Over the course of its 75-year history, the NBA has carved out an incredible legacy that includes unforgettable moments, superstar players, iconic franchises and legendary coaches. Basketball is now the second-most popular sport in the world behind soccer, and the NBA is a big reason why.
But let’s face it, the NBA is a boomer, and some of its conventions that date back to the 1940s are beginning to feel like baggage, and they will not help the best basketball league in the world continue to thrive as we race headlong deep into the 21st century.
It’s worth asking: What would be different if the league were able to restart from scratch right now?
Given that the league is 75 years old, the lines on the floor, the rulebook, the timing, the court dimensions and the height and size of the hoop are nothing short of a triumph. These core elements are all almost identical to how they’ve been for decades and have mostly stood the test of time. The original architects of pro basketball mostly nailed it, but there are a few exceptions, both on and off the court. So what would the NBA change if it wasn’t tied to the history and tradition of the sport?
On the court
If All-Star Weekend proved anything, it’s that the endings of typical NBA games are not as fantastic as they should be.
As it stands, the last few minutes of a 48-minute tilt are often brutal. At the exact moment that excitement should be peaking, games are instead deformed by clock-slowing strategies that end up increasing both free throws and stoppages of play.
Nobody could have foreseen this 75 years ago, but the clock itself incentivizes these ugly tactics. The team that’s ahead starts slowing down and milking time, while the trailing team starts fouling and hoisting up wild, rushed 3-pointers (which themselves didn’t exist 75 years ago).
When LeBron James ended the All-Star Game with a beautiful fadeaway on Sunday in his hometown, the basketball world once again caught a glimpse of a better future. The Elam Ending, which assigns a target score after a preset amount of timed play, is simply a better approach, but nobody knew that 75 years ago. We know it now.
The league deserves credit for experimenting with these alternative endings during All-Star Weekend, but now that we’ve seen the positive results, it has to figure out how to get them into real games too, perhaps starting with the in-season tournament NBA commissioner Adam Silver wants to add to the schedule.
For those who argue that the timed game is the only way to do it: Go to any playground or pick-up game around the world and find one that uses a clock.
The NBA would be better off if its games were won by buckets, not by buzzers.
If you think the Elam Ending is too drastic of a change, remember this is the same league that suddenly inserted a field goal worth an extra point to its playing surface in the middle of its history. Big changes are possible.
The 3-point shot was designed to open up the game, and it has definitely worked. Pro basketball is faster and more open than ever, but the pioneers of the arc failed to anticipate the ability of today’s shooters.
George Mikan didn’t pull up from the logo. Bob Cousy didn’t hit 40% of his 24-foot jumpers. Stephen Curry does, and the dimensions of the court — 94 feet long by 50 feet wide, unchanged from the league’s very first game in 1946 — are one big reason the league can’t adjust the 3-point line to challenge today’s pros.
The current shape of the arc (which isn’t fully an arc) tells you the original architects knew it was weird from the jump.
The “short corner” is currently 22 feet from the center of the rim, and the rest of the arc is 23.75 feet away. That doesn’t make sense, but it does ensure shooters still have 3 feet of shooting space in between the 3-point line and the sideline in the corners. The 50-foot length of the baseline was perfect for a league with no 3-point shot, but in 2022, it boxes in the league’s ability to extend the 3-point line.
The league’s last attempt to “fix” this problem — by moving the line in to 22 feet all around, making it an actual arc — encouraged even the most unlikely 3-point shooters to fire away. A similar move now would simply exacerbate the league’s transition beyond the arc. Curry, who drained a record 16 3s in Sunday’s All-Star Game, has changed the league forever. But he also has shown that the current line placement is too easy for today’s best shooters.
The average 2-point jump shot is now worth a measly 0.83 points. Meanwhile, the average corner 3 is now worth 1.13 points. In an era obsessed with data and efficiency, that massive gap is forcing teams to abandon things like elbow jumpers, fadeaways and post play that were once the signature plays of legends like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Dirk Nowitzki.
While the obvious tweak would be to move the line back, that pesky 50-foot baseline has us boxed in. If the league could extend the width of the baselines by just 10 feet, it could reduce the cartoonish efficiency gap between 2-point and 3-point jump shooting, give these incredible athletes more space to fly around and reestablish the majesty of the midrange.
Unfortunately, NBA arenas are already built, season-ticket packages are already in place and even a 10-foot expansion would cost owners a few rows of those tasty lower bowl seats, not to mention cause design headaches for every arena manager in the league too. All because the sport remains played on a court designed more than 75 years ago.
Off the court
Back in the 20th century, the NBA was chasing popularity, and baseball was the national pastime. Many of the NBA’s basic structural features were simply lifted from Major League Baseball, including the ideas for divisions and conferences.
While these groupings might have helped organize schedules and bus travel early on, they are now showing their age.
The geographic clustering of the 30 teams affects everything from our Finals matchups to who makes the All-Star Game.
