nba regular season product is dog shit. the media and fans think this has something to do with tanking, but really, the entirety of the schedule is boring and uninteresting, hence the fact that the same tired tanking discourse gets trotted out – there’s literally nothing else interesting to talk about, going into the playoffs, except how to turn the nobs on some spreadsheet, which can categorically never remove the mismatched incentives.

obviously the league would never implement radical fixes (eliminate corruption (balmer under mining the salary cap; lottery rigging; ban gambling endorsements; get rid of all the old refs and making refing assignments random/transparent); institute relegation and create a bifurcated league), but you could do simple things: eliminate replay except for facially egregious calls, cut the number of games down to 62, eliminate half the play-off teams, eliminate the goofus cup, institute foul rules which are simple to ref and which don’t just benefit the ball carrier.

but silver will never do that, and will happily run the league into the ground as some vertically integrated gambling parlor.