[Opinion] NBA discussion on expansion should happen

You watched so many garbage games your conclusion was to thin out the talent pool further?

 

If anything we should contract. Imagine 26 teams instead of 30, you use scrubs that shouldn't have roster spots. You start to have a real possibility of stars having competent role players and/or a 2nd option guy. Guys like Paul George, Kris Middleton, Al Horford, Marc Gasol- are really good but really shouldnt be carrying a team. Imagine if you had Harden with ine of them. Or Demarcus Cousins. Or one team with three guys of that caliber- they wouldn't contend with the Warriors or Cavs but they'd be competitive.

 

I'm more in favor of contraction.

Rockets lose to the bad teams and we need more Lottery Balls!

 

we need more teams. expand to 40 teams into 4 conferences, opening up mexico and more canadian teams.

top 4 teams from each conference advance to the playoffs.

 

4 of top 20 players are on the same team and you want to expand??

 

That has more to do with how the cap works.

I don't understand the argument of a talent pool honestly. There will always be 5-10 people with elite basketball skill. Always. Adding more or less teams isn't going to change that.

If they add 2 teams not much will change. You'll still have it so 2-4 teams have a legit chance at winning the championship. The only difference is that now two new markets have teams to root for.

 

If you're aiming for parity, the obvious would getting rid of individual max like football, but it'll never happen because no one actually wants parity.

 

On paper, maybe.
In practice, ripping away 4 teams from 4 loyal fanbases is just shitty.

 

I'd go with contraction with improved D-league use. Contraction could make D-League a little more viable option. Better players in it would make it more a true "triple A". Fan interest would somewhat increase. Players could actually be improving their skills even more. Making the contracted NBA even that much stronger.

In the past end of bench guys either cracked in or they didn't, and it'd take a Mario Elie like 7 year world wide journey to be heard from again. A D-league now, that kinda player could be developed and integrated MUCH quicker into an already more competitive league.

If they SHORTEN THE SCHEDULE, I could be on board for expansion. To give the bottom teams more practice time to be cohesive, and its less games of diluted play that fans have to suffer through

 

My hypothetical 10 added cities would be:

• Seattle
• Vancouver
• Las Vegas
• Louisville
• Mexico City
• St. Louis
• Baltimore
• Pittsburgh
• Montreal
• London

 

Maybe.. but matchups like GSW-Thunder, GSW-Cavs, Thunder-Spurs, Spurs-Heat, etc. are clearly head and shoulders basketball over other stuff. And you'd be more likely to have more of those matchups with contraction, just mathematically. I don't think expansion would change it a ton. You only get a couple of those matchups in the playoffs each year now and I suspect you still would get those with expansion.... but over the long-term, a decade plus, that might start to change.

In the days of the 80's/early 90's where you'd have the Rockets have to go through, in consecutive years to the title, (i) Blazers, Suns, Jazz, Knicks, and (ii) Jazz, Suns, Spurs, Magic (all 60 win teams) ... that just doesn't happen anymore. There's East hasn't realistically gone more than 1 deep in like a decade.. The West usually only goes 2-3 deep. It'd be nice if you could get back to that, in addition to having more great regular season matchups.

Can you point to the mid 90's expansion as diluting the talent? Maybe not directly, but hard to ignore the 2 team expansion in 88, 2 team expansion in 89, 2 team expansion in 95, and the add-back of the Bobcats/Hornets in 04.

IMO, the NBA kind of sucked from the late 90's to late 00's. Personally never a big fan of the AIs, T-Macs and to an extent Kobe's of the world. Kobe was way more well rounded, but this was a very me first generation of low efficiency scorers, then mixed with likeable but boring teams and players (Spurs, Pistons, Pacers). Nash and the Suns inserted a little bit of excitement in there, though you always knew it was a flawed squad relative to similar squads of the 80s/90s, you had some excitement about the new wave of guys starting with Lebron, but it was the beginning of what seems to have been a thinned talent pool over a much larger number of teams that was 10+ years in the making with the earlier expansions.

Cause there's a lag there. But more teams just mathmatically means more of those great players spread out over those teams over time via drafting. Carter to Toronto. Zo, Johnson to the Hornets, KG to the Wolves, Shaq/Penny to the Magic, Shareef to the Grizzlies, etc. These literally can't possibly happen with those teams not existing.

Anyway, all that said, certainly easy to see the NBA expanding a couple teams. Money coming in, lots of domestic and international interest, great product, expansion creates near term further excitement and near term doesn't appear to impact competitiveness (as opposed to long-term), etc. If Mexico wasn't Mexico, I think it'd be a no brainer. London and Madrid would cause the schedulers to do more work, and those squads would be at a disadvantage from a travel perspective (every road game would really need to be part of a multi-stop trip), but is possible. And as noted Seattle, Vegas, and other large metropolitan areas without a team (Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Nashville, Louisville).

 

While watching the pacers the other day, i kept thinking how awesome they'd be with legit 3pt shooting at the PG spot. Naturally I thought about contraction and @Shroopy2 took the words right out of my mouth.

But of course, you're right that no owner would agree to it because of $$$.

Expansion, however, is not the solution.

 

Well I'm not talking about financially. Financially it would be great for the NBA obviously, they add more markets. That's a good thing if those markets can thrive and support a professional team.

 

Relegation then

But the most important change to the game to increase quality of playing is more practice time. Reduction of the schedule to 65 games or so would drastically increase quality of play. No other basketball leagues or college play back to backs like this with no time for practice for weeks at a time

It's so obvious

 

Expansion is inevitable. Seattle, Vegas, and Vancouver seem likely.

Like someone mentioned before, the problem isn't with more teams; the problem is with how the cap system works and the current CBA. You can have 20 teams and it still wouldn't matter if the system allows for three to four top-10 players to be on the same team.

The next few years will be especially bad with the huge influx of money. You have the pre-2016 contracts working with post-2016 caps. Once the pre-2016 contracts run out, it should be a LITTLE better but it really depends on the new CBA. The percentage of cap that max players can make absolutely needs to be increased. I've seen the articles on various sites that list how much a player like Lebron, Curry, Durant, etc. should be making... it's ridiculous how underpaid they currently are. Removing the limit would be an interesting solution to parity but it would never happen.

 

Reducing games does not mean you reduce Season Ticket pricing. And that's really all that matters is full price of ownership.

A 66 game schedule reduces STH games from 44 to 37. As a long time STH, I would pay the same full season price for 7 less games. Owners can make up any difference in higher single game tickets and higher Luxury Box.

They quality of play is guaranteed to increase per game. And you don't lose financially.