i bet wiggins would still be making roughly what he is now, but it wouldn't look as insane bcuz lebron would be making $50 million per year or whatever

The league has a policy of paying top 5 picks the max if they don’t completely shit the bed in their first 4 years and that doesn’t make sense.

They get in situations where sunk costs and the costs of changing directions of the team add up to paying Jamal Murray the max for being the leagues 14th best shooting guard

those guys get the 25% max which is nowhere near as destructive as the contract chris paul is on.

the other big problem is that the contracts that are coming closest to properly paying the best guys are doing so on the downslope of their career. it's silly to me that various versions of the max contract (25%, 35%, etc.) are tied to service time.

― call all destroyer, Sunday, January 5, 2020 8:10 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah this is terrible. all these guys that are gonna be making $50M a year when they're 36 is fucked.

iirc this was driven by cp3 who led the players association to negotiate a cba that happened to largely benefit himself

it benefitted him and his class of player. vets who are involved in the players association aren't going to pay themselves less.

cp3 is gangster, role players are fools for not getting a bigger slice of the pie

it cld def use tweaking but i like generally how the nba contract situation works FWIW they set out to thread the needle between parity, teams retaining stars, and player freedom of movement which is the correct view and they kinda pulled it off imho its a good balance, and it has a high drama factor which is good

def prefer it to the hard capping of the nfl or the tax disincentives of mlb, the open market of soccer is by far the worst tho

one thing soccer has tho is promotion and relegation which is prob the best mechanism in all of sport m8

nba relegation would be amazing

they shd work towards incorporating the g league in this scenario (will never happen but in a better universe would)

nba w 20 teams plus a bunch more trying to claw their way in wld be so tite

i would be elated if a ridiculous regional g league team somehow scraped their way into the league a la the red claws stockton kings or whatever

would be interesting to see what the distribution of salaries as a percentage of the cap has looked like over time. maybe there have been times when there were lots of middle-sized contracts or times when a lot of money was going to the biggest contracts.

it cld def use tweaking but i like generally how the nba contract situation works FWIW they set out to thread the needle between parity, teams retaining stars, and player freedom of movement which is the correct view and they kinda pulled it off imho its a good balance, and it has a high drama factor which is good

― lag∞n, Monday, January 6, 2020 12:09 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

mostly agree with this! i think the weird soft cap and associated rules add a lot of intrigue.

check out this crazy old college 3pt line

https://i.imgur.com/NbEyrsD.jpg

michael jordan is playing there fyi

In 1982, college basketball's scoring reached a low point. The ACC Tournament title game featured North Carolina using a four-corner delay offense against Virginia. The Tar Heels won 47-45 but the game made for poor viewing to a nationally televised audience.

So before the 1983 season, with the NCAA's permission, the ACC and a few mid-major conferences tinkered with their league rules to increase scoring.

Free to set its own parameters, the ACC decided to adopt a 30-second shot clock and a 3-point line that was about two feet shorter than the one used today. The current line is 19 feet, 9 inches measured from the middle of the basket.

"I can remember it wasn't widely accepted _ or unanimously accepted," said UNC coach Roy Williams, a Tar Heel assistant at the time, said of the 3-point shot.

Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski was not a supporter.

"I was not and I was dumb,” Krzyzewski said. ”The 3-point shot is excellent."

https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb-playoffs-new-format-nba-reseeding-053243801.html

"It introduces incremental incentives. There’s incentive to be the best team in a league, not simply a division winner, because top seeds earn first-round byes.

There’s incentive to win your division, even if you can’t reach that top seed, because doing so earns you three home games in a three-game, first-round series.

If you can’t win your division, there’s incentive to finish with the top record among wild cards, which earns you three first-round home games as well. The alternative is zero.

And of course, there’s incentive to make the playoffs – which, after expansion, would become a realistic goal for a supermajority of the league, even as the season reaches its August-September home stretch.

Because of those incremental incentives, expansion doesn’t render the regular season meaningless. It just spreads meaning far and wide, distributing it throughout the standings, creating new playoff races in new places, all while maintaining the traditional ones. Because no two playoff berths would be equal."

i think most of these types of pieces and proposals have the cart way ahead of the horse. philosophically the north american sports need to decide for themselves what they want to regular season to mean and what they want the playoffs to mean.

i hate all of these calls from like 2:12 on and the style of play they encourage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOTGrk3ypN0

what kind of sadist put together 8 minutes of trae young drawing touch fouls

its amazing that it took 100+ years of basketball before guys realized if you just stop and shoot while going around a screen the trailing defender will run into you

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said she has talked with NBA commissioner Adam Silver and is "pretty optimistic" about landing an expansion franchise. https://t.co/JUVSYgnjT5

— NBA on ESPN (@ESPNNBA) January 8, 2021

nice, long long overdue

excited to see this nba, is smart to expand. there is so much talent they can easily accommodate an extra 30 players. if they dont abandon divisions, they shd at least do four 8-team divisions imo.

I wonder who would get the 32nd team. Jacksonville? Baltimore?

vegas

The Vegas Gamblers

wld be cool to do a gambling themed name, the whales, the high rollers...

the sharks

seattle and vegas would be awesome. im kinda bummed about expansion tho. 30 was always a good number to me. if anything i thought they should contract a couple teams and move a couple others to seattle and vegas.

lol stumping for basketball is probably the only thing failed mayor Jenny Durkan can do that won’t make people yell at her at this point

Expand to 48 and do an upper and lower division with relegation and promotion

that wld be sick

there's already not enough elite players to fill the league but whatever i'm down for more basketball

ppl seem to think that maybe louisville or nashville would be in play for the other spot. nashville apparently tried to get the raptors this season. tampa would also be in play given this season

just looked at metro area populations and the biggest ones w/o teams in order are san diego tampa baltimore vegas and austin tho the nba im sure looks at a larger area than that like all those places except vegas have teams fairly close, but they all also do have successful teams in other sports too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas

I wonder who would get the 32nd team. Jacksonville? Baltimore?

― Fetchboy, Friday, January 8, 2021 2:54 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

would love it if they brought basketball back to st. louis

yeah wld support that

actually missed st louis shd be in the middle of my list

and does not have a nearby team too

i've heard vancouver (though that may be more of a wishful thinking thing), louisville, nashville, and vegas.

i'm pretty agnostic on expansion, great for the cities that get teams but the league will dilute for a bit.

goon we don't want a st. louis team because jayson tatum will want to play there!

hmm mb youre right

yeah but not for a while since they'll be a low-talent expansion team

come back to Vancouver NBA (silver reads this thread right)

NASHVILLE

wonder what the nba looks for in an expansion city, a state of the art arena is obvs at the top of the list but past that im not sure, there must be some demographic profile or whatever

im assuming vegas has the arena considering they just got a hockey team

growing population and not a declining one

just throw another on in LA

from listening to various podcasts the main thing is having an ownership group who is willing/able to pay the money for a team and bring it to city x. kansas city built a nice arena some years ago hoping it would attract a team but no billionaire was inclined to take a team there

wld think you could always find someone to buy in but i guess not

lot easier to find a buyer for something turnkey but starting from scratch is a whole different beast.

The municipality should buy the team imo, Seattle could float a bond measure to pay the expansion fee and it’d probably pass lol

otm

they mayor should be the gm and get voted out if they suck

wonder what the nba looks for in an expansion city, a state of the art arena is obvs at the top of the list but past that im not sure, there must be some demographic profile or whatever

― lag∞n, Friday, January 8, 2021 3:45 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

basically-- nba-ready arena, the type of economy that can fill luxury boxes, and someone with 2 billion dollars who wants a team there.

they should pass a law called "bezos give us $2.5B in sonic bucks or we blow your head off"

tampa is the largest market w/o an nba team incl seattle fyi. but they have that dgaf florida fanbase so idk.

they should pass a law called "bezos give us $2.5B in sonic bucks or we blow your head off"

― trans-panda express (m bison), Friday, January 8, 2021 4:12 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

put it on the ballot

w/ OKC i heard it explained as like... they got a team bcuz clay bennett's ownership group had the money to buy a team and wanted to put it in OKC & stern decided to make it happen. but it's not like OKC was identified as the single most desired location for a new NBA team

didnt he promise not to move them to okc at some point

yeah clay bennett and the okc business community really put on the full-court press to get a team. they had the track record of the hornets season there which could have helped selling the nba on okc as a good market. also it's one of those places with more money than ppl think.

