Would Fewer Games Equal A Better NBA?

This piece is an example of the value of an open mind.

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I will admit freely that my hypothesis going into this piece was to seek statistical proof that today’s NBA player—the one who has been steadily and more loudly calling for fewer games on the schedule—wasn’t as durable or as tough—for lack of a better term—than their forebears from past generations of the league.

Lo and behold, the number bore out part of the hypothesis—the percentage of players who appear in every regular-season game was down 71 percent this season from its zenith, when 19.5 percent of the NBA’s players logged 82 games apiece in 1979-80, and was down 64 percent from the first season the NBA schedule reached 80 games, when 15.9 percent of the league’s players appeared in all 80 games in 1961-62.

But in the process of assembling the data for this study, there was one significant outlier—the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season.

There is a conclusion to be drawn from that which we’ll get to.

The Buzz About 82 Games

Last fall, the NBA experimented with a shorter NBA game, playing 11-minute quarters rather than the conventional 12 in a preseason matchup between the Brooklyn Nets and Boston Celtics on Oct. 19.

When asked about the experiment, Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said the length of game isn’t the problem, but rather the length of schedule.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of how long the game is,” Spoelstra from Zach Harper of CBSSports.com. “I think there’s too many games, to be frank. I think if there’s some way to find a way to cut out some of the back-to-backs so there aren’t 20-plus of them.

“I think that’s the bigger issue, not shaving four minutes in a particular game. But I’m open to seeing what happens with that.”

Spoelstra was hardly along in his sentiments.

“It’s not the minutes,” LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers told Cleveland.com last fall. “It’s the games. The minutes don’t mean anything. We can play 50-minute games if we had to.

“It’s the games that I think we all as players think is too many games in our season. Eighty-two games is a lot. But it’s not the minutes; taking away minutes from the game is not going to shorten the game at all.”

If it were up to Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki, the schedule would be in the 60s for the number of games, not 82.

“I think you don’t need 82 games to determine the best eight in each conference,” Nowitzki said in October. “That could be done a lot quicker, but I always understand that it’s about money and every missed game means missed money for both parties, for the league, for the owners, for the players.

“I understand all that and that’s why I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.”

For his part, Commissioner Adam Silver said during the All-Star festivities in New York in February that the NBA is looking at ways to eliminate as many of the four-games-in-five-nights scheduling blocks for teams and limiting back-to-backs as well (per NBA.com).

But the NBA schedule has been at 82 games every season since 1967-68, with two exceptions—the aforementioned 50-game season in 1998-99 and a 66-game slate in 2011-12, also brought about by time lost due to labor discord.

So Why 82?

If you look at a team’s schedule today, it’s hard to figure out why 82 is the magic number.

Using the Toronto Raptors as an example (for no other reason than it was the first team I clicked on), you find that an NBA schedule breaks down like so:

• Four games against each opponent in your own division (a total of 16 games).
• Four games against six opponents in your conference (a total of 24 games).
• Three games against four opponents in your conference (a total of 12 games).
• Two games against opponents from the opposite conference (a total of 30 games).

Add it all up and you have 82 games.

Not, you know, 82 games that make sense from a mathematical perspective, but 82 games, just the same.

The all-important division titles for seeding purposes are derived by playing 80 percent of your games against opponents not in your division.

It was expansion that drove the schedule to the 80-game mark in 1961-62. The addition of the Chicago Packers (now the Washington Wizards) that season left the NBA with nine teams.

The NBA schedule was at 72 games from 1953-54 through 1958-59, increased to 75 games in 1959-60 and to 79 games in 1960-61.

With an 80-game schedule, teams played the expansion Packers 10 times each, played the three teams in their division (in the case of the Western Division, the three teams not based in Chicago) 12 times and played two opponents from the other division nine times and two other teams eight times.

The 80-game schedule lasted for five seasons, until Chicago was again awarded an expansion team in 1966-67, the Chicago Bulls, after the Packers had renamed themselves the Zephyrs before blowing out of town to Baltimore.

The move to 10 teams bumped the schedule to 81 games for the 1966-67 season.

Two more expansion teams in 1967-68, the San Diego Rockets and Seattle SuperSonics, prompted a move to 82 games.

But this was a move that actually made some sense.

You played your other five divisional opponents eight times (40 games). You played the six teams from the other division seven times (42 games).

