Tired. Drained. Fatigued.
If you’ve been hearing those words a lot lately, you’re not alone. On my last two weeks of traveling to NBA cities, exhaustion has been a common theme as teams near the end of NBA Cup season and the so-called second All-Star break, a lull in the schedule that has been created in mid-December to allow for the completion of the in-season tournament.
On Tuesday, we will begin an eight-day stretch in which 28 of the league’s 30 teams will play only two games; with light schedules on the day before and after this as well, you can make it a 10-day stretch in which 18 of the league’s 30 teams play only twice, and only three teams play more than three games.
The big exhale is a chance for teams to regroup and allow some early-season injuries to heal. But that time off comes at a cost, and it’s the breakneck first six weeks of the season that have many executives questioning the impact the NBA Cup has on the rest of the schedule. It’s one thing to hear players are running on empty; when staff members and announcers are also telling you they’re worn out, it’s fair to wonder if the league turned up the early-season travel dial a little too high.
Here’s the backdrop: The NBA schedule fights the inexorable math problem of trying to squeeze 82 games into 174 days (or, once every four years, 175). That 174 shrinks further once you account for the All-Star break, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and other dates when the league is typically dark. So if you want to have 10 days with only two games, you have to cram a lot more basketball into the rest of the days.
In a related story, our season was only 42 days old at the close of business last Monday night, but five teams -- the Atlanta Hawks, Cleveland Cavaliers, Milwaukee Bucks, Phoenix Suns and Dallas Mavericks -- had played 22 games.
I’ll note, too, that this heavy load comes against the backdrop of a preseason in which teams are increasingly disregarding the games, especially for their better players. The upshot: Everybody is going 0 mph to 50 in record time and trying to sustain that through an unnaturally heavy schedule cycle to squeeze in four days in Las Vegas for the NBA Cup semifinals and final.
Of course, games played are only one element of how the schedule fatigues teams, and perhaps it’s not even the most important one. Another oft-cited scourge, for instance: one-game trips home, when a team comes back, plays a home game and goes right back on the road. That home stay turns into just another stop on the road trip. Atlanta will go 27 days without consecutive home games before it hosts Denver on Friday; Memphis will go 29 days this month, and Denver will go a staggering 41 days. Brooklyn has had two home stands the entire season; it’s December!
I don’t think that point gets discussed enough: A schedule optimized to minimize back-to-backs or flight miles can nonetheless be awful. The whole point of road trips and home stands is to minimize the number of trips through the bus-plane-hotel-arena-bus-plane-home car wash, and back-to-backs in the middle of a trip are not necessarily a negative if they allow multiple recovery days at home on the backside.
The NBA Cup is complicit here because of the necessary scheduling maneuvers to accommodate all intraconference matchups on certain nights, without back-to-backs preceding them, and then get everybody back to home base in early December. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to do that by giving everybody short trips.
That takes us to the next point in the chain. I can’t definitely prove that the uptick in early-season soft-tissue injuries to key players is connected to the amped-up early schedule, but reasonable people can certainly see how those events might be correlated.
It wounds me to say this as an NBA Cup enthusiast, but I’m wondering if the Cup is worth the cost, or if, at the very least, the league can rethink how it schedules the start of the season to accommodate this event. With teams now openly disregarding the preseason, it would make a lot more sense to have the first three or four weeks of the season be a ramp-up period, with maybe 75% of the game volume of the rest of the season. Right now, we’re doing the opposite.
How do we accommodate a Cup competition to allow for that? There are a lot of ways to potentially rethink this, none of which are perfect. What if the Cup quarterfinals were on Christmas and the semifinals and final were on the Friday and Sunday of All-Star Weekend? What if the Cup group games were the preseason?
Of course, all this presumes that nobody will commit to the ultimate sacrifice, the one that would have by far the greatest impact of all: shortening the schedule to something more manageable in the 65-to-70-game range and living with a quality over quantity mantra.
In the big picture, however, let me leave the discussion here: No sports league depends more on its stars than the NBA, and yet the league keeps getting worse at keeping those stars healthy. And, no, ordering players to show up for 65 games if they want an award isn’t any kind of solution, as we’re learning, as much as an open invitation to moral hazard.
Until or unless the NBA can turn the tide on that front, it is fair to question why the league is putting its most valuable properties at potentially greater risk for the sake of a relatively unimportant extravaganza that adds only a few extra crumbs to the revenue pie.
I say this as somebody who truly enjoys the NBA Cup -- the courts, the groups, the random tiebreakers, all of it. But it has become increasingly difficult to justify its impact when weighed against the early-season impacts on teams to accommodate it.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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