sorta indifferent-to-against expansion but seattle and vegas would be cool

yeah im prob against expansion for expansions sake but seattle 500% needs a team and might as well do another to keep the numbers even

my opinion is that more teams is good

more teams = more hoops = more 2 luv

nah man it's all about the product

have u considered that maybe quantity IS better than quality?

lol

idk for sickos like us the worst days of the week are like the tuesdays and saturdays when there's no good games and diluting the talent pool more doesn't really solve that does it?

too many lame franchises in places that dont really care about them already

moving would be a much better solution than expanding.

yeah but the nbas not going to force anyones hand

they can just makes new teams tho

u need 2 read more about MMT (modern make-more-teams theory or just make more teams or MMT 4 short)

lol

u, a 20th century bird brain: more teams will dilute the talent pool
me, a 22nd century time traveling superstar: more teams = more hoops fans = more future talent

checkmate

lol

will probably also mean league pass prices go up $_$

all of yall criminals stream illegally anyway

we have already established that silver reads our threads (adam, hello) so please do not out our community as thieves who should be in jail

anyways i am up for expansion if the teams are out west where there are not enough teams and i don't care much about "dilution" there's 30 very good basketball players out there i guarantee this

if were to accidentally click on an internet link and an nba game should play in the background while im going about my day i can hardly be blamed

very troubling to learn today during these difficult times that our beloved mob is in fact a sworn officer of the peace aka a police officer

*mod sure but i believe we call that a "freudian slip"

lol

i just believe v strongly in supporting the arts, and if u download hoops illegally u r making it harder for hoopers to feed their families

all of yall criminals stream illegally anyway

― trans-panda express (m bison), Friday, January 8, 2021 7:20 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

one of the most embarrassing facts about myself is that I have paid for league pass for like 10 straight years now

paid version is def a superior experience

i've paid for like 5 years now, i have no patience for sketchy streams

I miss ballstreams but alas it was too good to be true

its true that was a good site

balls tream

Rumor: Alex Rodriguez wants to move Timberwolves to Seattle https://t.co/PGSdJwKJeC

— Kurt Helin (@basketballtalk) June 1, 2021

Rumor: The NBA having teams in Charlotte, Memphis, OKC, San Antonio, Portland and Sacramento, but not in Seattle is really stupid.

Thread

Beginning with Summer Leagues and effective for the 2021-22 season, game officials will enforce the playing rules in a manner that reduces the incentive for offensive players to use non-basketball moves to draw fouls.

Thread ⤵️ (1/7)

— NBA Official (@NBAOfficial) August 8, 2021

I feel like the video of Steph in that thread should be a no call

RIP Trae Young

rip a lot of guys! But I love this, it’s been something noxious about the game that nobody likes for awhile and has been getting worse year over year

Among the many ugly non-basketball moves, I count the "rip through" move, where the offensive player who has been holding the ball high and away suddenly swings the ball down low and across the arms of the defensive player facing him, not preparatory to doing anything with the ball, but simply to draw a foul. Harden especially favors this one.

about time is how i break it down to an extent. mostly curious to see who and how this effects not only the 22 season but also player's legacies.

They changed the rip through years ago it’s just a common foul not a shooting foul now. You don’t see them nearly as often.

about time is how i break it down to an extent. mostly curious to see who and how this effects not only the 22 season but also player's legacies.

I feel like the video of Steph in that thread should be a no call

― Fetchboy, Sunday, August 8, 2021 3:47 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

but it can’t be a no-call, there’s too much contact that affects the shot. offensive foul seems right

These guys are crafty they’ll all be fine and have so many different ways to score I don’t see it changing much. Maybe a couple less FTs per game.

yea when I think about the guys this'll primarily affect it's pretty much all people who are great shooters anyway. what this will do is make it a lot easier to root for guys like Harden

i agree that the league will change and the players are superhuman so it'll be fine but i think there are a few people who are going to become considerably different quantities depending on how this is called in-game and i'm looking at harden xp lol

but it can’t be a no-call, there’s too much contact that affects the shot. offensive foul seems right

― k3vin k., Sunday, August 8, 2021 5:44 PM (forty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I feel like if the offensive player thinks they can get a shot up by bouncing off a guy who's not set they should be allowed to. No foul on the defender though. The less free throws we have to sit through the better.

I also think players should give each other boosts to achieve megadunks worth 4 points.

Last two minutes of each quarter, we shift to NBA Jam rules

pretty good idea

NCAAB should really create an Alumni league, 99% of their athletes never make the league. International can pay well, but NCAAB needs to beat the G-league and have the ability to play domestically.

Already have TV relationships, even just powerhouse schools would be enough.

— A.K (@Kungu_NBA) September 9, 2021

if that league just collected all the big white centers who couldn't play past college it would easily beat the g-league

Once G-League is easily brushed aside, they'd only need to compete for attention and ad dollars with NCAA hoops, WNBA, and Big3.

I would watch 2 teams full of lumbering white centers play each other

play in the nba offseason itd do numbers

allow each team a couple non alumni players, itd be cool

get em

NBA lays out new focus on stopping “manipulated,” non-basketball play fouls https://t.co/Mn8O8Ov877

— Kurt Helin (@basketballtalk) September 24, 2021

Love it

excellent. interested to see how its called/enforced. kinda hoping they are all just no calls

i mean the stuff is freaking legal and so forth

Players won’t be subject to random tests for marijuana this season, according to @NBPA memo shared w/ players and obtained by ESPN. That’s been adjusted policy thru Orlando restart and 2020-‘21 season. Testing continues for “drugs of abuse and performance enhancing substances.”

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) October 6, 2021

i think the next frontier in nba strategy will be finding mtiple players who can shoot well from 8+ feet behind the 3pt line.

Create a 4 pt line and they will come.

yes hahaha yes

Harden not getting this call this year. 👀

pic.twitter.com/V9M5q3Tvsb

— Hoop Central (@TheHoopCentral) October 12, 2021

love how hes the last one down the court in his pouting.

basically harden is gonna get called in the reg season how he gets called in the playoffs now. hes a smart and crafty player, im sure he'll adjust but his FTA per game should take a hit

Sources: The NBA Competition Committee today discussed the uptick in transition “take” fouls this season and encouraged the league office to develop a rule change that would eliminate incentive to utilize the tactic in future.

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) November 2, 2021

NBA informed teams today that the Competition Committee is unanimously supportive of the league’s new rules officiating non-basketball moves. The new Wilson game ball was also discussed, with the league and players working directly with Wilson to adjust as appropriate. https://t.co/ftgu8fbrbr

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) November 2, 2021

might be pretty cool with the prize money

ESPN Sources: There’s renewed traction on a future In-Season Tournament in the NBA. The league and union are discussing a structure that includes December pool play, pre-Christmas quarters/semis/finals and $1M per player payout on winning team. More next on ESPN’s NBA Countdown.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) December 25, 2021

no I don’t like it

The NBA brass are prob thinking the long regular season is just too boring and they need more games that "count", but that shows a huge lack of faith in the game of hoops and the skill and competitiveness of their players. Regular season games are often exciting as hell, just because NBA players are often exciting as hell. Fuck this nonsense. Just keep working on promoting rules that punish the teams that deliberately tank.

StilL some stuff to fix obv

I don't normally do requests. pic.twitter.com/H0XIIxm7OE

— Mo Dakhil (@MoDakhil_NBA) December 25, 2021

I think that was just reflexive habit on the ref's part, left over from years of calling fouls on that crap. Once the whistle was blown, he couldn't un-blow it without looking even more like an idiot.

my solution of a postseason single elimination tourney to decide draft order among non-playoff teams would categorically solve tanking forever and be dope af

xps

well well well

Report: With play-in tournament, NBA would shorten regular season to 78 games https://t.co/Xg4difx4YB

— Kurt Helin (@basketballtalk) December 28, 2021

pretty cool

Sources: The NBA has a new format for Rising Stars at All-Star Weekend, featuring four seven-player teams competing in a three-game tournament and each game having final target score.

28 players: 12 rookies, 12 sophomores – and for the first time, four G League Ignite players.

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) January 25, 2022

https://www.espn.com/nba/insider/story/_/id/33303891/reinventing-basketball-nba-look-75-years-baggage

its crazy they havent already done this

FIBA has found solutions to this problem + the take foul by allowing advantage situations if the defense gains possession off of a 24 sec violation AND giving 2 shots + possession if a take foul is committed.

