NBA Playoff Schedule 2012: Elongated Postseason Is Absolutely Ridiculous

Perhaps it's just me, but more than any other playoffs in professional sports, the NBA postseason just seems to drag on forever.

Let's take a closer look at the NBA's first-round schedule, focusing on the series between the Los Angeles Clippers and Memphis Grizzlies.

Game 1 is on Sunday. The teams then get a nice two-day break before resuming play on Wednesday evening.

Just because it might be fun to stretch things out even more, Game 3 isn't until Saturday.

Why is it necessary to elongate the first three games of that series so much? Why not play every other night, and save a single two-day break for a travel point in the series?

This bothers me every year, so I decided to take a look at other postseasons (starting with the last completed postseason) and gauge whether or not the scheduling in each seemed unnecessarily lengthy.

I didn't include the NFL, since teams only play once in a round (and once a week) unlike the series structure of the other sports. It should also be noted that Major League Baseball's postseason has one less round than the other two sports.

Sport	Start Date	Finish Date	Total Games Played	Series Lasting Maximum Number of Games
NBA	April 16th, 2011	June 12th, 2011	81	1
NHL	April 13th, 2011	June 15th, 2011	89	7 (including one in every round)
MLB	September 30th, 2011	October 28th, 2011	38	4

Now, it's probably most accurate to compare the NBA and NHL, since they follow the exact same playoff structures (whereas, in the MLB, the first round is a five-game series, and each round after is a seven-game series).

The important bit of data to me is that the NHL had seven series go the full seven games, and had at least one such series in every round. That means that one or several series in each round had to be pushed back in order to wait for the preceding round to finish.

The NBA playoffs only had one such series, and therefore only had to push one series back in one round. Even so, it was only completed in five days less than the NHL playoffs.

The other thing to note here is that hockey is a far more physical sport than basketball. While any sport takes a toll on the body, I don't think anyone would question that sports like football and hockey—which involve legal hitting—demand a higher physical toll than baseball or basketball.

Thus, allotting a certain amount of two-day breaks in the NHL just seems humane.

Now, I'm not saying running up and down the court in the NBA doesn't take a toll, but I simply don't see why the NBA can't play every-other night the majority of the time.

A two-month postseason shouldn't be a requirement unless the playoffs naturally extend that long due to several lengthy series. The NBA playoffs need not be so excessive.

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