3 outlandish suggestions for the NBA upon its return from hiatus

The NBA should overhaul the MVP voting schedule

This last change isn’t quite the groundbreaker that the play-in tournament or the shortened first round would be. Still, it could create fascinating narratives leading to an even more intense viewer experience in the final two rounds of the playoffs.

Remember how I mentioned the 2006-07 Golden State Warriors? That season, the eight-seeded Warriors took down the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks to advance to the conference semifinals. The Warriors didn’t just defeat the team with the best record in the league, though; They also clamped the newly anointed league MVP, Dirk Nowitzki. In that series, Dirk shot a dreadful 38 percent from the field while averaging only 19.7 points on roughly 16 shots attempts per game.

During the regular season, however, Dirk was unstoppable, averaging close to 25 points and nine rebounds per game. Even more impressively, Nowitzki became the fifth player in NBA history to enter the 50-40-90 club—an exclusive club that commemorates only eight players in the history of the NBA. Yet despite arguably having the best season of his illustrious career, Dirk posted an uncharacteristic plus/minus of -6.8 points per 100 possessions in that first-round defeat against the Warriors.

Dirk was incredible that entire season, but he squandered under the pressure when the moment mattered most. While not necessarily a full-blown aberration, that Dirk MVP certainly feels a bit tarnished when you consider how his season ended. So why not make a change? Why not consider an individual’s playoff performance when filling out an MVP ballot?

If the league were somehow able to collect MVP votes immediately after either the first or second round of the postseason—factoring in those previously played rounds, of course—the additional drama could lead to some of the most heated matchups in recent memory. Hypothetically, the change could create something like this:

Giannis Antetokounmpo is crowned as the NBA MVP, squeaking out the award over LeBron James by a measly 100 points just one week before their heavily anticipated matchup in the NBA Finals. LeBron, feeling slighted for the umpteenth time in his remarkable career, cranks his performance up a notch, leading to an unforgettable Finals performance and his fourth NBA title.

While there are certainly knots that need massaging out of this idea, there are scenarios in which this change could create substantial intrigue for the audience. Who wouldn’t love to see the best players in the game take things personally similar to how Jordan did when Karl Malone won MVP in 1997? Sign me up for that right now.

And hey, though this idea would probably be challenging to accomplish without experiencing an occasional bump in the road, at least there would be a chance that we wouldn’t have to watch the postseason awards ceremony ever again.

I’ll save that conversation for another time, though.