The travel argument is a valid argument, but as others have noted its all kind of arbitrary to begin with. Why 82 games? Why 4 against most of your conference, 3 against some of your conference, and 2 against the other conference? Why play any games against the other conference? My recommendation would be as follows: - Keep 82 games... because, why not? It's been 82 games forever, seems like it should stay at that amount. - Lengthen the season even more. I think they added 10 days to the beginning this year. Add 15 days to the beginning and 15 to the end. Move back draft, fa, summer league accordingly. Really just don't want to butt up too much with football, which isn't really that much in full swing until mid/late August. - Reduce training camp/preseason by a week - With the current 30 team league, every team plays the other 29 teams each 3 times each, except for 5 teams, which rotates throughout the years. This is as balanced a schedule as possible. If they expand to 32 teams, then it'd be each team playing each other team 3 times except for 11 teams, which would rotate through the years. - Seed everything in the regular season 1-30. All star game teams would be drafted by the head coach (or fans or something similar) after the players have been confirmed to be all star. - Seed playoffs 1-16 I get that even with further expansion of the season, there'd still be some extra travel tiredness. But then it's not like it's fairly distributed as is... according to this, for example, in 15/16 the Blazers had 55.6k miles of travel as compared to 42.9k miles. This is of course because of geography. So if the argument is that there'd be more "longer" trips east-west, and that would be bad for the teams and game, why don't they focus A LOT more when scheduling to ensure teams total travel miles are closer?? I personally don't think its about the miles/hours traveled, as much as having to do it back to back, 4 times in 5 nights, leaving a town at 1 am and getting to the next town even later, etc. But even with all that... the other day KD said this: “I didn’t go there to make my life easier every day,” he said. “I didn’t so I could stop getting up at 8:30 (a.m.) and try to be the first one on the court. if anyone thinks these guys have it rough, your fooling yourself. KD has slaved by getting up at 8:30 am, lol. You might say that we'd truly and really better, fresher basketball if these guys are fresher, and the extra travel will hurt them. And maybe, perhaps that's a bit true. Ok. That's fine. As a fan, I want to see (1) the fairest system, with (2) the players playing their best in that system and not resting.
Eliminate back to backs, make the first round of the playoffs best of 5, and have the best 16 teams in the league play each other in playoffs.
