If lack of rest in the NBA is putting the players and the product at risk with excessive back-to-backs, then how does the league go about fixing the issue?
There's no easy answer. The NBA is a business, and fiddling with the number of games hasn't been done since the 1967-68 season, when the schedule went the other direction, expanding from 81 games to 82. An 82-game schedule has longer ties to the NBA than the logo itself. Any tweaks would be seen as a radical change for both owners and players.
But the "this is the way we've always done it" defense is a flat-out rejection of innovation and everything the NBA under commissioner Adam Silver stands for. A season of 82 games will yield 578 brutal back-to-backs in 2014-15, where teams are forced to travel overnight, severely inhibiting sleep habits. To recap, studies have shown that a sleepless night or roughly a week's worth of little sleep has the impairment effect of becoming legally drunk. Another study shows that getting four or fewer hours of sleep a night in a week's span -- something that can occur when a team is forced to play four games in five nights -- can deplete a man's testosterone levels as if he's aged 11 years. Lack of sleep can slow reaction time by as much as half a second. One NBA player I spoke to is taking sleeping pills to cope with the NBA's travel demands.
There's more evidence that the NBA's schedule is hurting its product. A recent Stanford study showed that when basketball players got extended sleep, free throw shooting and 3-point accuracy each increased by an average of 9 percent. It's no wonder that, factoring home-court advantage, teams playing four games in five nights on the road play 3.7 points per 100 possessions worse than if they played at home with a day off.
Of course, the simplest and most effective way to lower injury risk and elevate competitiveness is to substantially slice the number of games.
Many smart basketball folks have made this proposal over the years. ESPN's Kevin Arnovitz outlined a 44-game schedule in detail. Shane Battier, when he was playing for the Houston Rockets, wanted 50 games. When he was coaching the Denver Nuggets, George Karl said he liked the idea of 62. Jeff Van Gundy called for 70, and Bill Simmons suggested 75 in this New York Times rundown by Richard Sandomir. There is no shortage of NBA coaches, players or commentators who believe 82 games is far too many.
What's the best option for Silver? Let's take a look.
The redundancy of 82
Forget the health aspect for a second. In its current form, the NBA season is excessively predictable. How predictable? Let's look at the data. Brilliant research by FiveThirtyEight's Neil Paine found that we learn as much about the true abilities of an NBA team after 22 games as we do about an MLB team after it plays its full 162-game slate.
Let that marinate for a second. Twenty-two NBA games. That's all it takes.
Not sold that the last 60 games are a bit superfluous? Go ahead and pull up the NBA standings on Christmas Day last season. There you'll find the six division leaders were Toronto, Indiana, Miami, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles Clippers and San Antonio. Yes, the exact same ones at the regular-season's end. The doormats in December were the same doormats in April, just with more dirt and worn bristles. The Western Conference playoff field on Christmas was no different than it was five months later, with the exception of Phoenix in Memphis' spot.
The irony is that many fans joke that Christmas Day marks the unofficial start of the NBA season. But if you look at the standings, it might as well be the end.
And that was just 28 games into the 82-game slog. Not even halfway and the dust had pretty much already settled. Let's put this another way: Wouldn't it be ridiculous if the MLB season lasted 610 games? What if each NFL team had to play 71 games? Absurd, right? That's approximately the equivalent length of an 82-game NBA season if we look at record variability.
As Paine points out, there's very little uncertainty in a sport when only five guys can play at any given time, and the stars play almost all game on both ends. Peyton Manning isn't playing defense or kicking field goals. Felix Hernandez isn't a slugger batting four times to five times a game, snagging fly balls or running the bases. The NBA is different. Given the immense power of NBA stars, we know where each team stands pretty quickly.
From this perspective, the NBA season could be much shorter and sacrifice none of the drama. We implicitly know this to be the case. Every season we'll hear coaches, players and media complain about the dog days of the NBA schedule. That's what they're talking about; it's painfully redundant. But with a less intense schedule, we wouldn't have to put up with teams too mentally and physically drained to play up to their natural abilities.
The minor tweaks
Drastically cutting the number of games isn't the only answer. There are more delicate tweaks that can move the scheduling issue in the right direction.
A whopping 96.2 percent of back-to-backs this season will require overnight travel. As we outlined Wednesday, the NBA strictly prohibits teams from traveling the day of the second leg of a back-to-back for fear of a mechanical or weather delay that could jeopardize the game.
From the perspective of Dr. Charles Czeisler, the Director of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School who met with Silver last season at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the costs outweigh the benefits under the current setup.
"You do not want to sacrifice the health, safety and performance of the players on all of the games just because one out of 100 flights might be cancelled," Czeisler said.
The league hasn't budged on this rule over the years. It carries a seven-figure fine if a team doesn't oblige. And this makes sense to some extent. Unlike the less strict MLB, the NBA plays during the winter, where snow can disrupt travel plans and prevent teams from arriving to arenas on time.
But it's not as though blizzards blanket the continental United States for five months straight. Loosening the rule would go a long way to ensure we don't grind the players to a pulp, specifically this season, where there are more back-to-backs because of the extended All-Star break.
"Given the NBA's decision to pack more games into a shorter time interval," Czeisler said, "it is time for the NBA to lift the fine or remove the threat of the million-dollar fine if a team travels the day after a game rather than fly immediately after the game. The schedule would be far less toxic if they could fly the next day."
That won't happen this season. The league has no plans to lift the ban on game-day travel.
