Sonny’s 2019 NBA Christmas List

Dear Santa,

Merry Christmas my jolly friend! I hope this digital letter reaches you in good health. I am sending along my NBA Christmas list a bit earlier this year than I normally do because in the past, well, you haven’t come through on many of the requests I included on this annual list. Perhaps it’s because my list has arrived to you just after some sort of deadline. Or maybe you’re just restricted to delivering gifts in the confines of a living room. Regardless, don’t let it concern you too much. Your generosity has brought a smile to my face on Christmas morning for well over twenty years now, but with that said, I do think I was a very good boy this year, so I sincerely hope you’ll consider these NBA-related additions to my Christmas list.

1. I want an endless supply of NBA tickets and a private jet that will fly me to any game that I want whenever I want.

I’m pretty sure I’ve asked for this every year, and so far no private jet, no endless supply of NBA tickets, not even a free League Pass subscription. I know there are some logistical issues that probably make this request a nightmare, so maybe we can simplify this one a little bit … How about season tickets to only the nearest team — the Miami Heat, though if you can make Orlando Magic season tickets work, I’ll happily take those as well — and a gas card, and maybe some spare cash to pay for parking because my gosh it can be expensive unless you want to get a long walk in before the game, and I’d rather not.

2. I want NBA teams to introduce alternate jersey’s that are a tip of the cap to other pro sports teams in their city.

This was another request that I made a while back, and will ya look at that, we’re almost there on this one! This appeared on my NBA Christmas List for the first time in 2016, back before Nike began manufacturing the NBA’s jerseys and creating “City Edition” uniforms that have resulted in some of the best looks in league history.

Now my hope is that you’ll be able to facilitate a move to take the City Edition jersey one step further … for only one night a year — this point is important, because as much as I love the occasional use of alternate uniforms, we’re seeing them far too often and not occasional enough — let’s put teams in jerseys that pay homage to same-state/same-city pro sports franchises. Like in Boston, for one home game per year, the Celtics would ditch the Green and White threads and play in Blue and Red uniforms to tip their caps to both the Red Sox and Patriots. Or in Chicago, for one evening only the traditional Red and Black Bull logo would get a Navy and Orange makeover to show some love for the Monsters of the Midway. Or how about if for one game a year the Knicks wore Yankee pinstripes?

For what it’s worth, every professional sports league should adopt this idea. Not just the NBA. It should be an inter-league collaboration, and if you think I’m wrong, just imagine the Miami Dolphins playing in Vice Night uniforms, and then reconsider.

3. Good Health for all players

This isn’t just a Christmas gift for me; it’s one that all NBA players, coaches, front office members and fans around the world can get behind. No nagging injuries means no games missed for legitimate or load management reasons, and that’s great news for the NBA, because nothing is as humbling/frustrating as being someone who prides yourself on being an all-knowing NBA fan and then tuning into a game and having to say “Wait, who is that?” when you see Terance Mann in the LA Clippers starting line-up because Kawhi Leonard is out with Quad soreness for the third game in a row.

4. I want the NBA schedule to include a Double-Header on Thanksgiving and an all-day marathon on Black Friday

Again, while this list is selfish in nature, I’m also looking out for what’s best for millions of other basketball fans. I understand that the NFL has a monopoly on Thanksgiving Day, and don’t get me wrong, watching football with a belly full of stuffing and turkey and pumpkin pie is one of my favorite pastimes, but the Thursday Night finale on NBC still doesn’t quite feel like part of the long-standing NFL tradition of football on Thanksgiving. I think that the NBA can carve out some space here, especially if you treat this TNT double-header like the opening week slate of games or the Christmas day marathon.

