The NBA’s tanking problem is a Too Many Games problem, too

Basketball has never been better.

We should start with that reminder before discussing the NBA’s problems. Over the past decade, basketball has improved. Players are more skilled; defenses are more sophisticated; young superstars are emerging to take the last generation’s place. That shouldn’t be discounted even even when discussing the league’s flaws.

The NBA’s product still could be better. It’s become harder and more expensive to watch your team play since regional sports networks collapsed. That exacerbates the league’s problem, at times, to get fans to actually watch hoops more than highlights. The league has continued snuggling up to gambling partners, even amidst several recent scandals, helping propagate these companies’ ubiquity and surely guaranteeing more to come. The collective bargaining agreement has radically reshaped how franchises build teams, perhaps for the worst. (I’d personally call it a mixed bag.) Officiating remains inconsistent; the league’s points of emphasis are often forgotten weeks after being introduced. And as ownership groups become wealthier, some of them larger than the league itself, we can already foresee the power those owners may have pushing self-interests over basketball’s.

I’m sure there are still more, but that doesn’t matter. Because the only one anyone ever talks about is tanking. That’s the one we can’t escape.

No one wants their teams to tank: not fans, not front offices, not owners. Perhaps, upon creating basketball utopia, we’ll turn every team into title contenders every season. Until then, bad teams will exist. They’ll be incentivized to build rosters and hold out players that reduce their chances to win games because the league’s structure incentivizes it. Most proposals aimed to fix this would still be exploitable or have other ramifications. (That said, I do find some of them fascinating.) In the meantime, we’ve seen more teams tanking sooner this season than any prior point in league history. I do understand why it has become the league’s punching bag.

I won’t defend tanking. It’d be better for every game to be played between two teams that have every intention to win. I do think it’s overstated how much it affects the NBA’s viewership. Teams amidst losing seasons will always lose fans, no matter how unethical those losses might be, but most fanbase’s diehards embrace a purposeful tank for a better future. (Look at how furious the Utah Jazz fanbase has been after last week’s tanking fines.) The league’s player participation policy has resulted in fewer stars being held out from nationally televised games, an obvious concern for the league’s most broadly watched showcases, which helps.

Those points aren’t meant to convince anyone who still can’t stand tanking. I understand those who see it as an unethical act, that it undermines sport’s intention. I sympathize with fans who bought tickets and then had their favorite player ruled out. But, far more often, those instances have nothing to do with tanking. 

The league’s most serious issue, no matter how much oxygen this debate about tanking has burnt this week, is an increasingly clear crisis the league should acknowledge: That superstars and role players alike are getting injured more than ever before. That keeps more players off the court than even the most egregiously tanking franchise ever could. 

Perhaps you still disagree. Perhaps you’re worried about how often players are getting hurt but even more disgusted by the franchises that hold out healthy players. I’ve heard you, and I’d like to counter with this: These two issues are so deeply connected that there’s one common fix that helps both problems.

The NBA should shorten the season. It’s time.

***

The drums warning of the NBA’s growing injury crisis have started sounding more ominous. As of the All-Star break, there have been 4,253 games missed this season by players due to injury or illness, according to injury guru Jeff Stotts. That’s close to three players missing every single game for both teams on average before counting games missed for rest or injury management, which comes in at just 199.

What’s concerning is that those numbers keep growing. Last season, once again according to Stotts’ excellent work, had the most games lost due to injury and illness since he tracking it in 2005. Earlier this year, before tanking discourse replaced it, alarm bells rang louder after scores of stars went down injured. You don’t hear quite as much about calf strains at this point of the season. Unfortunately, stars still keep getting injured and ruled out every game.

Some tanking teams shut players down for injuries, of course, and offer players more recovery time than they might in another situation. (See: Kyrie Irving being officially ruled out for the season on Wednesday while Jayson Tatum, injured two months after him, still seems to be nearing his return.) The overwhelming number of these cases, however, are real injuries that really prevent players from playing basketball.

What’s commonly accepted as the primary driver of these injuries, which has happened even as teams continue spending millions on sports science and injury reduction methods, is how the game has changed. Players play fewer minutes but run more miles in those minutes than ever before. More specifically, there are more closeouts, longer rotations, frequenter bursts. As the league embraced the spacing revolution, defenders have been asked to cover more ground to combat how many players can shoot.