But as the league continued to expand—to 14 teams in 1968-69, 17 teams in 1970-71, 18 teams in 1974-75, 22 teams in 1976-77, 23 teams in 1980-81, 25 teams in 1988-89, 27 teams in 1989-90, 29 teams in 1995-96 and finally 30 teams in 2004-05—the schedule remained 82 games.

Why?

At this point, it’s tradition. The schedule has been 82 games for almost 50 years. So, therefore, it stands that Moses brought down from the mountaintop some sort of stone tablet engraved with: “And thine schedule shalt be 82 games.”

This was apparently then delivered to then-NBA Commissioner Walter Kennedy and the rest is, literally, history.

The Outlier

So, about that outlier I mentioned early on.

Since 1979-80, the NBA had played a 171-day schedule, with four days knocked out for the All-Star break, leaving teams with an average of one game every 2.037 days.

Before 1979-80, the average had varied, from as little as 1.813 days per game in 1961-62 to as much as 2.134 days per game in 1978-79.

Beginning in 1999-2000, the NBA played a 170-day schedule with a four-day All-Star break, an average of 2.024 days per game.

This season, with the All-Star break expanded to six days over the same 170-day block, the average dipped to an even two days per game.

But back to 1998-99 or, as it could be more correctly termed, the 1999 season, since it didn’t begin until early February 1999.

The season was compressed to 50 games played over a period of 90 days, an average of one game every 1.8 days.

But a strange thing happened. Despite playing such a compact schedule, with back-to-back-to-backs being played for the first time since the early 1970s, the number of players playing in every game skyrocketed to its third-highest level for a single season since the advent of 80 or more games in 1961-62.

In 1979-80, 56 of the NBA’s 287 players on the official season log played in 82 games, or 19.5 percent of the league’s population.

In 1970-71, 42 of 217 players were 82-game ironmen, 19.4 percent of the league’s players.

But that number had been trending downward for a while.

It dropped below 10 percent for the first time in 1994-95, when just 35 of 407 players were active in 82 games.

The season before the lockout, 1997-98, 51 of 439 players (11.6 percent) played in every game.

But in the lockout season, that number shot up to 83 of 440 players—18.9 percent.

The shorter schedule had something to do with it, certainly.

But not just in terms of raw numbers.

It was because each of those 50 games was much more important in the overall scheme of things (playoff races and seeding).

Resting a player for even three games meant sitting a guy for 6 percent of your schedule.

Six percent was the difference in the Western Conference between the SuperSonics finishing tied for eighth at 25-25 and losing a tiebreaker for the final playoff spot and finishing sixth at 28-22.

Six percent was the difference between the Charlotte Hornets finishing ninth in the East at 26-24 and finishing tied for fifth at 29-21.

In an 82-game schedule, three games is a little more than 3½ percent of the slate—a little easier to take when looking at the macro view of the season as a whole.

The Conclusion

I’ve been an outspoken advocate for the schedule remaining 82 games. My logic was what you might expect from one of the grayer writers on the site—it’s the way it’s been for almost 50 years, why mess with it now?

But I was taken aback by the data for that short 1998-99 season. Now the idea of a shorter, higher-quality schedule makes more sense as a fix for any number of issues that have created noise in the league in recent years.

• If kept over roughly the same time frame, even shortening the schedule to 70 games would all but eliminate the four-in-five and back-to-back scenarios.
• Better rested players would not need to take games off to get that rest, meaning fans would get to see the superstars they intended to see when they bought their tickets.
• Common sense clearly dictates that players with more rest between games would be less prone to injury.

The result would be a higher-quality NBA product, albeit one that would have to have its economics adjusted. The TV networks aren’t going to pay the same amount of money for an inventory of 1,050 regular-season games (70 games per team) as it is willing to pay for the current 1,230-game inventory.

And, no, owners aren’t going to pay a guy the same $20 million plus for 70 games that they will pay for 82 games.

But with 35 home dates instead of 41, there would be less supply and, thus, more demand among fans.

And if the quality of play improves because players aren’t dragging their way through their fourth game in four cities over five days, it would stand to reason that increased quality would also have an upward pull on demand.

I remain skeptical that anyone on any side of the equation—television, players or owners—is willing to settle for a smaller piece of pie, even if it does taste much better than the larger piece they have now.

But I’m now convinced that it would be the right thing for the NBA to do, where I was not eight months ago.

Because data, much like ball, don’t lie.

–Statistical data acquired from basketball-reference.com.