Really no reason the NBA should be this slow on the uptake. https://t.co/ON7bypSq1j

— Joe Viray (@JoeVirayNBA) March 11, 2022

they should honestly do it before the playoffs

there are so many dumb reasons why this has gotten done yet. it's really frustrating.

*hasn't

The NBA is getting younger and lighter.

2014-15 — 26.7 yrs | 223 lbs average
2015-16 — 26.7 yrs | 222 lbs
2016-17 — 26.6 yrs | 221 lbs
2017-18 — 26.4 yrs | 220 lbs
2018-19 — 26.3 yrs | 219 lbs
2019-20 — 26.1 yrs | 218 lbs
2020-21 — 26.1 yrs | 217 lbs
2021-22 — 26.1 yrs | 215 lbs

— StatMuse (@statmuse) April 12, 2022

and speedier, too

NBA teams have suggested some tweaks to the Play-In Tournament, which the league will discuss with the Board of Governors and NBPA this offseason.

For example, if a team has a large enough lead in the standings, should it be exempt from the Play-In? https://t.co/2drqAAY3ZY

— Alex Kennedy (@AlexKennedyNBA) April 13, 2022

"The core of what we were trying to accomplish with the Play-In was driving regular-season competition,” Wasch said. “We use the word 'tiers' a lot to describe what that means. There's now a tier of the top-four teams, each of which get home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. There’s a 5-6 tier, which gives teams a guaranteed playoff berth. There’s a 7-8 tier, which gives teams two opportunities to win a game in the Play-In. And, of course, there’s the 9-10 tier that gives teams a shot to win two in a row to get in the playoffs.

yeah its working as intended and if you want to avoid it just get a top 6 record

no

Keep the play-in forever. Drop regular season games. Add the in-season tournament. Overhaul the NBA calendar. No reason to wait. In-season tourney incentives: cash prize, the trophy, wins count toward season standings. Single-elimination and it all matters, just like the play-in.

— Kevin O'Connor (@KevinOConnorNBA) April 16, 2022

wins count toward the regular season standings... but it's single elimination, just like the play-in. hmm

following on from the recent discussion of injuries etc

the nba being a physical contest will always find a way to push the limits of what the body can do and this will result in injuries.

i don't think shortening the regular season is the answer. sure back to backs should be dropped, but apart from that there would be limited benefit to reducing games further. an nfl player might only see an hour of real action in a full season but will still get totally wrecked in that time. similarly if nba player minutes were restricted across the board you would probably see bigger athletes with more fast twitch muscle who would combust just as frequently, if not more so, and probably more violently. the long regular season as it is has an endurance aspect which might not be apparent to the casual viewer but which really adds to depth of the league.

part of the story behind stars missing games is that the top players are still undercompensated. any team would give kawhi a max even knowing for a fact that he will only play at best 50% of games, because half a kawhi is still worth it. so limiting the impact of injuries (or injury prone players) will need deeper restructing. you're looking at things like a new max contract that allows for much higher dollar amounts but can only be paid out per game played.

most coaches would be happy to run any role player into the ground if it meant a couple more wins, and the disabled player exemption is basically a licence to do just that, so the exemption should be scrapped.

some minor stuff would be allowing more perimeter contact to slow down player movement and expanding the charge circle diameter to the full width of the key.

/

the disabled player exception is hard to get and even harder to use effectively. i don't think it has much of an effect on anything.

most top players are effectively playing a short season now due to resting games and sitting out with minor injuries, which is a problem for the nba in that their big regular season matchups are almost never played with full rosters, best case scenario they figure out what the largest number games is that will inspire teams to play all their guys, i think part of that is just having a enough time between games so players are naturally rested and then the other thing is have few enough games that each game matters, that number is 58 thank you for coming to my presentation

yup. lebron has probably put more thought and effort and $$ into this than anyone and has been consistently saying the ramp-up and recovery between games matters much more than the number of minutes he plays in a given game. the hope would be that a reduced schedule gives everyone the same opportunity to do that stuff effectively.

the problem with this line of thinking is the assumption that lebron or kawhi would play 58 games instead of 42 or whatever the prorated prescribed rest schedule was

there is a number at which they will play all the games when as mentioned you meet their rest needs and the game mean enough to play, like nfl players dont take rest games for instance, obvs no one knows what that number is but its def less than now, i think also even if you never get all way the to that number you will decrease resting by playing fewer games

also! you will decrease injuries which are a huge source of missed games

the issue is more existential. regardless of how many games you reduced the schedule to, the most logical approach with stars would be a cautious one. i guess if you cut the schedule to like 30 games you could get everyone to play every game, but realistically speaking i don’t think you’d ever be able to reduce the schedule to a point where load management was detrimental. a better approach would prob be just to pay star players for playing in national TV games, or having some sponsor put up a $1 million bonus for best player in a TNT or ESPN game

the NBA could take some of its TV money and pay out bonuses at the end of the year to every player who played 75 games, 65 games etc. but of course they’d never actually give up more money to ensure a better product

idk i think if you got to ~60 games and big stars load managed to 50 things would be fine. i'm not really sure there's a realistic financial incentive that will move the needle for anybody as we get to there era of annual salaries north of $40 million

*the era

see (jordan) you, despite BTW claiming otherwise in the directly preceding sentence, think the no resting number is 30 games but no one knows what it actually is, also as mentioned while eliminating resting totally would be best by reducing games even if you dont totally eliminate resting you will decrease its occurrence, paying players for big games could maybe work too but the thing about trying to move towards a number of games that doesnt cause fatigue induced injuries is its just generally good for the quality of the game to have healthy competitive bouncy players, its a holistic solution to a number of related problems

you couldn't pay players for selected big games without impacting competitive balance. its just not feasible. and jordan is absolutely correct in that reducing the number of games won't reduce the % that stars rest in.

its not math, its the human body

yeah i have no idea why this is some kind of established proportion

theyre resting because theyre tired

i generally tend to err on the side of players want to play, within reason--the issue is that our current schedule has 20 superfluous games

so whats the perfect number of games in a season to guarantee peak performance? 10? 12? 3? and how will players bodies & juice regimes change to suit that number?

its 58

xp "peak performance" and "meaningful regular season" are two different frames so i think we're talking past each other

well thats kind of my point, i think the league needs to incentivise being available to play over stars playing at their peak in the few games they do play

then listen to lebron--give time for recovery between games and stars will play

yeah its just not that simple haha

stars rest because they’re tired but they also rest (as directed by their teams) out of risk mitigation. and the way front offices view sports now, i don’t know if that changes if you reduce the schedule. this is partly why adam silver keeps going on about the midseason tournament — trying to create meaning beyond the one championship given out per year might give players more reason to play in non-playoff games — but i don’t think they have the right solution yet. making front offices care about regular season games is a more complicated issue than just shortening the schedule

yeah totes

Really the first order of business that would prob improve things enough without drastically changing revenue for owners is to get rid of back to backs, then go from there.

They are never going to meaningfully reduce the number of games in the era of TV contracts, CBAs and salary caps as that would require people (owners AND players) deciding to take less money. Could they go from 82 to 78? Sure. They aren't going to 72 or 58 or anything like that. They are more likely to go to 86 somehow (more ins, in-season tourney, whatever) than 76 imo.

i think they could do it, the money is def an issue but the quality of the game is too, the national tv money which is the biggest single source would be unaffected fwiw since thats for a relatively small percentage of the total games anyway, where they would take a hit is local tv and stadium revenue

wld be funny if they did the in season tournament and everyone just took the opportunity to rest their guys

Like baseball, I think owners (and to some extent players) don't ultimately care about the quality of the game v. wrenching every last dollar they can out of their investment.

a higher quality game makes them more money tho, obvs you cant guarantee theyre going to connect the dots eg mlb, but its not impossible

the game is v high quality rn though isn’t it? the regular season used to be way snoozier. you could argue the reason for so many injuries is that guys are actually playing like they care for more minutes than they used to

i think resting players particularly in big reg season matchups is a legitimate problem, and the league agrees in that they already tried to address it, granted in a totally ineffective way, basically when a casual fan tunes into a sunday abc game you want all the guys there, you want a really good game, thats how you bring people back

yeah the quality game to game is decent but the stars not playing drags things down quite a bit. the end of the season has gotten a bit better with the 7-10 seeds being what they are but you do still see a lot of guys get shut down.

