I’ve been an NBA fan just about all of my adult life. The Golden State Warriors have won the NBA Championship the last three out of four years. Now, they just signed DeMarcus Cousins. He is recovering from the worst injury you can have in basketball–an Achilles tendon tear. But if the Warriors start him, that gives them five starting players who are All-Stars. Has that ever happened before? It will make the Warriors even more dominant. This is looking like the Boston Celtic glory era all over again, when they won the NBA Championship eleven out thirteen years. However, there as many teams then as now.
A lot of NBA fans are ticked off about this. They say it ruins the NBA, making the Warriors so dominant for the foreseeable future that they can hardly be beaten. Warriors star Stephen Curry tried hard to defend it yesterday, but I think what he said sort of fell on deaf ears.
Another similar issue is that many NBA fans are calling for the league to change qualification for playoffs to the first sixteen teams in the regular season being seeded to the playoffs, thus disregarding the two conference arrangement in which the first eight teams in each conference make the playoffs.
Even Commissioner Adam Silver emerged from NBA meetings this week and spoke about this possibility since they had discussed it. He said the idea is intriguing but that it would require “40% to 50% more travel,” which is a negative. I assumed that he meant team travel during the playoffs. That wears players down. They need their rest. Like Curry, he also tried to defend the Warriors dominance.
But such a change in the playoffs would add more interest for NBA fans. That only means more money to the NBA overall, which includes players’ salaries. (Yeah, I know, as if some of them don’t make enough $$$. I’m not one of those who make that gripe.)
It’s no fun to see that the best dogfight in the NBA playoffs are the finals of the Western Conference rather than the finals of the entire league, which is the two conference winners going at it at the end of the playoffs. It’s because the Western Conference has been stronger than the Easter Conference for years.
That’s what happened this year. The Warriors and the Houston Rockets playoff series (semi-finals) was better than the finals between the Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers, despite the Cavs having Lebron (King) James. However, the Cavs got the raw end of the deal in that officiating. For me, it ruined that finals.
So, if the NBA ever makes this change, it will be nothing but more dollar signs along with the recent Supreme Court ruling that legalized sports betting in pro sports. (That’s a conversation for another day.) They just would have to suck it up and fly more.
This reminds me somewhat of when I used to play the regular PGA Tour beginning in 1964 (when there was only one Tour and thus no Champions Tour or Web.com Tour). The scheduling of the tournaments was based on players being able to easily get from one tournament to the tournament the next week. The PGA Tour had a legacy in which players had driven their cars from tournament to tournament. But when airplane travel became more developed, and airfares were coming down in their ticket prices, it became another option to consider. Yet with tournaments being scheduled on average about 300-500 miles apart, auto travel still looked pretty good. Plus, all players didn’t have the luxury of the tournaments providing a courtesy car to the player for the week.
Then there was television. It was beginning to come into its own. Just about all tournaments were being nationally televised. Both the tournament’s commercial sponsors and especially the TV advertising sponsors were admitting that they would willingly pay more in contracts with the PGA Tour if scheduling of tournaments fit their purposes more that the convenience of the players in their travels.
That’s when the PGA Tour changed the scheduling of tournaments so that they were at locations on average maybe 750-1,000 miles apart. With this change, eventually most players were taking the airplane. All were making more money due to increased revenue in contracts that resulted in bigger purses. And eventually, just about every tournament could provide a player with a new “courtesy car” as they are called. The only negative about it was that the players’ families, if on Tour, had to fly. That raised the players’ expenses. More kids, more expenses. I never did that much. By then, my children were getting up there in school, which required them to stay home except in the summer. And I ended my full-time participation on the regular Tour at the end of 1982.
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