Some guys were talking on the radio yesterday and said that going into the NBA season, you know that the NBA champ is going to be Golden State, San Antonio, or Cleveland. There’s something like a 98% chance of that being the case. So then the point becomes, “Why bother playing the season?” Let’s just play a really short season, have a playoff with eight teams, and then crown one of these three teams.
There’s really only one way to solve this problem. Because the NBA game favors one guy with great talent — MJ, Kobe, LeBron, or Curry — and a solid supporting cast (or heavens forbid, two great guys on one team), you can’t make the league thinner by adding more teams; that only makes the problem worse, the dominant guy dominates even more.
What you have to do is dramatically contract the league — and I mean by 25% or more — and make it “thicker,” for lack of a better term. The worst 25% of the players would be gone and you’d have fewer teams, so every team could have at least two or three stars. You still have an issue where LeBron in his time is dominant, but then at least he’s playing against other great stars, such as playing against Kobe and Shaq in their primes.
Sadly this means that a lot of small markets would lose their teams, but it would be best for the game. Maybe you could take the 25% of the guys who aren’t in the league any more and create a decent minor league system, dunno. But to make the NBA interesting at all, this has to be done. Right now there are 27 teams with almost no chance of winning the NBA title, but they still have to play out the season.
FWIW, I write this as a fan of basketball, but not a fan of the current NBA.