There are other reasons theorized to contribute to this: That youth basketball grinds down young players and forces them into sports specialization from an early age; that the teams these kids play for don’t have long-term prioritization in mind; that athleticism has reached such levels that more players’ bodies can’t handle the forces exerted on them; that even on the other end, on offense, players move horizontally more than ever before. These ideas all have merit, and it’s different for each player. But how much more this sport asks from players might be the most important one.

The NBA wants its players to be healthier more often. Here’s one solution: Toss out the 3-point line, eliminate Eurosteps, and make basketball look like the ‘90s again. Any takers? (I know some oldheads are reading this thinking hell yeah.) Since that won’t and shouldn’t happen, however, we’re left with modern basketball pushing against the limits of the modern player’s body. The less radical solution would be reducing how many games they must play.

This idea doesn’t appear to have much traction with the league office as things stand right now. That’s despite the aforementioned fact that most regional sports networks, and the revenue from those local broadcast rights, have crumpled in the past few years. This feels like the opportunity to reconsider what has always been an arbitrary 82-game schedule, established back when gate revenue was the only thing keeping the NBA from bankruptcy. The league’s long-awaited expansion seems to be inching closer, too, which would add games back to the ones lost from the reduction. I’m sure you’ve heard the rest of the argument: Fewer games would allow stars to be more available, which would increase the product’s quality, eventually earning back whatever revenue was lost through fewer ticket sales.

The standings don’t move much in the season’s final months. Last season, among the 12 teams finishing with top-six seeds in each conference, 11 of them were in place on March 1. The year before that, 10 of those 12 teams were already settled into top-six seeds. And for the 2022-23 season, not only were all top-six finishers already within the top-six on March 1, but they were in the exact same seed they’d finish the season with. This has been the trend for years: The best teams have been established and the posers have fallen off each season by February. It’s why March has become known for such wacky basketball, why coaches leading teams destined for the postseason talk about how hard it is to keep up the motivation.

The same March where tanking teams lose all shame.

Most schedule shortening proposals don’t want the league’s schedule to change. We aren’t running from March itself; there’s no Bermuda Triangle-esque effect it has on the players. Fewer games in the league’s established schedule, however, would mean less bad basketball even before tanking reforms happen, which can still also happen if you want. The standings might not move much after 60 games, but franchises still need the first 20 to decide how good their teams really are. There’s less time to turn to a tank.

Eliminating back-to-backs has been one of the shortened season’s purposes, too, which would come at tanking teams’ chagrin. They love that excuse to sit veterans who might dare help them win. It’s a built-in excuse the league provides them not so different from the very incentives that cause teams to tank. Teams also shut down players for season-ending surgeries, ones that stem from nagging injuries they’d try playing under different circumstances. I want players to have more chances to recuperate midseason away from this current meat grinder they’re ran through.

I’d like to make one concession to my earlier argument that tanking doesn’t affect how many fans actually tune in. I still believe that’s true. But why shouldn’t a casual basketball fan, seeing this many headlines and podcasts devoted to making teams try, believe there are no competitive games around this point of the regular season? Rather than this truer statement: There’s great basketball most nights, we’d like if there were more, and it’s more than just the tankers. (To that point, you do realize Utah won one of the games the league cited when fining them for tanking last week, right?) But how would anybody know that from spending 10 minutes in any NBA space?

What else are we to talk about, though? We largely know which teams are contenders, which ones are just first-round fodder, which ones will be represented in the lottery. That wasn’t true at the 40-game mark, mind you, when the Detroit Pistons were atop the Eastern Conference but still new enough to be fascinating. They’ve now answered our regular season questions. They have proven that much legitimacy. What more they must show us is two months away.

If the league played a 62-game schedule, we’d still be at that 40-game mark. There would still be more to say. It would reshape basketball coverage quite possibly for the better. We’d have more unknowns later into the year, more anticipation for when those teams do play, less need to create storylines after the league’s own on-court ones have finally lost shine.

You can still want tanking fixed. It just seems more serious when, right now, nothing else is.