yeah kudos to the league the playin tourney is working as planned, to decrease tanking, and the games have even been exciting which is a nice bonus, im sure theyll keep working on solving the resting issue but i kinda doubt theres as easy of a solution out there

guess one thing is they could do lengthen the season again, which addresses the games too close together issue if not the too many games one

yeah kudos to the league the playin tourney is working as planned, to decrease tanking, and the games have even been exciting which is a nice bonus, im sure theyll keep working on solving the resting issue but i kinda doubt theres as easy of a solution out there

― lag∞n, Monday, April 25, 2022 8:01 AM (forty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

add in that one of the lower teams that got in via the play in is giving the #1 seed a handful

the play-in has definitely worked better than i thought mostly due to the upward pressure to be the 6 seed.

yeah ive come around on the play in but dont think i will ever like the mid season tourney idea

getting rid of back to backs is my main thing thats the source of the most rest days afaict, also just generally a bummer when your team is playing without rest vs a team that is rested

a higher quality game makes them more money tho

much as I'd like to think is true, I don't believe this. the committed fans will watch the regular season because it's still the highest quality hoops in the world (outside of the nba playoffs) and casuals can't appreciate differences in quality and don't really care.

ciderpress otm, it’s not fair and also probably the biggest cause of resting guys(citation needed)

how feasible is it to eliminate back-to-backs? MSG, for example, is booked pretty full in winter and i have no idea who gets first crack at the dates they want

if back-to-backs are necessary another possibility would be playing two-game sets. it doesn't give bodies time to recover, but eliminating the need for travel in between would surely be a bonus (and fewer overall trips would save teams on travel expenses)

how feasible is it to eliminate back-to-backs? MSG, for example, is booked pretty full in winter and i have no idea who gets first crack at the dates they want

Answer is to fold the Knicks.

finally

League discussed update on the “transition take foul” during its General Managers meeting in Chicago today. There was widespread support in meeting, as conversations have been ongoing among the NBA, NBPA and Competition Committee over the past several months. https://t.co/TZnkcWcYLD

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) May 17, 2022

ok that’s good

also announced they are moving towards the in season tourney. reallllllly interested to see whats proposed here

ok that's bad

the play in worked so they earned it but itll prob be dumb, as long as they dont make it affect playoff seeding or whatever i dont really care maybe itll be fun who knows

yes more games what we need is more games

The NBA is changing the take foul rule for summer leagues in San Francisco, Utah and Las Vegas -- one free throw, plus the ball, for transition take fouls.

Likely a precursor to what's coming to the NBA. Board of Governors expected to make the final change later this month.

— Tim Reynolds (@ByTimReynolds) July 1, 2022

the play-in is here to stay. wonder if theyll find a place to put the stats?

ESPN Sources: NBA’s Board of Governors is expected on Tuesday to approve the Play-In Tournament as a regular part of future league seasons. The Play-In had been voted on a year-to-year basis in past two seasons, but support exists to turn it into annual element of NBA structure.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) July 11, 2022

nice

The NBA Board of Governors have approved the "Transition Take Foul rule" this rule would award the offensive team with one free throw and retain possession, Per @ShamsCharania pic.twitter.com/pQsc2VccsY

— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPointsApp) July 13, 2022

Bless

Harden currently in the lab trying to figure out a way to game it in his favor

CP3 was already good at drawing those, he's gonna be out of control this season

this would be interesting

One of the best basketball leagues in the world, the ACB in Spain, is testing a new rule this season.

When inbounding the ball in the backcourt the referees no longer need to have control of the ball first.

(For the first 38 minutes of the game). pic.twitter.com/S4xJN3bfPG

— Dionysis Aravantinos (@AravantinosDA) September 21, 2022

love it

would likely lead to +/- 5 on-court heart attacks each year

NBA rules change this season to limit prolonged standing of bench players/coaches and crowding of sideline. Warning first. Then delay-of-game warning. Then technical. Unsportsmanlike technical assessed for players not in game who enter playing court or making "distracting" move.

— Ira Winderman (@IraHeatBeat) September 23, 2022

theoretically good seems like something that will never be enforced tho

So the Celtics bench always stands until their first basket, but the refs just held up play to tell all of them to sit down and get out of the way lol

— Jared Weiss (@JaredWeissNBA) October 5, 2022

seems like drafting high schoolers might not actually happen

Agents have no interest in guaranteeing full NBA combine participation or giving up control of players' medicals -- the only real leverage they have currently in steering clients away from undesirable franchises with poor track records for player development. NBPA members say they see little benefit to allowing a new class of teenagers to come in and take roster spots from veterans. And NBA executives are openly dreading the idea of returning to high school gyms and being forced to make career-altering decisions with limited information at their disposal. Sources say the union is indicating that in order to give Adam Silver -- who is the clear-cut driving force behind the elimination of the age limit -- what he desires in collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2024, they expect to receive major financial concessions from team owners in exchange for this bargaining chip, something that may not be attractive to franchises since many believe that making the league even younger will water down the talent level. The fact that college basketball's biggest stars are now able to earn six- and seven-figure deals thanks to name, image and likeness deals softens some of the ethical concerns some had regarding preventing teenagers from earning a living when there is clearly a significant market for their services.

https://www.espn.com/nba/insider/insider/story/_/id/34775143/lessons-learned-team-usa-junior-national-team-mini-camp-cam-boozer-going-really-good

adam silver and... condoleezza rice are maybe the only ones who really want to do it

Silver himself admitted that, in the past, he favored increasing the age limit to 20, in theory meaning players would spend two years between high school and the NBA. But, after seeing how things have evolved over time -- including, he said, the proliferation of NIL deals and "a lot of societal changes," and the recommendations of the NCAA committee led by Condoleezza Rice on the subject -- he has changed his mind.

"It may be the case that it's in all of our interests that we start impacting with these young players, especially because in our sport they are identified at such a young age," Silver said, "and begin working with them on their development then, not just basketball skills but increasingly there's a focus on their mental health, their diets, just helping them build character and all of the important values around the sport."

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/34233695/nba-stiffens-penalty-transition-take-foul-approves-permanent-play-tournament

seems like silver is looking at it from a development perspective which is prob the way in which it makes sense no 18 year old is really good enough to be in the nba, maybe lebron idk

if you took the development pov to its rational conclusion what you would have imo is not drafting high school kids but rather euro soccer style academies, which is prob best from the pov of the players having basketball careers, there is the question of whether they have childhoods but most of these top players are so deep in the basketball system already its more offering them a better system than the typical aau prep schools weird quasi agent guys hanging around

particularly these guys just playing a million games is not great for their bodies and can cause injury issues, just giving them access to professional trainers, nutrition etc would be a huge plus, not playing so many games, focusing on skills development and so forth

i support the change to 18 on principle but otoh it’s possible the current system is….fine? not perfect but good enough?

i feel far less passionate about this subject now that there’s stuff like g league ignite & NIL etc. as a fan i’m not dying to accelerate the timeline on these kids by one year, i don’t see how it would change the viewing experience in any real way

i’m kinda surprised that silver is so passionate about this… ignite seems like a real success and i think for the league there is a benefit to players like zion, trae, scoot, wembanyama etc cultivating stardom for a year before entering the league

yeah i dont think drafting 18 year old is really good for anyone except maybe the players, from a purely entertainment standpoint having players do two years of college would prob be the best cause theyd be better and more famous by the time they hit the league, and itd be better for the college game, of course there are so many non college options now so its a little different, but thats not going to happen anyway

entertainmentwise drafting high school kids is i think a pretty strong negative you get too many busts and even good players take so long to develop

and yeah agree now that there are legit ways for them to get paid its less exploitative

only two of the top five prospects in this years draft are even in college, got big victor in europe, scoot on ignite, and ausar thompson is on the tiktok team (overtime elite)

it feels like refs just no longer call guys for not having two feet behind the line when inbounding the ball after a made basket anymore? obv i have no problem with this but i feel like i’m constantly noticing guys breaking this “rule”

Yah they don’t even bat an eye as long as you pass it in with confidence

i have not noticed this but i will keep an eye out

jokic is bad about this

lets fuckin do this lol

The NBA and Adam Silver have considered “relegation” as a punishment for tanking teams, where two of the worst NBA teams would be demoted to the G-League and two of the best G-League teams would be put in the NBA.