And speaking of marathons, there were 13 NBA games played on Black Friday, and only one of them tipped off before 7 pm. There’s no reason why NBA TV shouldn’t have shown five consecutive games marathon style for all of the hoops fans who still haven’t bit on NBA League Pass. You’re telling me that there wouldn’t have been members of the NBA fanbase who had just gotten home at noon on Friday after foolishly hunting for Black Friday deals since midnight who wouldn’t have been positively giddy about having the opportunity to put their feet up and enjoy the Celtics/Nets game that tipped at noon? And just imagine if there were four more games on the national TV schedule to come after that!

5. A Channel separate from NBA TV that is called NBA Hardwood Classics

There’s no good reason why there shouldn’t be an NBA Hardwood Classics channel, similar to ESPN Classic, as an alternative to NBA TV. Past NBA Games would be played on a 24/7 loop every single day of the year, with the exception of a one-hour block each day during the regular season and Playoffs from 6 to 7 pm where NBA Hardwood Classics would show the original highlights from the most memorable games played on that date in the past. Wouldn’t you love watching Lakers/Kings highlights from a 2001–02 regular season game with Stu Scott telling us what went down.

Oh, is that just me?

6. Let me handle all of the NBA regular season and postseason scheduling and formatting

I appreciate that the NBA is open to tinkering with ways to keep the regular season fresh and exciting and meaningful, but this mid-season tournament that is being floated around … this ain’t it. Nobody is trying to watch the NBA Maui Invitational, Presented by Mountain Dew, because there’s not a single prize that can appeal to everybody — fans, players, coaches, front offices, broadcast partners, sponsors. Why would players care about the possibility of an extra draft pick that is hanging in the balance? For that matter, why would a coach care about it when the NBA Championship is really the only prize that matters? And where would that Draft pick fall anyway? Is it a lottery pick? Would it come at the end of the 1st Round? Or would teams just get two picks back to back whenever they do make their selection in the NBA Draft?

So what other potential incentives are there, you ask? Well, the NBA could just write a whole bunch of checks to the winning team, but I don’t think that really incentivizes dudes to play through nagging injuries like they often do during the Playoffs. And if they did, then we’d need to hear from the assembly of old-timers who would be overjoyed to have the opportunity to tell everybody how back in their day, players played basketball for the love of the game, but today all of these spoiled brats are just in it for the money. OK Boomer.

Look, we don’t need a mid-season tournament to save the NBA’s regular season. The way you contend the malaise of an admittedly long regular season and a deceptively long postseason is to shorten both, and shake the snow globe. Here’s what we do, in three simple steps:

· Reduce the regular season to 72 games — Every team would play three games versus the fourteen in-conference opponents, and two games versus all fifteen non-conference opponent. That brings you to 72 games. By the way, team owners would collectively throw an absolute fucking hissy fit if there were ever serious traction on the idea of losing the revenue from five home games each year, but that’s their problem.

· Best of Five in the 1st Round of the Playoffs — There is nobody that I know personally who is a bigger NBA fan than I am, but even I’ll admit that the Playoffs can drag on a little too long, particularly in the first couple of weeks. The fix here is as simple as reducing the 1st Round to a Best of Five series and making sure that games are being played every other day. We don’t need teams having three days of rest in Round 1, and we also don’t need to see 1 seeds going up 3–0 before dropping Game 4, only to win Game 5 by 30 points.

· Re-Format the NBA Playoffs to a 1–16 seed set-up — This has been one of the pitches that I’ve made most frequently over the last few years, and it’s not because I feel as though the Western Conference will forever reign supreme over the Eastern Conference or anything drastic like that. Once upon a time, the East was the deeper and more competitive conference. This stuff changes with time. Eventually, the Eastern Conference will be on top. It just happens.

The appeal of a revamped postseason format to me has always been rooted in its entertainment value … I just think that fresh Playoff matchups could add a layer of intrigue to the postseason. It certainly does when you play the What If Game. Could one of those heralded Seven Seconds or Less Suns teams made a Finals under this new format? Would LeBron and Kobe had their Playoff showdown prior to the Finals if the league was rolling with a 1–16 format? Would Bird and Magic have played more or less times in the Playoffs than they did under the traditional East/West format? Most importantly, I think a 1–16 structure ensures the best possible late-round matchups, including the Finals. The league have been much better off with the Lakers and Kings in the 2002 Finals than the Lakers and Nets. As much as it pains me to say this, Warriors/Rockets would’ve been a more intriguing AND more competitive Finals series than Warriors/Cavaliers in 2018.

