I haven’t heard serious talk about shortening the season, but I have heard discussions about it.
But instead of considering shortening the season, why not space it out more?
The reason coaches and players have talked about shortening the season is so players wouldn’t need to rest as much and injury could be prevented. But in my opinion, spacing the NBA season out more would theoretically be much more beneficial without cutting out any games.
Players would have more times to rest, and wouldn’t have to worry about playing so many games back to back. There are some weeks when teams play 5 out of 7 days which is just ridiculous, especially when the games are long and exhausting.
On top of all that, for NBA fans who enjoy watching more teams play than just their own, they would be able to tune into more games. There are days where you’ll have 10 matchups in an evening, and you can’t watch 2 games at once. If the season were spaced out more, these NBA fans could get to watch more games.
But I also feel like spacing out the games more would get more casual fans watching too. If there’s 4 or 5 games in one week, casual fans won’t be concerned about missing a game because they can tune into the next one a day or two later. But if you make the games more rare, fans would be more incline to tune in since the next game may not be for another few days.
Really the only cons of this idea are:
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Diehard fans wouldn’t be able to watch their favorite teams as much (in the short term of course)
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Fans might get tired of a “dragged out” season
I would prefer if games were spaced out a bit more than now, me personally. It really sucks when your team is exhausted from playing a bunch of games and they have to play a team that isn’t. I also like watching other teams play, so as I mentioned before sometimes I have to choose between two games to decide which one I’d rather watch. Also having the regular season go from the middle of October to let’s say late April or early-mid May on top of having the playoffs would be awesome. But I could see how people would disagree with me.
This is all just my imagination though. There’s practically a 0% probability the NBA changes how their games are scheduled, whether there be less games or less frequency of them.