The NBA is nearing the end of the most compressed 82-game season in its history. The league, in a long-overdue move, decided to finally extend the All-Star break this season in order to give its athletes a chance to rest a few weeks past the midpoint of a campaign that could see some players work in excess of 100 games from the exhibition season in mid-October to the NBA Finals in July.
The drawback to that sort of break, which still didn’t do a whole heck of a lot for some of the league’s top stars (LeBron James, between contests and practices with the Cavaliers, the All-Star Game, and travel, really only got Feb. 17 off), was that the NBA had to squeeze its long schedule into a shortened time frame. It decided against upsetting the recent tradition of starting the season in the last week of October, and as a result 2014-15 will feature more back-to-backs and four-game-in-five-night runs than ever.
That is not a good thing. This is why the NBA’s calander needs to expand. Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban is more than aware of this. From Tim McMahon at ESPN Dallas, via Pro Basketball Talk:
"I'd rather us go later in the season into July," said Cuban, who still is in favor of trimming the preseason schedule. "Used to be, we had to be concerned about baseball. Now we don't. Baseball, particularly from a media perspective, has become regional, so it doesn't negatively impact us from a national TV perspective to go late."
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"I've been bringing it up for years," Cuban said before the Mavs' 99-92 win over the Toronto Raptors on Tuesday, one of three games in four nights for his team. "[Commissioner Adam Silver is] more open to it, and he's going to be considering it. Everybody's for it now."
Silver might be open to it, but as McMahon noted – in a press conference prior to the All-Star Game on Feb. 15, the new’ish NBA commissioner didn’t exactly embrace the idea of July basketball:
“I've heard proposals about them moving The Finals past the Fourth of July. Generally the view has been in addition it just feels out of sync once you get into the summer historically those haven't been viewed as the best television nights, once you get into July, and just in terms of households watching TV.”
With respect to the commissioner, this makes no sense. The NBA Finals are already played in the summer.
In the NBA’s nascent days, sure, a sport created as a winter diversion saw its championship round run in April and sometimes May, but with the playoff and team expansion, the Finals have been a summertime tradition for years. Dating back three decades, even in the NBA’s northernmost American city, these things have been sweatbox affairs. For several generations of fans, the NBA is the thing that saves you from a dreary fall, distracts you from a darkened winter, brightens you with the promise of playoffs in the spring, and finishes its triumphant run just as school lets out and the days run long.
For the NBA to go until July would be no big deal. It’s true that viewers don’t tune in as much to television in the summer as they do during colder months, but by the time the latter half of the playoffs hit summer is already just about in place and most network TV shows have finished their seasons. There really isn’t much of a big difference from showing a Game 6 on either July 6th or June 16th.
The NBA would not upset Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, which this year is set to take place on July 14th. Moving the regular season up a week or so deeper into October wouldn’t be upsetting MLB’s figurative apple cart either, as the NBA has been in active play during the World Series a couple of times in its recent history – including 2014. Pushing out an extra week in the beginning of the year, eliminating pointless exhibition games along the way, and pushing out an extra week at the end would seem to be a simple solution to the league’s player fatigue issues.
Of course, there is one issue that this NBA junkie rarely considers when approaching the league’s fandom as a whole. There is the idea that just an extra fortnight’s worth of play would encourage fan fatigue as the league tacked on yet another week to a too-long regular season and what is already a two-month long postseason run.
That’s significant, and though I’m probably projecting, I don’t understand it. What NBA fan was rolling their eyes at the prospects of seven more weeks of playoffs during last year’s Greatest First Round Playoff Ever? Even when the matchups are dull as dishwater, fans aren’t exactly tuning out along the way. Once the NFL draft finally shuffles off to the hotel bar in April, the NBA is competing with absolutely nothing but regionally-placed Major League games and the Stanley Cup Playoffs during its playoff run. By the time May ends, sweeps are over, and the NHL season ends prior to the NBA’s last tip-off. There are viewers to be courted, here.
The league would be courting them with rested players, as well. Not daisy fresh – no athlete asked to run up and down a court from October until June or even July could be – but likely fresher than we’ll (sadly) see this June. The NBA was completely right to extend the All-Star break, but the resulting rash of back-to-backs and compressed games could mitigate any advancements this season.
The 82-game season isn’t going away. There is too much money to be made in this realm for the NBA to lop 16 or so games off in the interest of a breezier season for the players. What you might get instead is a World Series Game 3 one night, and the opening game of the NBA season the next night. Some eight and a half months later, you might get an NBA Finals Game 7 in July. All while eliminating back-to-backs and hurried schedules along the way.
What, exactly, is wrong with that?
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