Beyond that, Czeisler proposes another tweak that could yield a much better product on the court: Have teams in the same division play each other in consecutive games on the same court. Consider it a half-step toward the MLB model. Think about it. Instead of Oklahoma City having to fly across the country to Portland twice, why not just have them knock out a pair of games and be done with it?
This almost makes too much sense. Such a move would drastically reduce needless travel, help keep players healthy, and strengthen the almost nonexistent divisional rivalries, so it's not just another game on a schedule. One obstacle is that a turned ankle may ruin, say, Utah fans' chance of seeing Kevin Durant live for an entire season if he needs to miss the Salt Lake swing.
But is that potential downside worth the injury risk of grinding through 20 back-to-backs every year? Doubtful. While new starting pitchers will freshen up consecutive baseball games in ways the NBA can't, it's not as though the NBA has a problem with consecutive tilts against the same team.
One complicating factor: Arenas are not always available. Circuses, conventions and concerts provide an obstacle for the NBA's schedule-maker Matthew Winick.
Given these constraints, it is admirable that Winick and the NBA have knocked down back-to-backs from its recent peak of 603 in 2009-10 to 560 last season. With 18 more this season to bring it to 578, we're right back where we were six years ago in 2008-09 when there were 580 back-to-backs on the ledger.
But you know what would really make it easier for Winick? If he didn't have 82 games to cram into a 170-day span.
Drawing the line
If we know 82 is too much, how short exactly should the season be?
"The number of games should be that which allows you to eliminate back-to-back games," Czeisler said. "Whatever that number is, that's what the limit should be."
Sounds good, but the precise number for that is difficult to pin down. Eliminating nearly 600 back-to-backs will require the assistance of an ax, not a hair trimmer. Each team has roughly 20 back-to-backs every season. If you remove the second leg of those back-to-backs, that saves each team about 10 games, which brings us to the Van Gundian total of 70. For proper rest, let's use that as the max.
But here's the elephant in the room: In a vacuum, lopping off 10 or more games from each team's schedule would cut the league's revenue by a proportional amount. No owner is going to welcome a 12 percent reduction in gate receipts and local broadcast dough.
But the NBA doesn't operate in a vacuum. For one, the resulting scarcity could potentially drive up TV ratings and raise ticket prices when each game counts more. League revenues could also benefit from an event-viewing schedule pattern.
While the NFL is the king of Sundays, and NCAA football owns Saturdays, the NBA has the, "Wait, which day are they on again?" market totally cornered.
Fewer games, more appointment viewing. Going the Arnovitz route, it makes sense to make, say, Tuesday, Thursday and Sundays the province of the NBA. In a smartphone world of transient attention spans, any way to lock in fan awareness and commitment is essential. Whatever chunk of overall viewers you lose in a reduction in games, it's possible to make it back with new viewers who are able to follow a routine in their week. Right now, the NBA has the rhythm of a rack of basketballs spilling onto a court.
Having a regular, spaced out and restful schedule would also eliminate the incentive for coaches to sit stars on national TV days. Remember in 2012 when David Stern fined the San Antonio Spurs $250,000 for resting Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker and Danny Green, sending them home rather than making the trip to Miami? Surprise, surprise: The game was San Antonio's fourth in five nights. Even though the contest was on national television, coach Gregg Popovich decided to give his guys a break, knowing that extra travel could be deleterious for his weary veterans.
It's unfair to put coaches in the position. When the league hit the Spurs with a quarter-million-dollar penalty, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said he agreed with the league's decision because of the TV money at stake, but not before adding, "It's just as stupid to put a team in their fourth game in five nights on national television. That's just as dumb. You're not going to get as good of a performance, and that's what you want to show."
The major tweak: a 60-game plan
Money is king. And it's not just the commissioner who wants to squeeze every last dollar out of the NBA season. To be sure, players will want to make sure league revenues don't drop, either. Since they receive a fixed percentage of basketball-related income, players have every incentive to keep the pie as big as possible.
But that doesn't always mean more games. The NFL plays 16 games, and its revenues dwarf the NBA's. There is value in scarcity. And why should fans have to sit through 82 games when we know pretty much everything we need to know after 30?
Let's make it a 60-game season. Teams play two, at most three, games per week if they play a divisional opponent. No more back-to-backs. No more dog days. Create a social routine rather than inconsistent viewing.
The league is at least trying to find a good middle ground. Time off in the middle of the season will make the players happy in the short-term and allow the players to recharge the batteries some. That is, if they decide to use the vacation to recover rather than to party. Talking around the league, not everyone is convinced it'll be much of a restful vacation for the players. But it's something.
Regardless, these teams will be limping, huffing and puffing their way to the finish line in 2014-15. However, drastic changes to the system could create more uncertainty in a bullish NBA environment. Cutting the schedule seems like a hopeless pipedream when franchises sell for $2 billion. Business is very good in the NBA.
But with the NFL facing ugly concussion litigation, the NBA has a golden opportunity to be progressive and make player health the top priority. Let science lead the way to smarter management and leadership. Sixty-game schedule or not, there are tweaks to be made in the short-term that can keep the league's financial incentives aligned with maximizing player health. We won't see changes until the current CBA can expire in 2017. Then, the league and its players can get serious about making significant changes. Hopefully the looming media rights deal will be adaptable to any potential changes down the road.
For now, 82 games will remain as franchise values hit all-time highs. But with more dreary back-to-backs this upcoming season, another thing could reach record-highs, as well: yawns.