I love basketball, but have problems with the NBA

How about some complaining that’s not Sixers specific for once?

The NBA, which I once thought about 15 years ago was primed to leap the NFL in the public consciousness at some point in my lifetime, can’t get out of its own way.

What happened to what used to be my favorite sport and my favorite league? I still love tuning into seeing the games greats a couple nights per week and, sadly, I am still gobbling up the garbage that is the Sixers, but my excitement level for doing so is in the gutter.

There

are too many games. Players get hurt because there are too many games and the load management crisis leaves fans who forked over money to attend games and the ones at home paying for approximately 500 streaming services in order to watch this league out to dry. The product suffers. The regular season has become increasingly irrelevant, especially as players are judged solely by their playoff accomplishments. I remember the lockout-shortened season of 2012 had 66 games. There were too many back-to-backs during that period so it could fit in a truncated schedule because the season began on Christmas, but 66 is a great number to have owners still earn enough dough from gate receipts, concessions and to keep the TV executives and streamers happy.

Money is ultimately why it hasn’t happened and might never happen, but the league needs to take measurements to protect the association from collapsing and fading away. Sometimes, less is more. Each game would have slightly higher stakes, boosting fan interest and maybe, just maybe, players become more inclined to play more often during the doldrums of January and February.

Tanking also seems more rampant than ever. It would be rich for a guy who made his name talking about sports as a blogger during the Sixers’ Process era to complain about tanking, but as has always been the case even back a dozen years ago, tanking is an institutional problem rather than a team-specific one. It’s almost a necessity for teams to do so to find franchise-altering talent. I don’t fault teams for doing so nor their respective fan bases for rallying around it and dreaming about prospects, the lottery and the draft as we all in Philadelphia once did. The flattened lottery odds of recent years, however, have made the issue worse rather than fixing it.

Over the years and even this week, I’ve seen hypothetical ideas to fix tanking, including tournaments of the lottery teams or one-off games to decide the draft order. That’s so bogus. Why would any player want to compete in such a thing? Those guys are fighting for their basketball lives and they’re supposed to lay it on the line so their boss can draft their replacement? It’s nonsensical. The whole league has become nonsensical!

Sure, people were tanking way back in 1984 in a pre-lottery world for the likes of Hakeem Olajuwon. It’s not a new phenomenon, but it’s one that’s been exacerbated because there are too few good players to make up enough teams to produce winning, high-quality hoops. This isn’t about modern players not being as talented as the ones who came generations before them. There are players right now who will go down as some of the greatest to ever pick up a basketball, but in a five-person sport, the disparity between the all-timers and the also-rans is so evident. It’s why late-career Michael Jordan was able to have his Bulls teams put up 72 wins and beat up on 1990s expansion era competition. Expansion dilutes things and has for decades.

That’s what makes the rumors that the NBA is pushing for eventual expansion to 32 teams, with Seattle and Las Vegas as logical choices, so disheartening for people who understand all of this. Do you think there aren’t enough great players now to elevate 30 teams to contention already? Well, it’s about to get even worse. The basketball nerd inside of me who would go wild over following an expansion draft can’t even get truly hyped for that because I know what would eventually come from it: more tanking, more meaningless games and worse basketball.

I don’t want this to ultimately come off as a guy in his early 30s yelling at clouds. I came of age and fell in love with the sport in the immediate post-Jordan era. While watching Allen Iverson and Tracy McGrady then helped me fall in love with the game, a couple decades later, I know that was sort of a bad era for the on-court product. I can be nostalgic for being in awe as a kid while knowing it wasn’t that great. The early 2010s were maybe the sport’s apex, but it’s been on a downward trend since then and I don’t know how to fix it. It’s sad.

Time’s yours, Adam Silver.