(via @Baxter, https://t.co/H4DDgFZutw) pic.twitter.com/Jo0yc3iHE5

— ProCity Hoops (@ProCityHoops) October 22, 2022

something tells me the kings will vote no on this proposal

the idea of random g league teams with shitty little stadiums losing every game in the nba and nba teams winning every game in the g league is pretty funny they should give it a shot

in all seriousness tanking is usually a bummer story for the nba but i think the wembanyama hysteria is prob good pr

everything about this proposal is correct and nothing is wrong

im not opposed to pro/rel in principle if the 2nd division was like euro soccer, but the g league is more like minor league baseball and p much every team is owned by another franchise, this is bad

like if the nba wants to expand to 32 teams and make 16 teams the top flight and the bottom 16 the 2nd (with the bottom 16 eligible for the lottery) then have them play against each other in the tournament thing they want to do, i think they'd get some owner buy-in, but the g-league is a joke

Just make the lottery for the top few picks a true lottery - every team in the league gets one ping-pong ball. (Okay maybe every team but the team that wins the title, they get no ping-pong balls cause they're the only team that doesn't need the help.)

bison is right—it’s as if no one has explained to them how relegation actually works

Yah in theory it is cool but a lot of other changes would need to take place and I don’t see it happening. I actually think the bottom three teams getting even odds has helped as well as the play in tourney. This year may be diff tho w scoot n ‘Yama as prize. Just feels like tanking was way worse a few seasons ago.

silver's obsession w/ european soccer is really tiresome

i hate it, it's ahistorical nonsense

seems to me like silver is just saying this as a way of saying “we’re looking at radical solutions” as cover for some truly desperate tanking to come while the league does nothing about it

yeah

They want more international money

weak

The NBA does not credit assists thrown off the backboard. It’s in the stats manual. Seems like something that should be reconsidered. https://t.co/rPaebwN4Rb

— Tim MacMahon (@espn_macmahon) October 23, 2022

many of these seem directly inspired by draymond

The NBRA fully supports and enforces the “Respect for the Game” program announced today. This is another step forward in fostering mutual respect in all arenas at all levels and reaffirms the existing “Respect for the Game” rules. pic.twitter.com/y8YW6w5ruT

— NBA Referees (@OfficialNBARefs) October 25, 2022

lol at its ok to point at the jumbotron as long as youre chill about it

love to gesturing

inspired by draymond and the majority of the stars in the league. luka is real bad at this.

no one is near draymond hes got a tier to himself

i can seem him doing every one of these, most players stick to one or two

he doesnt point to the teleprompter usually. but yes he is the worst at ref interactions.

the one i hate to see them enforce is the "wave offs" theres nothing better than a psh wave off and walk away that should def be legal

tatum does that on almost every drive, tho i noticed hes dialed it back this year which is good cause you cant think you got fouled on every play

tho its actually a combo of two of the offenses raise arms then wave off

https://media.tenor.com/S2_5-WzdLDkAAAAd/pssshh-psh.gif

league wants hard cap lol

Story filed to ESPN: The NBA is pursuing the implementation of an upper salary limit in its negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement with the National Basketball Players Association, a systematic change that has been met with significant union resistance.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) October 28, 2022

meaning of "the league" / "the NBA" is fuzzy here--surely the clips and warriors don't want this but some small market owners do.

idk the teams paying all that tax might want it too

the teams getting the payouts want this?

apparenlty its a non starter says woj cos the players association is against it

pretty good thread on the scoring boom

3-part hypothesis for why we're seeing so many insane stat lines in the NBA:

1) More heliocentrism ==> stars' usage rates are higher than ever https://t.co/zONRSzUtyi pic.twitter.com/r7tIUTB9ua

— Lev Akabas (@LevAkabas) January 4, 2023

Heliocentrism... it's FANtastic!

learn things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyzhZzx2a3U

wow the last one!

all those rules are good and should be immediately adopted by the nba

i love the negative point for missed FT, half the players would be out of the league lol

yeah thats the most problematic one would make fouling too good

BUT1 League

Had a theory and tested it out, and it's true. Slowly but surely, players listed 6-4 to 6-6 have overtaken those listed 6-0 to 6-3 as the league's primary ball-handlers. pic.twitter.com/lXQRspVGM6

— Yaya Dubin (@JADubin5) January 17, 2023

interesting

lead guard is really it rip point guard

Deputy commish Mark Tatum tells ⁦@YahooSports⁩ midseason tournament “has momentum”; likely to begin in new TV deal, sources say. Plus, All-Star starters ballot https://t.co/s59wzrpbLj

— Vincent Goodwill (@VinceGoodwill) January 20, 2023

doing this but not doing a two-tier relegation-like structure is so tiresome. If you don't want to do real relegation just take the top half of each division after half the season and put them in the Championship Division that'd be cool right

I've watched like 1.6 basketball games this year but I have strong opinions about playoff formats

relegation is an amazing system but it will never happen in america due to financial reasons, and tbf it has at the top levels of soccer been rendered mostly irrelevant due to financial reasons

imho the draft is a very nice system too tho

imo this is the biggest thing they need to figure out in the next CBA

The Warriors are sitting Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Andrew Wiggins and Klay Thompson in Cleveland tonight. Last game of a five-game road trip. Went into OT in Boston last night.

— Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) January 20, 2023

zero back to backs

would be best, mb this in season tournament is a sneaky way to play fewer games which imo wld be directly addressing the problem

i havent read anything, has any type of format been leaked or proposed for that?

dont think theres been any concrete info but iirc they were talking about not increasing the number of games which then it stands to reason that at least the teams that didnt make it to the champ game would be playing fewer games, obvs big speculation but makes sense to me

i do think there is some awareness that they play too many games but obvs the owners dont want to give up gate/local broadcast revenue, this could be a good compromise if it juices the national tv deal

less games wont ever happen so just find a way to stretch the season or maybe less 3-4 day breaks?

its possible you gotta believe

but in the short term yeah they wld prob have to lengthen the season to eliminate back to backs think the other demands on the arenas hockey games concerts etc make perfectly spaced games impossible

they already did it once why not keep going

I’m 100% against the mid season tournament until the league figures out the stars sitting situation, completely grotesque bullshit imo

your best players play 75% of the time even when they’re not injured, everyone agrees there’s too many games, now you want to start a new tournament because we all watched soccer that one time and liked it, give me a break

if it doesnt result in more games played i dont see the problem it will prob be a big success etc

maybe the good players will/should just sit out the tourney and take a couple weeks off in the middle of the season lol. i just cant imagine the stakes of this thing meaning enough to the players but we'll see

thats the big question is how does the league convince teams to not throw the tourney for rest purposes

the soccer teams already do that!

one thing u could do is the games count as regular season games, you have enough rest baked into the tourney no back to backs, then youre risking one loss for the opportunity for five wins, or maybe less if theres a knockout phase, either way the winners would get a nice boost in the standings, plus some other prize

the question is…why

How would the NBA's In-Season Tournament work?

According to Charnia, the NBA would play "Cup games" throughout November.

The eight teams with the best records in those games would advance to a single-elimination tournament in December. The other 22 teams would continue their regular seasons.

All In-Season Tournament games would count as part of the 82-game schedule. The two teams that reach the final will end up playing play one extra game during the regular season (83 total).

they should do a thing where at the end of the year, the top teams play in a "play-off" tournament

wtf, sounds like a scheduling nightmare... and whats the incentive

lol xp

imo lengthening the season would help to some degree but idk if we can ever turn back the clock on the concept of load management aka "lengthening guys careers is good" and "the playoffs matter way more than the regular season." those things are just kinda inarguable. if the league reduced the schedule to i.e. 72 games i'm not sure that would really change the mentalities of franchises & older stars. lebron really takes pride in playing every night and being on the floor when ppl are paying to see him. kawhi or jimmy butler or whoever don't & i'm not sure the league can legislate that out of them

one thing the league and the owners *could* do is provide a monetary incentive above and beyond salary to entice players to be on the court more. the league and the owners *could* i.e. create a fund to pay out a 10% salary bonus to every player in the league who plays x% of games or something like that. or pay max players 500k for every national TV game they play in. but i highly doubt either the league or owners would be willing to put their money where their mouth is on this issue, or would want to spell the capitalism out so explicitly. but why lie? money talks, we all know that.

the midseason tournament might be a roundabout way of doing this if the prize for winning is money instead of a trophy nobody will care about... but i bet we get a trophy nobody will care about

I think lebrons stated motivations aren’t his actual motivations… which is to break every stat record and make them unbreakable for others

maybe! either way in a macro sense he cares about his legacy and that’s why he plays

nobody will ever explain in a clear and clean manner to me why this in-season tournament is not an abomination to god and man that literally nobody but kia executives and adam silver will ever give a shit about

i think the single elimination part of the tourney could be fun, a lil novelty to kick off the season before the christmas games, its a marketing gimmick for sure but could work to get people talking and interested, i see it more or less as "no big deal" and "maybe a bit of fun"

if the league reduced the schedule to i.e. 72 games i'm not sure that would really change the mentalities of franchises & older stars.

