The league has its problems: the dispute with
China, injured stars and falling TV ratings. But fixing what isn’t broken isn’t the solution
The NBA is reportedly considering a new tournament, staged during November, as a way of juicing up what is generally considered a long, slow ramp to the NBA finals, when
basketball commands national attention. A single-elimination tournament – the NBA’s equivalent of English soccer’s FA Cup – would in theory attract casual fans during the otherwise inessential early part of the league calendar, and would allow the NBA to compete for viewers during the heart of the
NFL regular season.
This is a theory worth approaching with skepticism. For one thing, the league will have to come up with something creative in order to get teams and players to care about a tournament staged 15 games into an 82-game regular season. An intense midseason tournament, held months before the start of the playoffs, is a lot of work to add to the schedule of NBA players in the load-management era, when the benefits of time off are better understood and more rigorously pursued than ever before. Without directly affecting the championship picture, a midseason tournament would and should be treated as a series of pointless exhibitions and an unwelcome addition to the workloads of exactly those players whose exploits are supposed to be driving the league’s popularity in the first place.