When you think about professional sports and the levels of popularity in the general public, there will be a lot of peaks and valleys. You are either on your way up, or on your way down. Right now, the NBA (National Basketball Association) is on its way down. Nobody watches basketball until the football season is over and players admit that it doesn't get serious until after the All Star Break in February. Stars are wasted on substandard organizations, eroding on rosters until the first opportunity to bolt, hoping that it isn't too late. Somehow in the playoffs, teams with under .500 winning percentage are accepted while teams with a significantly higher winning percentage are left at home. How does that exactly happen? And this isn't a statistical outlier, this has happened multiple times. There are multiple little tweaks that need to be made to the game that will bring viewers back and build markets up. .
I have to start with the game, because if the game is bad everything else doesn't matter. The league is heading into a wing dominated game where size and speed are needed. This turns into a run and gun show, defense tends to sag, scores are high but intensity is reserved for the last two minutes of the game. That is the game on every night, almost like an exhibition because it really doesn't matter until the playoffs. Then the playoffs come and the game almost changes, defense is intense, zones are collapsed, and some physicality is reintroduced to the game. So is there anything we can do to speed the game up to highlight our athletes, incentivize a physical style and putting a focus on rebounding and scoring? .
In the NBA the shot clock is 24 seconds long. So you have 24 seconds to have a shot attempt that at least hits the rim of the basket. Once the ball does, the time resets and you have another 24 seconds to formulate an attempt. So the ball goes out, the teams reset their strategies, and the wings shoot again, eventually.