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NBA

I don't think it would be that hard to turn the NBA season from something that is totes boring into something that is pretty compelling.

1) First phase of the season: 66 games. We all liked the 66 game season a few years ago, and it's easy to do: home and home against everyone, and an additional home and home against your division.

2) Second phase of the season:
a) Take the top 8 teams in each conference and have them play each other home and home (14 games), with the top 4 advancing, in lieu of the first round of the playoffs. I have some further thoughts on how to go about this, but the important thing is that playoff caliber teams would be playing other playoff caliber teams every night.
b) The remaining 14 teams play each other once (13 games). Standings after 13 games determine the lottery odds, so that the best placed team has the most ping pong balls and the 14th placed team has the least. Hell, you could make each game be for a ping pong ball, or 2 or 3 or whatever makes the most sense mathematically. (I thought about having the standings be the actual draft order, but I think that gives some teams a little too much incentive to miss the playoffs).

3) Best of 7 playoffs involving the last 8 teams.
 
Too soccerish for American sports fans. Americans need elimination-based, win or go home each round, tournaments.

For the draft order, Simmons has always had it right - go with a separate playoffs for all teams not in the playoffs. You could run it at the same time as the actual playoffs, but more scrunched together so it ends earlier. A team that finishes 9th in the conference doesn't have the worst situation in the sport anymore. They'd have home court for the draft playoffs and probably finish high in the draft order.

Problem would be incentivizing teams other than legitimate title contenders to tank out of the playoffs. Maybe make it so a team can only move up X number of spots from where they would have picked if they based it on regular season record. If X is something like 5, that's still plenty of incentive to not build a complete shit team like the Sixers, Lakers and Knicks have done and also not tank out of the playoffs.
 
Well, more people watched the World Cup than the early rounds of the NBA playoffs last year, so maybe Adam Silver should worry less about what Americans want and focus more on what whoever watched the World Cup are looking for.
 
Reddit says Kawhi is first non-C/PF to lead NBA in defensive efficiency rating for a season since Pippen 95. Shows how slanted defensive rating is toward bigs.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
Problem would be incentivizing teams other than legitimate title contenders to tank out of the playoffs. .
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Yeah, the incentive is a big problem there. If 9th-seed meant best odds in the lottery, there'd be a race toward the middle, getting all squirrelly around the tie-breakers and shit.

I think the best thing would be to have all 30 spots in the draft order determined by single-ball lottery. Each Playoff team only gets one ball in the pot, each non-Playoff team gets two.
 
There are ways to mitigate the risk of teams tanking to avoid the playoff. You could give ping pong balls to the teams that finish 5-8 in the conference. Or you can do what Steve Kerr has suggested in the past, to have the 5-8 teams in each conference get the first 8 picks in the second round; i.e. the first picks that are not on the rookie salary scale. Some of those teams might be better off adding a 22 year old Draymond Green for under a million than they would be adding a 19 year old Okafor for the rookie max. In any event, the NBA is better off if the biggest strategic decision is whether to play for the playoffs or the draft tournament, rather than whether to try and lose 65 games.
 
The second-round proposal is interesting; I hadn't heard that before.

I still like the idea of disincentivizing missing the Playoffs overall. There should be pretty much no reward for sucking, as long as there are still feasible ways for bad teams to get better occasionally.
 
I'm also fascinated by just how little success teams have after winning a top-3 pick. This article is a few years old but I think the basic premise still holds up:

http://wagesofwins.com/2012/04/02/why-t ... n-the-nba/


tl/dr: In 27 years (at the time), 5 top-3 picks have won titles with the team that drafted them, and one of them was Darko. And two others were traded and actually won in their second tour with the team.
 
Oddly, in the NHL, I think the elite pick results are much different, even though one player means so much less to an NHL team than an NBA team. Taking one of the top 2 forwards/centers picked in the NHL draft typically sets you up for Stanley Cup runs. I think the large number of different teams that actually win the Cup compared to the small number of teams that win the NBA title has a lot to do with that contrast. In the NBA, getting one of those rare, absolute best, most transcendent players means you're set for an entire era. The next tier guys, like Harden and Westbrook, will probably never win a title without a teammate in the top tier (Westbrook has one).
 
Sources told ESPN.com that based on current projections, league officials expect the salary cap to increase from its current $63.1 million figure to $67.1 million next season, $89 million in 2016-17 and $108 million in 2017-18. The jumps represent massive increases triggered largely by the influx of television money that will begin pouring in after the 2015-16 season, when the NBA's new nine-year, $24 billion TV deal kicks in.
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Jesus. Should've chosen to become an NBA player instead of wasting my life on academic pursuits. Melo's deal is actually going to be a not-crippling contract soon. Tradeable. Any elite free agent this summer signing more than a 1-2 year contract is kind of an idiot, assuming the players can get the individual max level pushed to around $25 million a year.

Draymond Green will make $25 million a year for 8 years.
 
Warriors have been playing like ass lately in the 4th quarters, almost cost them today. Up 25 and the bench goes full on suck mode. Need to play Mo Speights if Curry isn't on the floor.
 
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