Would Domantas Sabonis be a two-time All-Star if his Indiana Pacers had been a Western Conference team over the past two years? As absurd as that might seem, three of Indiana’s divisional rivals — the Chicago Bulls, Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks — were once Western Conference teams. The Memphis Grizzlies and New Orleans Pelicans are in the Western Conference despite being far closer to the Atlantic than the Pacific.
If the Phoenix Suns and Golden State Warriors clearly prove themselves to be the league’s two best teams over 82 regular-season games, then why does the league’s playoff format prevent them from meeting for the championship in June?
Many passionate NBA fans can’t even name the league’s six divisions, let alone which teams belong in each. Regardless, these old groupings still influence scheduling, which in turn affects things like playoff seeding and draft positioning.
Because the league’s schedule is tied to its division and conference structure, it’s hard to simply say those structures should be eliminated, but there’s a fix for that too. Just last week, Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey suggested the league would be better off with a shorter regular season. The current 82-game schedule doesn’t quite have 75 years of history attached to it (teams only played 60 games in 1946-47, and the schedule didn’t expand to 82 until the late 1960s), and the idea of reducing the schedule has been floated regularly in recent years, particularly after three seasons (2011-12, 2019-20 and 2020-21) saw teams play fewer than 82 games due to a lockout and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Morey’s suggestion for a 58-game regular season is smart for a few reasons.
First, it balances the schedule across the league. Every team plays every other team two times, once at home, once away.
Second, a 58-game slate would provide players with more rest between games. I’d also open up postseason seeding so that the best two teams could end up in the Finals, even if they play in the same time zone (or even, to the NBA’s delight, the same city). And while historically 58 games has proved to be more than enough to determine who should and should not make the postseason, there is one significant problem with this idea: money.
The inconvenient truth is that fewer games means fewer dollars, both in terms of ticket revenue and television rights, and if there’s something that players and owners will always agree upon, it will be that fewer dollars sounds like a bad idea. More than anything, the NBA is a business.
Since this league’s biggest source of revenue remains tightly bound to the number of broadcasts it can generate, reducing that number is a nonstarter, even though we now know the long-established approach contributes to injuries and diluting the relevance of an average game.
Speaking of the relevance of regular-season games, fans of international soccer love to lecture NBA fans about how relegation is a great way to inject high stakes and suspense into even the worst games on a league schedule.
And you know what? They’re right.
If the NBA were building its league structure from scratch right now, it would be better off including some kind of relegation element. (Though including one would not be guaranteed; just look at Major League Soccer, which was created less than 30 years ago, also without any kind of relegation system.)
In a world where the three or four worst regular-season NBA teams would be relegated to the G-League and the three or four best G-League teams would take their places, we would immediately see three huge benefits over the current system.
First of all, tanking would be eradicated immediately, and teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets, Orlando Magic and Pistons would be sweating bullets right now, trying to win every single game instead of posturing for lottery balls.
Second, instead of tuning out for games following the All-Star break and simply waiting for draft night, their fans would be hyped and desperate. Suddenly, a game like the March 17 Pistons-Magic matchup would become intense.
Third, interest in the G League would explode as fans, coaches and players of teams like the Delaware Blue Coats and Fort Wayne Mad Ants could dream of promotion to the big leagues.
Unfortunately, that’s never going to happen, because the 30 NBA franchises are all worth billions, and the current ownership groups in places like Sacramento, Orlando and Detroit aren’t interested in morphing into second-division clubs after a rough season.
If the league started today, maybe it could engineer a two-division system that includes relegation, but nobody was thinking like that in 1946.
Along with relegation, another thing the league could borrow from international soccer is the academy system. Right now, the best basketball players in the world arrive to the NBA after enduring one of the most chaotic youth development systems in the sports world.
As it stands, NBA teams can’t help players get better until they are deep into their development windows. Too many talents like Zion Williamson or Joel Embiid are shuffled through so many different basketball ecosystems before landing in the league.
At the exact time these young stars need consistent and intentional direction, they get the opposite and move through a dizzying array of AAU, high school and college programs with competing interests and visions for their future.
Imagine a world where NBA teams each had talent academies that blended schooling and athletic development for elite adolescent players. In such a world, players would get exposed to things like professional nutrition, wellness, sports science and practice habits in their teens. Both the clubs and the athletes would be aligned to generate the best long-term versions of these future pros.
The current NBA has no such infrastructure, and its product will be suboptimal until the world’s brightest young hoops talent is nurtured in a professional manner.
One more obvious idea from the world of soccer: If the NBA started now, it would include international squads. Thanks to players like Jordan, Nowitzki and Giannis Antetokounmpo, the so-called National Basketball Association is now an international product, but you wouldn’t know it by the geographic arrangement of its franchises.
If the league started from scratch today, there would be more games overseas. It might be hard to permanently locate teams in Asia, Africa or Europe, but those fans deserve more opportunities to see these games in person, and the league itself would benefit long term from a bigger international presence.
The fact that the NBA was born in 1946 is both impressive and restrictive. The league’s rich traditions and entrenched institutional mindset simultaneously provide it with one of the strongest brand identities in pro sports and prevent it from changing.
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