Steve Kerr on the Warriors sitting their big names in Cleveland tonight

“I feel terrible for fans who bought a ticket expecting to see someone play. It’s a brutal part of the business. It’s why I’m going to continue to advocate for 72-game seasons.”

Full soundbite pic.twitter.com/P0ZGbv1DNE

— Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) January 20, 2023

i think every game you reduce it by is an improvement until you reach the ideal number of games which is prob like 50

60. play every team twice and get rid of divisions/conferences

yeah playing every team twice makes a lot of sense

every team twice would be 58

yeah i’m pretty opposed to any of this stuff that doesn’t get toward 58, and i’ll hold out judgment until i see it but i definitely haven’t seen the brilliant incentives that are going to make players care about this tournament.

if you win you get seven fouls a game for the rest of the season

if you win you only have to play 58 games that year

the ultimate prize

the owners would shut down the league before they reduce games and give up revenue. there would have to be an entirely different economic model. maybe in like 20 years when cable TV is fully dead things will be different

i mean they could build a more profitable business with fewer games but that would take vision

Once Elon takes over

there is certainly value in scarcity and while it would take some time and thought i don't believe that 17 home games per team of gate receipts is some sort of insurmountable amount of money to recoup

but if we're thinking long-term, what happens today with back to backs has to be among the worst consumer experiences out there and could be really destructive over time, like if you want alienate a well-off casual fan in cleveland just get them to pay secondary market prices for this game against the warriors where no one is playing.

sorry 12 home games

turning on the tv seeing two teams playing in unrecognizable alternate uniforms and also you dont recognize the players because the stars arent playing is a bad experience

tbf i do think the nba is generally excellent tho it would be better if healthy players played and also if a teams uniforms all more or less had the same color scheme

yeah, the nba is in a good place now which is exactly why they should get after some of these issues now

tbf i do think the nba is generally excellent tho it would be better if healthy players played and also if a teams uniforms all more or less had the same color scheme

― lag∞n, Friday, January 20, 2023 10:07 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the two most important issues

Making the season into a big double round robin is a great idea

Then you wouldn’t even need playoffs

that's how the EPL works but they obviously have other tournaments that their teams go to which adds interest, so you would still want the playoffs to have some kind of tourney element.

to me the big thing that does is get to the ideal of each team playing 2 games a week, you do one on weds/thurs and one on fri/sat, you give the season some structure as opposed to having no idea what each team's schedule is week to week, and every game becomes an event because it's really hard to blow off games in that format.

i agree that would be the ideal, and each game becomes more of an anticipated “event” a la the NFL

but it’s not just 17 games’ worth of tickets and hot dogs - it’s all the ad money that goes with those games

there would still be more than enough games for the national tv deals which is the big money. and local tv is going to look very very different in a few years anyway.

Just someone fix league pass.

538 wants in on the post-up party

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-nba-teams-are-bringing-the-post-up-back-to-life/

Thinking about post-ups in a vacuum, however, misses what makes them so valuable in the current NBA. The league is shifting away from static plays of any kind, and toward a fluid state of multiple actions layered on top of one another. The post-up as a primary playcall, with a ball handler dribbling downcourt and dumping the ball into the post, where a center promptly battles another center before shooting, is finished; that precise sequence has happened only twice this season.x
Once by Jokić and once by Andre Drummond.

this is wild. to think kendrick perkins used to get this play called for him to start every game!

wasting your first possession "getting your center involved" was such a bizarre coaching conventional wisdom

it really was, every team did it it felt like

big advantage for teams who had good centers

You might know it as "walking the dog."

I traced its 70-year history, from 60s legends to Chris Paul, and dug deep into how a new generation - led by @JaMorant - has found its most cutthroat purpose yet.

The history of walking the dog, for @espn: https://t.co/mqGCGIsIgl

— Ben Dowsett (@Ben_Dowsett) January 25, 2023

they need to change the rule that lets you drain the clock by rolling the ball. it should only be used to extend the clock

Disagree. The defending team should just have someone in the backcourt on the inbounds. It’s only happening because they let him do it.

I did enjoy watching peak Dwight go to town in the post

Disagree. The defending team should just have someone in the backcourt on the inbounds. It’s only happening because they let him do it.

― Jeff, Wednesday, January 25, 2023 11:22 AM (one minute ago)

right, until this happens

The tactic came to an extreme head in a late October game between the Nuggets and Celtics. With about five minutes left, Denver forward Aaron Gordon slammed a two-handed dunk to pull the Nuggets within 13. As Gordon jogged back on defense, Al Horford rolled the ball to Jayson Tatum so slowly that it completely stopped before his own free throw line. As Tatum stood alongside the ball, Horford and Grant Williams guarded him like linemen blocking for a running back. Nuggets coaches called for Gordon to force Tatum to pick the ball up. Gordon barreled through Williams so hard that he was called for a flagrant.

the fact that the main person quoted in this article crowing about the value of rolling the ball to waste the clock is chris paul should tell you everything you need to know about the legitimacy of this practice

Oh no, a single instance of it going bad!

ive seen that clip and gordon was clearly being a dickhead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU3gaffdUB8

If you pressure someone walking the dog, you’re going to get a wedgie.

love to have two guys set up in the backcourt playing offensive line for a third player who is watching the ball sit on the floor. that's the kinda basketball you really wanna see

Ideally basketball will become a game where the referee tosses the ball into the air, then bounces on the ground a few times, comes to a halt, and two teams just stare at it for 48 minutes

changing the rules is for cowards, all sports must be allowed to become as perverted as possible

not good

These are the kind of fouls the league has to let go of to bring a little bit more balance to the game.

What was De'Andre supposed to do here? pic.twitter.com/DoSEaFqhQq

— Nekias (Nuh-KY-us) Duncan (@NekiasNBA) January 31, 2023

yeah that is absurd. no one wants to watch that. except calls like that are how the league looks after its stars

dame was even surprised, he was already countering cos he knew he got beat to the call

beat to the *spot

feel like that was just a bad call but they are calling the game too tight imho

its bad when they call those but then miss the more obvious hacks and holds on the perimeter

it’s a contact sport iirc

on occasion

The NBA and NBPA, as part of CBA negotiations, have discussed tying the league's postseason awards to how many games players appear in during a season, sources told The Athletic. It's one way NBA is trying to solve the issue of star player availability. https://t.co/uWKqRdMpMU

— Mike Vorkunov (@MikeVorkunov) February 14, 2023

democratic party ass solution lol

opportunity zones for winning the mvp

thats totally gonna work and is not open to circumvention

they should just have an attendance award, like a high school

yeah this stuff comes from a genuine place but all it's going to lead to is guys starting games and then committing a foul immediately after tip off and walking off the floor and what not

maybe they'd try and tie it to minutes as opposed to games but i'm not sure that incentivizes playing in more games as much as it does playing more minutes in the games you do choose to play in

there's pretty obvious ways to do mpg & gp as combined metrics

what if they just added a bunch of worse teams so some of the games aren't as hard

it reminds me of trying to protect against hacking... the hackers are always gonna be one step ahead. teams will find the loopholes in any rule very easily

also established veteran stars like kawhi, PG, jimmy, the warriors guys will prob just be like "ok fine we don't care about awards anyway." kawhi and jimmy to pick two already essentially voluntarily remove themselves from all NBA and all star consideration w/ their rest schedules even tho there isn't any rule in place yet. they asked jimmy about not making the all star team and he said "me no care" lol... he knows what he needs to do if that stuff mattered to him but it doesn't anymore

younger stars w/ more to prove already play above what i imagine the threshold would be, they're gonna pick their spots to rest just like they already do. and guys like giannis and lebron who just seem to wanna play every game are not gonna care either way

the league is trying to legislate its way around an existential problem w/o really getting to the root of it imo

yeah everyone knows what the solution is but they dont want to do it for obvious reasons

most of the voters already have a number in their heads anyway. bill and zach always talk about it.

