Sky not falling due to new NBA scheduling ideas from Adam Silver

Commissioner Adam Silver said late last week the NBA is open to some scheduling changes, but the reaction among fans has been mixed at best.

For years, fans and media around the NBA have groused about the long-standing 82-game schedule, which was first introduced for the 1967-68 season and has been the law of the league since.

So it’s a little bit odd that last week’s news that Commissioner Adam Silver and the Board of Governors is contemplating some different schedule ideas was met with a less-than-enthusiastic response.

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Apparently, it’s the age-old case of “we want change, just not this change” response.

Among the ideas, reported by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and Zach Lowe on Friday, are the potential reseeding of the playoff semifinals, a 30-game in-season tournament and a scenario by which teams would have an opportunity to play themselves into a postseason berth.

Would any of these scenarios shorten the season appreciably? Not really. According to the report, the league would shave no more than four games off the current slate, saying the minimum under any proposal would be 78 games.

According to the report, the hope is to bring a proposal to a vote by the Board of Governors when it meets in April to introduce some, or all, of these plans for 2021-22, which is also the NBA’s 75th anniversary season (not really, but the NBA sticks to the origin date of 1946-47, which was when the Basketball Association of America was formed, with the NBA emerging in 1949-50).

The idea for re-seeding what had been the conference finals into a semifinal round based on regular-season record would at least give the NBA an opportunity to get its two best teams into the NBA Finals each year.

Last season, the teams that would have been the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in the semifinals — the Milwaukee Bucks and Toronto Raptors — played each other in the Eastern Conference Finals. Under this proposal, the matchups would have been the No. 4 Portland Trail Blazers taking on the Bucks, with the No. 3 Golden State Warriors meeting the Raptors a round earlier.

This is not a new idea. The National Hockey League reseeds its conference semifinals and conference finals, while the WNBA has seeded its playoff teams without regard to conference alignment since 2016.

It is the idea of an in-season tournament that seems to be getting the most push-back in the media and from fans. European football federations — yes, we call it “soccer” — have been conducting these for decades and they are very popular. Tournaments are conducted at the continental level — the UEFA Champions League — as well as domestically.

Some of the best cup competitions in European football include South America’s Copa Libertadores, that continent’s equivalent to the UEFA Champions League; the second-tier UEFA Europa League, England’s FA Cup and Spain’s Copa del Rey.

No, there is no tradition of such an event in U.S. basketball, but every tradition has to begin somewhere, and such an event could provide a break for players and fans from the regular-season drudgery that can sets in both after the initial rush of the beginning of the season and again after the big slate of Christmas Day games.

The NBA wants to include all 30 teams in the in-season tourney, with a group stage broken down by the six existing divisions — which would be included in the regular season — with the six group winners and the next two teams with the best records advancing to the quarterfinals in the knockout stage.

Per Wojnarowski and Lowe, the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association are reportedly zeroing in on a tournament window that would begin after Thanksgiving and run through mid-December.

The idea of holding a tournament after the New Year that would end with a Final Four at All-Star Weekend was shut down after players and team executives raised concerns. The teams were worried about trade deadline roster churn that could damage the tournament’s competitiveness. Players are not thrilled about cutting the All-Star break.

That would be particularly true for players that would have to be in both the tournament and the All-Star festivities.

The addition of play-in games is an interesting idea. There would be two four-team tournaments for the final two playoff berths in each conference. The seventh and eighth seeds would play a single game with the winner getting the No. 7 seed. The winner of a game between the ninth- and 10th-place teams would play the loser of the 7-8 game to determine the No. 8 seed in the draw.

According to ESPN’s report, players are starting to receive information on league calendar proposals on a team-by-team level, without much objection so far.

There are hurdles to be cleared to make any changes. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement includes language that limits the regular season to a maximum of 82 games. Some of the proposals currently under discussion could have some teams playing up to 83.

That’s not even getting into negotiations with ABC, ESPN and TNT over television windows.

While none of the proposals brings the much-craved 1-16 seeding for the playoffs, the reality is that such a plan only really works if the schedule is balanced. Trying the 1-16 plan under the current schedule leaves in the problems with the relative strength of the conferences; i.e., Eastern teams still have an advantage over Western clubs because of easier scheduling.

But the math for a balanced schedule works exactly two ways: Ideally, a home-and-home series of 58 games would balance things at 29 games both home and away. The next magic number for a balanced schedule is 87, but that would be three meetings with each other team in the NBA and would leave every team playing an uneven number of home and road games.

That concern gets addressed at least in some fashion by the play-in tournaments.

None of these plans are imminent and while Silver’s preference is to start phasing in some of these changes in 2021-22, the NBA acknowledged, per Brian Mahoney of the Associated Press, that those changes could be studied for several years before implementation. Silver said:

"“Part of it is just the formality that they need to be negotiated with the Players Association, but even if the Players Association came to us and said, ‘You guys know best, what is it you want.’ I wouldn’t know how to answer it. I think it’s going to require a lot more research, a lot more thoughtfulness on behalf of the teams, players and the league working together.”"

In any event, being open to some new ideas is never the worst thing. An in-season tournament would be different, but it would not signify Armageddon — either for the NBA or the broader world at large.

There has been a vocal group wanting some sort of scheduling changes for the NBA. So maybe let’s see what is ultimately put on the table as a proposal before dismissing the entire thing out of hand.