part two of the nba 2020-21 anything but regular season

i mean thats the other thing hes just not good anymore/cant stay healthy, maybe the cavs cld buy him out

im sure they will in his final season

this is a weird column

My Column: Inside Damian Lillard’s most frustrating season and how his inaction led to inaction from a franchise destined to be yet another postseason tuneup for legitimate championship contenders. https://t.co/Go8VRkrVWq

— Chris Haynes (@ChrisBHaynes) April 30, 2021

is haynes speaking for lillard?

if i were a western conf team id be interested in talking about a non conf playoff seeding format

it’s long past time and I think the rivalry argument was always weak but I just don’t see why it matters these days with players changing teams all the time, era of league pass and whatnot

imo the rivalry argument is legit but its just not enough

something that was rare already becoming 50% less common idk, what are the current rivalries

is haynes speaking for lillard?

― i was too much listening to your accent (Spottie), Friday, April 30, 2021 12:32 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

they are pretty tight as superstars and journalists go

but I just don’t see why it matters these days with players changing teams all the time, era of league pass and whatnot

― k3vin k., Friday, April 30, 2021 1:21 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is a very good point as someone who has supported the rivalry argument in the past. the 90s aren't coming back. the late 2000s aren't even coming back.

IMHO

eliminate conferences, play 58 games each team home and away, eliminate back 2 backs, 12 playoff teams with the top 4 getting byes with the first round being short series so the top teams dont have to sit for too long / make the 1st round more exiting / give teams more incentive to try to get those byes

my proposal for the nba to focus on quality instead of just racking up increasingly meaningless quantity

imo it should be 60 games with every team assigned a regional rival they play a second home&away against

yeah thats cool i like it

They added Covington, they added Norm Powell... it's not like they didn't do anything. It's a strange thesis

tho if you get a real shitty rival thats nice lol xp

teams realizing that resting their guys is a competitive advantage has really become a big problem in a situation where even before that it was obvious there were too many games, we hardly ever get big national games with full strength lineups anymore, got to find a place where teams actually want to win every game

i just hate the number 58 is all

the other fix is to add a 31st team

its true 58 is a pretty lame number

They added Covington, they added Norm Powell... it's not like they didn't do anything. It's a strange thesis

― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Friday, April 30, 2021 10:40 AM (fifty-eight seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

he even mentioned that but just kinda threw it away. im not sure what else they can do if they are married to the idea of paring dame with cj (which caps how far they can go).

i suspect theyd trade cj but offers that makes sense for them just arent out there

xp it's time for the Las Vegas Blackjacks to finally take the court

teams realizing that resting their guys is a competitive advantage

― lag∞n, Friday, April 30, 2021 1:42 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

a funny thing about this is how many rings the spurs won off it before the rest of the league got wise, hmm san antonio went on another late season tear weird oh well back to playing my star 43mins a night

its the back to backs that kill everythign. i think just doing whatever they can to elimnate those would help a ton.

if they dont remove some games then theyd have to make the season duration longer which also isnt great from a rest and recovery perspective, also wld make the regular season seem and i guess actually be even longer which idk, fewer games its the way to go

its just not gonna happen. they are doing less games this year but a compressed sched so we dont really get to see if it actually helps and owners are going to take less money after the last couple of seasons.

owners arent*

its a tough sell for sure but i dont think its impossible, makes too much sense, obvs someone has to start making the argument as the first step

yeah each game is a little mechanism for printing money

there is no upside for ownership

thats just not true lol

well anything that subtracts money from their charts and spreadsheets is not going to fly, IHIBIDTAE

it's interesting to me that the league is apparently looking for an absolutely stratospheric number for the next round of national tv deals because that's one thing that could soften the blow of potentially changing the regular season.

tracer, spottie, whoever else is out there engaging in this uhh zero summary, youre smart guys im sure you can imagine a scenario in which from a game receipts perspective (itself an assumption fwiw) it would make sense to cut games

make NBA league pass $300, stop cable tv/local blackouts and include the playoffs imo; basically the same deal they do for international fans.

then sell mini packages direct to consumer and to businesses, fuck cable

tracer, spottie, whoever else is out there engaging in this uhh zero summary, youre smart guys im sure you can imagine a scenario in which from a game receipts perspective (itself an assumption fwiw) it would make sense to cut games

― lag∞n, Friday, April 30, 2021 11:03 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah theres options but i just dont see it happening is the thing

obviously major changes are always difficult and unlikely but i dont think this one is quite as impossible as it may seem

1. revenue and number of games played are not very highly correlated, one only has to look at football which plays 16 games and makes much more money than the nba to see that, or even march madness which is played over 3 weekends and has a bigger tv contract than the entire nba, the obvious variable here is not number of games but peoples interest in watching the games, and in fact the nbas biggest source of revenue its national tv deal doesnt care at all about the number of games played as they only broadcast a fraction of them, what they want is games that people want to watch, and fewer games are more likely to create those due to a. decisiveness and b. guys not resting/being injured

2. the idea that the owners are super micro focused on the bottom line is imo pretty clearly not true, these are play things for super rich guys, you can see that in the warriors paying a $100m in luxury tax for kelly oubre or whatever it was, nba teams arent really good business investments, except... for the resale values have been spiking the last however many years, which idk its tough to forecast how far that will go and what exactly is driving it, i dont think its gate revenue, tho having a league with increasing interest that seems —hot— couldnt hurt

3. the resting/injury issue is already acknowledged, theyve done what they can to eliminate back to backs, and are fining teams for resting guys on national games which is obvs just a pr thing to get teams to make up fake injuries so the fans dont get pissed off which is ridiculous but anyway the problem is well accepted already

4. the nba has been pretty proactive in the past about addressing issues with the game, rule changes, pr stuff etc, its not like theyre baseball, and now particularly there are a lot of newer tech/finance guy owners who might be more amenable to this sort of thing

*i am aware the the nfl just switched to playing 17 games lol

i think most of them are bottom-line focused in that they're not just going to punt revenue for the abstract idea of a "quality product" but there are pathways to making up most of it. obviously a big bump in the national tv deals would help, premiumization of the remaining reg season games, some other iffier things like international revenue, gambling, topshot, etc. i think one of the harder things left is breaking free of the RSNs and the 72 games a year thing but the crumbling of cable tv should help with that. i think we're 10 years away from this being a serious discussion.

re punting revenue idk most or some of these rich guys im assuming have made long term strategic plans before or at least heard of the concept

i think baseball could be a useful warning too, dont want to end up like baseball

like also the players and basketball ops people have already made their position pretty clear. the traditional methods of capturing consumer sentiment like tv ratings and game attendance are pretty useless at the moment but my guess is that there's an underrating of the erosion of interest due to guys never playing. i heard somewhere that we recently went like 3 weeks between national tv games where both teams were good and at full health--that should be pretty scary.

not totally relatedly but the huge drop off in viewership across all sports during the pandemic and the question of how much thats going to bounce back is pretty... interesting

also will people ever wear non elastic waistband pants again

no kidding, the nba store always pushes jerseys but maybe they should do a promo on shorts.

the viewership thing is fascinating and no one predicted the dropoff, so i think we're totally in the dark about what happens next.

i suspect some people who got out of the habit of watching will just not get back in, from a human nature perspective and so forth

also i think not having fans was a huge part of it, the fans are key, which was tbf obvious already

yeah agreed. also saw a survey recently saying that for teens watching tv/movies is like distant last on things they want to do after gaming, streams/youtubes, surfing the net, etc.

basically pandemic took a trend that was slowly happening anyway and put a brick on the gas pedal.

teens need to learn about the two screen experience