if they want to go full mckinsey the league should push for salaries to be contingent in some way on playing time, like a player who misses games would not collect salary for the games missed but that money would still have to be paid out by the team (and count against the cap) and put into some sort of insurance pool that is then divided among all the league’s injured players evenly. the players would never agree to something like this obviously

right, just like the owners would never agree to paying into an escrow fund that paid out bonuses based on games played, which would prob be the easiest solution. the league has enough money to do that itself but would also refuse, i'm sure. at the end of the day nobody on either end actually wants to give up money so we'll never get a more proactive solution than silly rules changes from the league

I mean call me a boot licker but paying players extra to play games they’re already getting paid to not play seems like an absurd solution

I feel like the stars would just turn around and negotiate to be paid a comparable incentive payment to not play

players shd just skip the games and go straight to making highlights for ig and tt

nba finals determined by view counts

I mean call me a boot licker but paying players extra to play games they’re already getting paid to not play seems like an absurd solution

well it's not exactly the same thing...bonuses for stats benchmarks are sort of like performance bonuses in some corporate jobs, but i don't know of a job where you get a bonus for working your allotted number of days/hours.

but either way i think exhorting the players to play with money is missing the point--the teams with the best players are generally supportive of playing those guys between 60 and 70 games a year, and i'm sure the smart ones have already priced that in to their planning and projections. so why are we doing carrots and sticks with the individual players? i can't think of a reason other than "it's easier to try that first."

like would the clippers be happy if kawhi suddenly decided he needed to play 72 games a year to get some sort of bonus? i don't think they would!

well it’s not a question of what the teams want

tbf the teams do make the rules

yeah that gets to who exactly is advocating for high profile players to play more and why this entire thing is probably noise just like the upper spending limit was noise

but it’s not like players are refusing to play, right? it’s teams and coaches choosing to rest their playoffs.

i think it’s on a case by case basis

the league has fined teams for mass benching players for national TV games but they’d never be able to ratchet up to a price that actually mattered

you could also pretty easily incentivize at the team level to play guys

this is all a question of when you turn on TNT or ESPN or go to the arena do you know that the stars on each team are actually going to be playing. so yeah if we go by what the owners want paying bonuses for playing in scheduled games would never happen… we also wouldn’t have free agency and the players would be flying coach on southwest. most of the owners would be happy not even hitting the salary floor. practically speaking what the owners want does matter of course, but again this is an existential discussion about the point of the sport that is best off with little input from the owners who would be happy to just outright steal their customers money if they could. the league and the owners combined could come up with such a bonus system and barely make a scratch on their own bottom lines

you could also pretty easily incentivize at the team level to play guys

ok so why haven't i heard any proposals to do it this way?

but also, all this talk of incentivizing anyone to play somewhere in the area of 82 games keeps missing the point. the regular season has too many games!

I thought this was interesting from a recent article I read about this stuff:

At the end of the 1989-90, Stern was fining teams for resting players. On the last day of that season, the Lakers chose to rest James Worthy and Magic Johnson against the Blazers for a nationally televised game, even though the Lakers and Portland were locked into their playoff seeds (Portland ended up winning by 42). Jerry Buss actually apologized for the resting, though Pat Riley was defiant that it wasn’t worth the risk stating that he had “an obligation to our management” to protect his stars. The NBA said the fine was “for failing to play two healthy players who are normally starters.” Riley had fought this battle before. In 1985, the Lakers were also fined for not playing Magic or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a season-ender against the Kings.

but it’s not like players are refusing to play, right? it’s teams and coaches choosing to rest their playoffs.

― Piven After Midnight (The Yellow Kid), Tuesday, February 14, 2023 10:28 PM (one hour ago)

agree w/ jordan that it’s case by case, which is why I really don’t think a bonus system is going to move the needle here. kawhi isn’t getting out of bed for a few extra bucks to play in a random tuesday night TNT game, and the team obviously isn’t going to care if their star does or doesn’t get a bonus. (I assume you’d have to not make this count for the cap.) this is really why the only real solution is to address the root cause and just to reduce the number of games

which is why if you’re going to avoid actually addressing the problem you’d do better imo by disincentivizing players from missing too many games while also making sure the owners don’t benefit from that. you miss more than 10 games, you forfeit a game check for each additional game you miss but get a payout from the insurance pool which is financed by those forfeited salaries and by luxury taxes. the players full salary still counts against the cap to discourage teams from paying players under the table to miss games. also deals with malcontents like kyrie or jae crowder. at the end of the season the surplus from the pool goes to rookies or to some charitable cause or something

obviously there are a lot of holes in this proposal, for example how to do treat end of the bench guys who are suiting up but not getting run, obviously they shouldn’t be penalized. (though maybe their insurance pool payouts are actually bigger than their usual game checks.)

just ban zones again. less movement on defense, less stress on everyones joints, and the stars get to cook. everyone wins.

the answer is fewer games of course but that ain't happening.

lmao get a grip

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver unveils streaming experience of the future via the NBA App - and you can be in it! pic.twitter.com/FKYJvskf0H

— NBA (@NBA) February 17, 2023

that is.....something

lol thats pretty funny

rashad has hella vertical for his age impressive

gonna be a lot of people scanning their dicks for this

As long as there's such vast sums of money at stake the league is going to tinker with every aspect of the "product" to maximize its profits and growth potential, while the teams, coaches and players will game every change to the system every way they can think of to maximize benefits to themselves. Pro sports are a very pure form of capitalism in that way.

With #NBA as our first professional sports league partner, we will bring select live @NBA games to fans in #SharedReality at our immersive entertainment venues in LA & Dallas, with more venues to come, bringing fans together in person & closer to the game.https://t.co/5uVWs820mz pic.twitter.com/aTsKd6klUv

— Cosm (@experiencecosm) February 17, 2023

so like…. an annoying movie theatre?

love to have an immersive entertainment experience

Do you want a mid-season tournament?

DeRozan: “I love hooping, man. I play in the summer, every summer, for free. Midseason? I’m all for it.”

How many games should a player have to play to be MVP?

DeRozan: “All of them. All 82.”

Mikal bridges MVP.

Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game was the lowest rated and least-watched edition of the game, per @paulsen_smw

• Ratings declined 29% and viewership 27% from last year’s All-Star Game

• The record-low audience places the NBA All-Star Game well behind this year’s NFL Pro Bowl

•… https://t.co/7vjNs9pe8B pic.twitter.com/sZ2jJXdXur

— NBACentral (@TheNBACentral) February 22, 2023

with the glut of talent the league has right now, the product is not ideal

not headed in a good direction. theres a lot to figure out.

they have no idea how to market the international stars either.

my three point (ha) plan to save the nba

1 reduce number of games to 58
2 limit number of uniform designs to 3, all in team colors throwbacks excepted, return to home white road color scheme, no nickname jerseys are allowed "the city" is grandfathered in tho
3 widen court so the three point line is a uniform 23-9 and there is space to shoot without stepping out of bounds all the time

that should pretty much do it, please dont respond saying this will never happen because thats a loser mentality, the nba needs these three big ideas very much

ok also

4. dial the officiating back a bit let em play a lil rougher

addendum to 2 no alterante courts

also they should euthanize shaq

that all star game did really feel like a new low in real time

i still think the saturday events are pretty fun, they need to get creative w sunday and figure something else out. it would honestly be more fun watching those guys play horse or do trick shots then what that game was

it was so bad

I like the cray jerseys. Bring back sleeves.

mods

ban jeff

ok also

4. dial the officiating back a bit let em play a lil rougher

― lag∞n, Wednesday, February 22, 2023 11:35 AM (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think they should just ref it how they do in the playoffs, it really shouldnt be two different sports between the two and yet.

that all star game did really feel like a new low in real time

i still think the saturday events are pretty fun, they need to get creative w sunday and figure something else out. it would honestly be more fun watching those guys play horse or do trick shots then what that game was

― J0rdan S., Wednesday, February 22, 2023 1:48 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I am pretty certain they’d take 3 on 3 a lot more seriously

If it was post-season like the probowl instead of a couple months before the playoffs then injury worries wouldn't be as big a factor. Of course, a lot of the best players would be pretty gassed by then. Another argument for shortening the season.

i was reading something where they pointed out that picking the teams right before the game is completely insane if you want a competitive game, no one has time to even think about who they're playing with. i would get rid of that, get rid of the elam ending, simplify the voting and try to start over.

shorten the game too

have they tried begging the players to care

i mean it's completely doomed as a concept but they've also just been stepping on a lot of their own rakes recently

Just play the game in 2K

i think just like two years ago was a fun game?