These are the things I think about on a daily basis.

7. I want the G League to experiment with more rule changes

The G League is the NBA’s designated developmental stop for pro players to hone their skills as they work towards being called up to the Association, but what has made the G League most interesting over the last few years has been their willingness to consider implementing rule changes that are designed with creating a faster and more fan friendly version of professional basketball in mind. Not everything that the G League does will eventually make its way up to the NBA, and that’s fine … the G League should be a place where the envelope can be pushed without major implications. So with that said, I think we should shove that envelope right off a damn cliff.

There are plenty of wacky innovations that the G League could theoretically test out — four-point line, two halves instead of four quarters, no fouling out, , but the one that fascinates me the most — and probably one of the most unrealistic concepts that they would ever actually consider — is the idea of allowing teams to create a more specific home court advantage for themselves.

It’s goofy and I would never want the NBA to have any part of it, but I’m also kind of intrigued by a basketball league where a team can look at their roster before the season and decide on team-specific structural or geometric advantages to implement on their home floor. It’s sort of like how Slamball was a cool idea, right? We loved watching guys jump on trampolines and dunk on each other, but we didn’t want Slamball to make its way into the NBA. It needed to be its own thing. Same for this idea I have for the G League.

Perhaps a team would decide that on their home floor they’ll reconstruct the three-point arc in a way that eliminates the corner three. Or perhaps a team with multiple shooters with 30-foot range pushes their three-point arc back further. Or maybe a team that employs a bunch of off-the-chart athletes and historically plays fast decides to expand the length of the court.

There are all sorts of offbeat ways we can spice up the G League. Or, someone can pitch this to Vince McMahon and convince him that the XBA is his next billion-dollar idea.

8. I want for the next time there is discussion about how a College team can beat an NBA team for that college team and the worst team in the NBA to play each other.

Just to prove a point to the anti-NBA crowd, that’s all.

9. I want a Giannis Antetokounmpo vs. Luka Doncic NBA Finals sometime in the next five years

The way things are going, it looks like this should be a sure-thing, right? The league’s two best 25 and under stars, both lighting up the league — winning Eastern and Western Conference Player of the Month honors in November, respectively — playing for teams that are a combined 36–10 at the time of publication, should theoretically cross paths within the first five years of the 2020’s, correct?

How did that work out for Kobe and LeBron?

What’s your favorite MJ vs. Hakeem NBA Finals moment?

Didn’t everyone expect that Bill Walton and the Portland Trail Blazers were going to be the NBA’s next great dynasty in the late 70’s/early 80’s?

How many return trips did KD and Russ and Harden make to the NBA Finals together after they got beat by the Heat in the 2012 Finals?

Those Derrick Rose-led Chicago Bulls teams in the early 10’s have a boatload of great moments, don’t they?

There are no guarantees in the NBA. New stars come up quicker than we expect they will and others fade faster than we anticipate. Teams catch bad breaks. We miss out on the matchups that look like sure things. But if there is any sure thing in the NBA right now, it’s that the two players who will likely define the NBA in the 2020’s were both born outside of the United States, and both have a chance to end up having One of the Greatest Ever caliber careers.

So let’s just make sure we get them in a Finals series against each other … whether it’s via the traditional East vs. West bracket, or at the end of a 1–16 postseason format.

10. I want everyone — basketball fans and weirdos who don’t like basketball — to have a very Merry Christmas

Please send my best to Mrs. Claus and all of the elves who will play a large role in making sure that all of my Christmas wishes come true.

With love,

Sonny Giuliano