How to (maybe) make the NBA game better

1. “In the act of shooting”

• No, you’re not in the act of shooting if you flail the ball somewhere towards the rim when coming off a pick and feeling contact when turning the corner. How this stuff is officiated makes no sense at all and is a stupid incoherent mess.
• This should take into account what is a “natural shooting motion”, similar to the justification of removing Kevin Durant’s rip-through move.

2. Replay Center, please be faster

• The NBA is making like 600 trillion dollars a year now, get a fourth ref with 24 seconds to overrule a call. Why does everyone have to huddle at the monitors? Seriously, what contribution is being added?

3. Give the defense a chance

This actually contains a few different things.

First, defending a spread floor with shooters and someone like Harden running pick-and-roll has become almost impossible over the course of a season. Takes too much effort and you have to be precise.

82 games is way too much and at this point is quaint, bordering on hilarious overkill. In the CBA, I would have loved an option for teams and players to agree on dropping the number of games by up to 2 per season, with both sides having to agree to at least one. Just play 58 games (making a bet this is true in 20 years) and stop trying to run these athletes to the ground.

Combining the first and second paragraph, defenses in particular could be much improved by adding practice time and rest. I’ve talked to quite a few European coaches, and while everyone recognizes the players aren’t as good, most of these coaches are astounded by the mistakes NBA teams make defensively. Basic stuff from boxing out to pressuring the ball when fronting the post etc. By my recent coaching experience, I have to agree with this point of view.

EDIT: Personally, I don’t buy the fact that revenue goes down. At least not in the way that you would make 70/82 of the today’s money playing 70 games.

I mean, Doug McDermott needs to build up some solid habits. This isn’t great stuff in a playoff game.

(just an example).

Overall the fans may not care, and the NBA isn’t in the habit of doing stuff to limit scoring, but in a small but undetectable ways this would help the product long-term (read a book recently that covered stuff about how companies react to success and how the marketing team isn’t always right even if the numbers show some good stuff for a while. I feel like there was some good stuff there and the philosophy regarding defense fits that well).

4. “Who the ball went off of?” replays in the last two minutes are somewhat stupid

In the course of a regular game, most of the time when it’s a 50/50 situation the defense gets the ball because when you look at the game full speed it looks like the offensive player pokes the ball out trying to tip an offensive rebound.

Replay shows the reality here, which is sort of ugly, since often even when the situation is exactly the same, the call gets reversed like 80% of the time. This is because when you look at the replay, when you have inside position and a hand on the ball it’s almost impossible to tip it in a way where the offensive player touches it last.

Usually goes rolls through the fingertips of the defender.

This, is also a stupid incoherent mess and makes no sense at all. Unfortunately, not sure if this can be corrected. It may just be a truth of the universe.

Experimental stuff:

1. No shorter games, thanks

• I don’t want shorter games (40mins). This is a bad idea and needs to die.

2. Defensive 3-seconds

• I’d like to see the defensive 3-second rule removed in pre-season. I don’t think it really makes sense necessarily. It could make the game worse, but could make it better too. Who knows? But on the list of things to try this would be pretty high for me.

3. Foul limits

I wonder what would happen if players were given a personal foul limit of 7 and one more team foul before being in the penalty was added?

The immediate reaction of most people would be “this is a foul fest”, but I tend to disagree with that.

I hate it when a team defends well, not overly aggressive, but with a high intensity and gets put in the penalty with 6 minutes to go. Also, foul trouble seems like such an arbitrary constraint on big men to limit playing time. I’d rather see Blake Griffin (bad example, I know), on the floor in the second overtime than Speights.

I ran the math on this once and many of the star bigs are in foul trouble in 25% of games or something, this is too much.

Overall, if we were lucky it may speed up the game. Teams wouldn’t be as often in the penalty, and those are the worst times when both teams are and it becomes a free throw shooting festival.