[valentine]

 George Karl enjoyed playing a shorter season due to the lockout in 11-12 and believes the NBA would be better if it became a permanent change.

"I’m sure Commissioner (David) Stern won’t like this, but I think the product would be better if we shortened the season. When we start playing in late October, the people are thinking football. If you could just get us less fatigue [in a shorter season], I think you’d have a better product. When they started on Christmas Day, I thought, ‘This is not a bad idea. This should be the start of NBA basketball … Maybe start Dec. 1 and play 62 games, whatever number they’d come to."

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do you think it would be better for the nba to shorten its season?

 

[Steven]

 no.

[TyroberParticipant]

 Good luck trying to get the players, coaches, and owners to get up 25% of their profits.

[LipstickParticipant]

I agree it’s a better product, but it’s all about the money so this will never happen unfortunately.

Hard to prove this, but when is a player going to be more focused: November or April (forget tanking for lottery picks)? There’s four months between November and April and football has a full head of steam during the fall and early winter. 82 games is too much and I loved the start of the season on Christmas. So much more anticipation and every game has much more importance when there is even 70 games instead of 82. Less games would also mean more longevity for many players, probably extending players’ primes an extra season or two (as long as they have more rest than they did last season).

Attendance would be much better too. How many times are arenas sold out compared to football when every game is huge? There’s not enough demand for tickets right now in basketball. Basketball teams in Florida will likely never have great attendance because that’s Florida sports in general, but for every other market I’m sure there would be higher demand and more tickets sold if every game had increased importance (again, forget ‘tanking’ for a moment). With less games and higher stakes it would make for a better atmosphere in the arena, hopefully. Atmosphere is one argument that puts college b-ball over the NBA and shorter seasons would help eliminate that (hopefully!).

But…it’s all about the money so it will never change. It also wouldn’t help fix tanking which is a huge reason why the NBA not only doesn’t have as much interest during November and December but also in April.

[bobbybParticipant]

I think maybe a few less games with the long season, this way you dont have so many back to backs

[omphalosParticipant]

 It wasn’t a better product this season, there were many, many blowouts, the bottom teams really, really sucked, new teams couldn’t really gel and coaches couldn’t have enough of an impact without more training.

They wouldn’t be able to play 66 games in that amount of time every season, teams that rely on a star player will break down; see Rose, Howard. This season you saw a number of teams without a star who were successful in the regular season and average in the playoffs (Indiana, Philly, Utah, Denver). These teams were invariably deep at every position and their benches won them games of the course of the season, but once the extra rest of the playoffs kick in and coaches shorten their rotations the stars take over again (see Indiana’s collapse against Miami).

The NBA is all about star power, and if this schedule was continued with a shorter, more frantic season then the stars would only wear down more and you’d see even more demand by stars to play with other stars because the burden would simply be too much. I don’t want to see last season’s Nuggets and last season’s Pacers in the Finals, because while team basketball is great, it doesn’t make for great viewing unless they are either past their prime stars (Celtics, Spurs) or playing against a superstar. Nobody wants to seem two teams deep with starters and no All-Stars playing against each other in a series, it’s boring.

Karl is only saying this because his team is very deep and was able to capitalise, plus this would skew so many records like all-time scoring lists, win-loss records and the like.

[LipstickParticipant]

How would they wear down when they’re playing less games? I’m assuming Karl meant the same number of games but more days of rest (back-to-back-to-backs should never happen) just like I posted earlier. Just extend the season into the summer. Can’t be that hard.

[Jlv2012]

would like shortened seasons.  Given that he has a fairly young and fast paced team, the short schedule with the little time between games and back to back to backs would benefit his team against older ailing rosters.

[Author]

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