[Rockets] Battier's plans for a bigger and better NBA

Very interesting. I like his lottery idea, that would greatly benefit us this year! :grin:

I do think the NBA season should be 82 games, but I would not mind seeing a 3-5 game series in the earlier rounds...

 

thx for sharing this article!

Liked the idea of the King's cup that would be a very interesting theme

 

Most of these ideas are pretty interesting even if they don't have a chance of coming to fruition.

I'm not sure I really agree with his/Bill Simmons' idea to have 7th and 8th place playoffs. It completely discounts the regular season for those teams who take part in it. Conceivably you could go winless during the season, win the 7th/8th place tourney, and make it to the playoffs.

 

It really should be changed. He's right not many downsides to what he has proposed.

Yeah they play a few more games, but the NBA should really consider subtracting 15-20 games any ways.

 

Not necessarily. The tournament for 7/8 can also be seeded. This means that teams who played better in the regular season are rewarded. This will discourage tanking for the draft, as lesser teams will still play hard to have a better seed in the 7/8 seed tournament.

I could Imagine a 12th seed team playing hard to get the 9th seed just to play the lowly wizards for example.

 

Agreed, that would never happen but it shouldn't even be possible.


Man, Battier is such a cool guy.

 

Shane "The US president!!!" Battier

 

******* all his ideas are awesome. I've thought many of the same things over the years. Goes to show how anyone with a brain is better than $$$tern and his $10 million paycheck.

The mid year tournament is an idea that's been kicking around for a while. It would solve a lot of problems with the all-star balloting as well. Remove the all-star game from mid season and stop letting ppl vote for the all-star season so early FFS.

Replace the all star game with that minitournament. That would solve 2 main issues with the NBA. 1) the first 40 games would mean something instead of just dragging out the season for revenue for Stern 2)all star balloting would mean something if people voted mid to late season

the whole thing with shaking up the early rounds of the playoffs is a good idea too. It's something Stern would never do because he's mainly interested in ramrodding Kobe versus Lebron to the Finals but a 5 game series or play-in would actually make the NBA tournament halfway exciting like MLB, NFL or NCAAs

 

I am really impressed with how articulate and insightful Shane is. He's one of the VERY few players where his high Basketball IQ correlates with his high general IQ. He's a player that I can see making a smooth transition from the basketball arena to the political arena.

 

In a way yes but the larger impact will be to reward teams who play their best ball at the most competitive time of the season.

The regular 82 games will always be paramount because the top 6 seeds are determined by the year rankings. No team's goal is to be the 7th or 8th seed everyone is shooting for the top 4 spots and home court to give yourself a decent shot at winning. It'll be slightly disruptive to the bottom of the rankings but those teams are cannon fodder anyways for the most part. No one wants to be an 8 seed anyways and play LA in the first round. Half the fans of those teams prefer tanking rather than that option.

If your team has suffered unfortunate injuries that has screwed the early part of your season or your young team makes a late push, this sort of format will allow those teams to have a shot. The only way it invalidates anything is that it disrupts that bull**** 82 game grind in the NBA that leads to crap like tanking and guys like Shaq play half assed for part of the season. Shane's ideas will make both the first half and the late part of the season important, make it less easy for teams to "plan" some sort of route for the season where all there's really doing is stacking things for the last 20 games of the season and the playoffs.

If they do the play in, they can determine lottery %s after the play-in is completed so that teams cant tank since both season and playoff are included in the final ranking of the team. The main thing is to make the league more competitive in order to increase revenue. Both the very top and the bottom of the order play a lot of meaningless games at the end of the season

 

There is a tournament for the 7th and 8th spot. It's called the regular season. Like someone above said, seeded or not, that makes the regular season 100% pointless if your gonna have a shot no matter what.

 

Shane Battier will be the next NBA commissioner.

 

President of the NBA Player's Association maybe? He's definitely one an example of that rare breed of player who can be as successful if not more after his NBA career is over.

 

Can you imagine if we had overachieved this season and gotten the 8th seed just to miss out on the playoffs by losing to someone like the even lowlier t-wolves? I know seeding would be used to give home-court advantage but anything can happen on a given night.

 

I'm not crazy about the play-in tournament idea, but I like all of the rest of those ideas. But the Stern Cup is something that could definitely work. It's the kind of big idea that could bring big money that Stern and the owners would go for. 80,000 NBA fans showing up to watch a single-elimination tournament among the top 8 teams? That would be awesome, and it would be huge for the game.

 

I like pretty much all his ideas - but I wish they had asked Battier a bit more pointed questions about how to improve the reffing. None of these changes will really help the game until the reffing problems are fixed.

 

The greatest excitement and pressure I've seen among low-performing teams in any league is in the English Premier League (soccer). How do they do it? Relegation. The teams that finish at the bottom of the league get demoted to the next league down, the minors. And the teams that finish in the top 3 spots in the minors get promoted to the majors.

Don't reward low-performing teams by giving them a shot at the major-league playoffs. They haven't earned that. Instead, threaten them with something worse -- and build up minor-league basketball so that somebody who will try harder has a chance to replace Donald Sterling and his perpetual mediocrity.

Oh, and here's the clincher: The New York Knicks, instead of being rewarded for deliberately making themselves an embarrassment to basketball, would be left asking King James to join them in the D League.

 

Shane is such a smart guy.

 

Stern is immortal.