Tagged As: basketball, NBA, Playoffs, Sports, David Stern, Cavs, Lakers

I am very excited to watch the Los Angeles Lakers and the Cleveland Cavaliers play in the NBA Finals. I want to watch Kobe and LeBron do battle. I want to see if this is the season James is able to bring home a championship to the much maligned Cleveland sports scene or if Kobe is able to prove that he could win a title in tinsel town without the Big Diesel. The only problem is that I have to wait for two months of meaningless prologue to dispense before I get to see the seven game series.

I must ask, is this format really necessary? Is there something that can or should be done? Is this long process really necessary?

Other leagues have figured out what works. The MLB has wisely kept there postseason limited to eight total teams and three rounds, including a best-of-five divisional round. The front office seems to understand that after 162 games the last thing fans need is another half a season before crowning a champion. Up until last season, the World Series had never fallen below a 10 market share, and much that was probably because of the marketing nightmare that put the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays in the series.

The NFL, which is consistently run with the most commonsense despite being a sport based on three-and-a-half-year pro careers and voluntary brain damage, has a mere 12 teams in the playoffs that play 11 total games, seven total game days, and 42.0 Nielson rating for the championship game. Each game has a compelling storyline or relevance before kickoff thanks to the limited postseason play.

Perhaps the NBA can learn something from these leagues.

The NBA Playoffs: The Bloated Carcass of the ‘90s

I have no doubt that David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA who has devised this playoff system, loves this game of basketball. However, he also has a love of money and market share, and this seems to be the biggest problem with creating an enjoyable postseason experience for fans.

To be clear, when a season lasts longer than 50 games, a single elimination tournament, such as March Madness, does not work. The teams have played too long to allow 48 minutes of action decide the victor of each round. Imagine the Cavs knocked out by the Pistons on a single night because LeBron was having a rare bad game and the Pistons starting five were hitting threes all night long. It would be a disaster for the league and really ruin the rest of the playoffs for even the most fringe fan of the NBA.

A series of some sort is necessary to let the law of averages take effect and demand the upset to be something truly worth watching (like the eight seed Golden State Warriors knocking off the number one seed Dallas Mavericks in 2007).

The current four-round, 16 team format has been around since the 1984 playoffs. The NBA is said to of had its golden era during this playoff expansion. This means, that in the most romanticized version of basketball history, nearly all 16 teams were worthy of playing in the postseason and put on a beautiful show of flowing offense and solid defense.

Since I was all of three when this expansion took place I cannot say with any certainty that this was or was not the case, they do not show the average game on ESPN Classic. So, given my ability to decipher some sort of truth from the past, I will take it that basketball was in its heyday with tremendous ratings fueled by a decade long rivalry between Magic Johnson (black, on the West Coast) and Larry Bird (white, on the East Coast).

Before anybody decries me for doubting the greatness of the game from my toddler years let us quote Baz Lurhmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” (which is just Mary Schmich’s 1997 Chicago Tribune put to music):

“You too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.”

Example of the effects of nostalgia: I recently read a long list of comments from people bemoaning today’s music for the music from their past, when it was great…in the ‘70s. So, there, think about that.

Back to basketball (and more ellipses)…I accept that a 16-team format then has the historical tenure to remain, despite the fact that it means that more than half of the league gets to participate. The problem I have is the response to a waning television market share at the beginning of this century was to expand the first round from a best-of-five game series to a best-of-seven game series in 2002. Why?!?

Stern had heard fans complain that there was too much time between playoff games, so instead of moving the games closer together in the postseason schedule, he added two more to the first round. This is the complete opposite of what every fan, I assume, wanted to see. Now TNT and ESPN get to tout 40 games in 40 nights with only about 15 of those holding any meaning.

This addition coincided with a shallow pool of talent and experience in the league following the end of the Chicago Bulls dynasties and at the beginning of the draft-a-high-schooler years. Meaning, at least four teams (or, really most of whoever was playing in the Eastern Conference) did not even belong in the playoffs because their play was so awful. It was terrible and may be one of the many factors that made fans leave the game behind so quickly.

The play really has improved leaps and bounds in both conferences, but still there is no need to draw out a series that pairs a one seed and an eight seed or a two seed to seven games when it becomes painfully obvious the higher seed is just playing that much better. I say this even though my beloved Bulls are fighting behind the incredible play of Derrick Rose and Ben Gordon to rally to upset the limping Boston Celtics.

I think that really the first two rounds of the NBA playoffs should be a best-of-five series. The entirety of the playoffs should not last from April 20 to June 17 as it did last season for the champion Celtics. It should be a month tops. The proof may be in the numbers.

Despite the highly ballyhooed series between the Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, the finals still ended with a mere 9.3 rating according to the Nielson Ratings. To clarify further, that means that the NBA scored a less than double digit rating for fans to even watch six consecutive minutes of a game in the series.

This can be attributed to diehard fans finally losing patience after two months of playoff basketball and the average sports fan being forced to choose between a baseball season in full swing and the petering end of the NBA finals. Really, I do not know how much more revenue this extra two weeks of basketball produces, but I know as a fan that I even missed more than half of the Celtics-Lakers series because I was ready to move on.

This is a league that has yet to even approach the astronomical 18.7 rating from 1998, the last Bulls championship. They are fighting to remain part of the big three and can arguably already be dropped from that category with the strong annual performance by NASCAR, though the latest numbers for the racing circuit are down 11 percent so the NBA can wallow in their failure.

Rather than wallow in another league’s failure, finding comfort in the fact that the NHL seems to have done its best to alienate its fans, and ignoring soccer because the vast majority ignore the sport professionally and only include it in their lives to as a means to exhaust their children, Stern should take a long look at the NBA and the postseason and find some sort of solution, other than adding a European road trip to expand the fan base and market share.

NBA Playoffs