The NBA has a regular season problem. Here's how it's trying to fix it.
For Joe Dumars, February's NBA All-Star Game was the final straw.
LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo, the team captains for the event, barely took the court because of minor injuries. Their healthy teammates didn't bother to play a lick of defense, and the game devolved into a half-court shooting contest. Jayson Tatum scored a record 55 points, but sleepy fans headed for the exits before the final buzzer, bored television viewers tuned out, and Denver Nuggets Coach Michael Malone said it was "the worst basketball game ever played."
The NBA's midseason showcase had become a haters' ball for critics who say players coast through the regular season and load management - the strategic resting of healthy players - has eroded the league's nightly appeal.
"What we're talking about is the culture of this league," said Dumars, a Hall of Fame guard for the Detroit Pistons who now serves as the NBA's executive vice president of basketball operations. "We are really emphasizing that this is an 82-game season, an 82-game league. It's not a 50-game or 60-game league. . . . Slowly, over time, you see all this slippage in missing games in the regular season and the All-Star Game devolving into what it did this year. None of that happened in one year. At some point, you have to stop the slide."
The NBA's multipronged approach to fixing its regular season came together in labor talks with the National Basketball Players Association, which produced a new collective bargaining agreement in April, and in conversations with its media partners ahead of negotiations on its next round of broadcast rights deals. After soliciting feedback from team owners, general managers, coaches and players, the NBA opted for the carrot and the stick, unveiling an incentive-laden in-season tournament and formalizing new policies and punishments for missed games and flopping in hopes of improving the quality of its season, which opens Oct. 24.
With the NFL inking new media rights deals in 2021 worth about $110 billion over 10 years, the NBA has plenty of motivation to put its best foot forward before its broadcast deals with ESPN and TNT expire after the 2024-25 season. Of course, the weekly excitement the NFL generates over its 18-week regular season has proved difficult for the NBA to match across its six-month calendar.
To help bridge the gap between opening week festivities and the annual Christmas showcase, the new in-season tournament will begin Nov. 3 and conclude with a Dec. 9 championship game in Las Vegas. The 30 teams will be divvied up into six groups of five teams in a round-robin group stage. Eight teams - the six group winners and two wild cards - will advance to a knockout round. Each team's in-season tournament games will count as part of its 82-game schedule, but the teams that advance to the championship game will play an 83rd game that won't impact the regular season standings.
The NBA's hope is that the in-season tournament will elevate early-season competition the way its play-in tournament, which was introduced in 2020, has helped improve the final two months of the regular season. The in-season tournament champion will hoist the NBA Cup, and each of its players will receive a $500,000 bonus. The NBA also will recognize an all-tournament team and an MVP to add gravitas.
"The notion of a single championship, a single trophy, being lifted each season is fairly unique in the sporting landscape," said Evan Wasch, the NBA's executive vice president of strategy and analytics. "Instead of just having a slow build to the Larry O'Brien [Trophy] in June, we think we can create another peak in December. . . . Anything that's going to create higher-quality basketball, better competition, more intensity and more fan engagement is a great growth opportunity for us. We understand that tradition is not created overnight."
Buy-in from the superstar class will make or break the in-season tournament. If LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant lead their teams on March Madness-style runs, buzz could follow. But if the league's top talents ease off the gas with an eye toward May and June, the in-season tournament risks being labeled as frivolous.
In a blunt acknowledgment that the health of its wider business relies heavily on the availability of its stars, the NBA announced last month a new player participation policy that will seek to curb load management. Executives from the league office have held face-to-face meetings with teams during the preseason to reinforce the importance of the policy, which mandates that healthy stars take the court during nationally televised and in-season tournament games. Teams also will be prevented from resting multiple healthy stars on the same night and from shutting down healthy players late in the season.
The Golden State Warriors rested Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green during the same game on multiple occasions last year. The Portland Trail Blazers and Washington Wizards shut down Damian Lillard and Bradley Beal, respectively, three weeks before the end of the season. Similar conduct this season could prompt a league investigation, and teams will be subjected to fines of $100,000 for the first offense, $250,000 for the second offense and $1 million for each offense after that.
While players will not be forced to play through injuries, the NBA can request health documentation to support a star's absence and investigate teams for possible violations. The Los Angeles Clippers were fined $50,000 in 2019 when then-coach Doc Rivers said Kawhi Leonard, who was on a management program for a knee injury, had sat out a game even though he was healthy.
"I work out every day in the summertime to play the game, not sit and watch people play," Leonard said this month. "No league policy is helping me to play more games."
Under the new guidelines, the NBA defined a "star" as any player who had made the all-star or all-NBA teams in the previous three seasons. However, veteran stars, including James, Curry and Durant, will be allowed to rest during a set of back-to-back games as long as they are at least 35, have logged more than 34,000 career minutes or have played in at least 1,000 regular season and playoff games.
Before implementing the new policy, the NBA tweaked its schedule to reduce back-to-backs and cut travel miles by installing MLB-like "series" of games between two teams in the same city. The NBA and NBPA also agreed to institute a new threshold that requires end-of-season award candidates to play 20-plus minutes in at least 65 games, with minor exceptions made for season-ending injuries or near misses.
Building on those changes, which were aimed at getting stars on the court, the league rationalized its more stringent player participation policy by citing internal data that purportedly found no relationship between load management and injury prevention.
"Before, it was a given conclusion that the data showed you had to rest players a certain amount and that justified guys sitting out," Dumars said. "We've gotten more data, and it just doesn't show that resting and sitting guys out correlates with a lack of injuries or fatigue or anything like that. What it does show is that guys may not be as efficient on the second night of a back-to-back."
As for the actual gameplay, this season's biggest change will be the new penalty for flopping. Referees will use the STEM acronym to help distinguish "secondary, theatrical and exaggerated movements" that meet the league's criteria for a flop and trigger an automatic technical foul.
Though the technical foul won't count toward a player's possible ejection, it will grant a free throw to the opposing team. A similar rule change for "transition take fouls" - an intentional foul by a defender designed to prevent a transition scoring opportunity - reduced the number of infractions from 1,800 in the 2021-22 season to 200 the following year.
If the NBA's regular season makeover goes according to plan, fans will see fewer A-listers in street clothes, more superstar showdowns on national television, a fiercely contested in-season tournament and a cleaner on-court product with fewer attempts to deceive the officials. With any luck, the 2024 All-Star Game in Indianapolis won't leave Dumars as exasperated as the dreary Salt Lake City edition did.
"I think it was the lowest [television] rating we had in the last 10 years," he said. "It didn't make the product look good. You're never in the business of putting your product out there, knowing it's going to look bad and accepting that."
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