They should add an all-2k twitch game. Ayton would be the perennial captain in the west. Who would it be in the east? Simmo the Savage?

They could also try playing by North Korean rules

haha ok

Among the most critical issues, the NBA and NBPA are negotiating new luxury-tax tiers and rates to increase the lower tier and make it more viable for teams to spend money into the tax. As salaries continue to increase across the league, increasing the lower tax bracket tier allows the tax tiers to match up with the money being spent.

Sources: The NBA and NBPA are progressing in talks on reaching a new Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Full story at @TheAthletic on key issues such as luxury tax brackets, one-and-done rule, player extension limits and more: https://t.co/OPe3lC3hIC

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) February 27, 2023

this one is funny who wants it exactly

Lowering the age eligibility for the NBA Draft to 18 years old, which would effectively end the one-and-done system in college basketball. The NBA and NBPA have momentum on an agreement to terms that would lower the age to 18 for the draft, but sources say the union is pushing for conditions that would facilitate veteran players providing tutelage and orientation to the high schoolers entering the league. The players union wants to maintain the presence of veteran players and not allow newcomers to replace them, especially in the cases of teams with high school prospects who enter the NBA.

anytime you have an opportunity to use the world tutelage you gotta do it

the tax tiers thing is actually a pretty big flaw right now, the tiers need to be adjusted on the fly as salaries increase.

they calculate it anew every year no

i think they’re referring to the actual amount of money between the tiers which iirc is only $5 million even though average player salary is now i think north of 10. they want to make it so signing one guy doesn’t blow right through the first tier.

ah ok

it is funny tho that they did this to stop themselves from spending so much money but they just cannot stop, if i were a tax reciving team id be like no the tiers are fine

these two seem very reasonable

Increasing the contract extension limits, which would add flexibility and have significant effects incredibly quickly. Under the current CBA, teams and players can only increase the player’s salary by 120 percent in the first new year of the extension unless that player qualifies as a designated player/rookie or makes well below the league’s average salary. Shifting that 120 percent to potentially 140-150 percent as the sides have discussed, according to sources, opens the door a lot more for players who signed contracts that eventually become below-market deals to get enough of a raise to commit ahead of time, a group that potentially includes O.G. Anunoby, Domantas Sabonis and Lauri Markkanen over the next few seasons.

Smoothing out the process by which the salary cap rises instead of allowing the cap to spike, which occurred in 2016 and led to several overpriced contracts.

imposing a salary cap but then arranging a complicated tiered system of payments that allow you to spend over the cap you are imposing on yourself is a really funny circular game. like i get why it exists in this league but on its face it's still plainly stupid

to their credit its a fun game, basketball is easily the best general manager sport

i would love to see them do some things to ease player movement in this CBA but it feels like the teams are still pushing it in the other direction. there is a healthy balance between the FA and trade markets that is heavily imbalanced now bcuz every star player is incentivized to take the massive extension that they can only get from one team the first day it's made available

the decision was nearly 15 years ago and teams are still so shook by it. free agency is a more fun and overall a more healthy system than "you can only afford to acquire a star player if you are willing and able to mortgage a half decade of your franchise"

or put another way i don't see how the bradley beal situation is beneficial to the league overall, or really to the wizards either. everyone is a loser in that situation except brad beal but even he kinda loses too

the biggest max deals coming at the point when players decline is a flaw in the system

players should be eligible for super max as soon as their rookie deal is done imho

they are if they make an all nba team its just not as big of a super max as later cause the whole system is built on yearly raises

it shd be the superest of maxes, like imagine tatum on the dame deal

nba needs to set up their own academies to protect kids from aau basketball its bad

The whole picture starts with players sometimes playing between 10 and 20 games per week between school, AAU and competitive runs.

By the time guys get to the NBA, a lot of damage has already been done. NBA teams are mostly trying to hold of what feels inevitable for too many. https://t.co/S0gipY7dIZ

— Keith Smith (@KeithSmithNBA) March 9, 2023

i keep wondering whether the ball bros having a bunch of injuries is related to stuff like that

Specialization is a killer. (Hollinger snippet below from our load management story: https://t.co/9YhWYHKBEx)

It ain’t just the NBA. In baseball, you hope pitchers have already had their Tommy John’s before you get them. pic.twitter.com/NdtadVNe0p

— Eric Nehm (@eric_nehm) March 9, 2023

also, humans keep getting bigger, stronger, faster - ligaments and cartilage generally don't get stronger/tougher.

NBA, NBPA moving closer to agreement to establish rule that a player must play in a minimum number of games to be eligible for major awards as part of potential new Collective Bargaining Agreement, sources say.

Full details in The Bounce at @TheAthletic: https://t.co/0BKUBNAkQr

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) March 13, 2023

that it’s going to be based on games rather than minutes is just the icing on the cake

The Mavs say Kyrie Irving (right foot soreness) joins Luka Dončić (left thigh strain) as OUT tonight against Memphis.

— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) March 13, 2023

kyrie shutting it down early to save himself for the summer contract for whichever team is sucker enough to sign him

I was curious whether 1 of 7 games featuring both teams' top two players was a big outlier. So, I asked @DanFeldmanNBA to compile the data, and High Quality Matchup Rate was born:https://t.co/BvF4Plouidhttps://t.co/iikfe4g3hO

— Nate Duncan (@NateDuncanNBA) January 26, 2023

High Quality Matchup Rate was just 25% over the weekend. pic.twitter.com/MrK8SQh8bA

— Nate Duncan (@NateDuncanNBA) March 20, 2023

new CBA has been agreed upon but still needs to be ratified. sounds like the midseason tournament is happening, among other things

this thing where they’re killing the midlevel completely for high-spending teams sucks

yeah one would think the players wouldnt like that

it might be good imo

Wonder how many of these we'll see under the new rule of 65-game qualification for MVP, DPOY, 6MOTY, MIP, etc. https://t.co/PLTRWSjK9d

— Tom Haberstroh (@tomhaberstroh) April 1, 2023

this will be great

one has to imagine they’ll have try and close such loopholes to a degree i.e. a “game played” for awards purposes only counts if you play at least 15 minutes or something

saw somewhere that weee is getting removed from drug testing for good, i guess that’s the players big win in this

they should be able to vape on the bench

When was the last time a player got suspended for weed? Feel like it’s already been removed from testing off the record or something

i’m still shook by stephen jackson revealing he used to smoke weed before games. few things would make me panic harder than smoking weed and then sitting on an NBA bench with all that noise & stimulation around me waiting to be called into the game. but i guess that’s why i’m not stephen jackson

yeah thats wild lol

i bet he smoked it a lil while before the game so that he wasnt super high but still feeling loose

like you get high then warm up and by the time the game starts youre in the zone, thats what i used to do at the gym lol

it’s a good thing there are only 2 games today, this way more games can be played the other days. if you’re making the schedule you definitely want to block some days off to not have games

they dont want to catch march madness

there’s no known cure for it

April fools theres actually 100 games today

shd be fine

Game changer: The league's new collective bargaining agreement will give players the ability to invest in NBA and WNBA teams, as well as promote and/or invest in sports betting and cannabis companies, sources tell @TheAthletic @Stadium.

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) April 2, 2023

invest in the teams they play for?

must be april fools

love to invest in sports betting while playing professional sports

New cba sucks for teams that draft and develop well.

no games tonight, more games other days!

many games on tues, bos-phil cld be nice but wonder if we might be in rest mode east seedings are looking pretty set

I think officiating hasn't been mentioned enough as a factor in the NBA's offensive explosion this season

16.6% of all 2-point shot attempts drew fouls this year, a massive increase from 15.2% last season, which was already the highest mark of the 21st century pic.twitter.com/GAuFTzNbwK

— Lev Akabas (@LevAkabas) April 13, 2023

hmm not good

that's interesting. i'd be curious to see how that trends with 2-pt shot location (i.e. more shots near the rim = more opportunity to draw fouls)

^^^

If teams continue to move towards the morey fever dream of all 3s and layups, gotta think this number has yet to reach its high water mark

thatll show em

The NBA says Dallas has been fined $750,000 after the league opened an investigation into the Mavericks' decision to rest several players before last Friday's home game against Chicago while still mathematically alive for a play-in spot.

More NBA from me: https://t.co/A6ycVmnrjq

— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) April 14, 2023

all they had to do was fake some injury maintenance but they had to go run their mouths

The marketer who proposed Slovenia Night now has their head on the chopping block.