Six Ways to Fix the NBA

The Boston Celtics won their 17th Championship Tuesday night in one of the more unwatchable NBA Finals in recent memory.  The entire series seemed to be a race to the bottom, as one team couldn't play defense and the other could only play defense occasionally.

The NBA highlighted the fact that this year's Finals featured two of its more storied franchises, and all it managed to remind us of was how good the NBA was then compared to how poor it is now.

Before the NBA loses any more traction, here's a quick list of ways to fix the faltering league and restore it—if not to its former glory, then at least more watchable then the fine mess it is today.

6) Fewer Timeouts

Basketball is a game of flow, and nothing disrupts flow more then a ridiculous number of work stoppages—especially during the last two minutes of the game.  Each team is fully equipped with three 20-second timeouts, and three full timeouts per half.

Suggestion: Get rid of the 20-second timeouts.  This would force teams to use their timeouts more effectively during the course of the game.  It may even make for more interesting decisions as to whether or not a team would use a timeout during the half simply to interrupt the other team's flow.

5) No More Fouls in the Last Two Minutes

Another useless strategy in the NBA is that of fouling the other team in the last two minutes when your team is down by more then two baskets.  This strategy occasionally works in college, though rarely, as college kids are not as refined free throw shooters.  NBA teams, however, usually have at least four to five ringers they can throw out there to render such a strategy pointless.

Suggestion: Make an intentional foul in the last two minutes of the game, on a player not in the act of shooting, a technical foul.  Thereby you award not only free throws but possession of the ball, making such a game-halting strategy utterly pointless.

4) Stop Making Defense Illegal

In 2004 a no-name Detroit Piston team beat the likes of individual talents like Tracy McGrady, Dwayne Wade, Shaquille O'Neal, and Kobe Bryant on their way to a surprising NBA title by playing a tough team-oriented style of defense.  The NBA's answer: make that style of defense illegal.

The NBA made it illegal to 'find' or hand check a player dribbling the ball.  In short, it makes it illegal to place your hand on a point guard right before they try to blow past you for an easy layup.

By making hand checks illegal, the NBA ensured that players like Kobe, McGrady, and Paul Pierce can only be contained for so long but never really stopped.  It also ensures that speedsters like Dwayne Wade are able to dart to the basket unobstructed by anything so pesky as a defender.

People watch sports because they like to watch profound acts of athleticism, but creativity is an important component of that.  If necessity is the mother of invention, the rules make offensive innovation completely unnecessary.

3) Create a Hard Salary Cap

The current cap in the NBA is so soft it could be a summer dish at BaskinRobbins.  With the mid-level exception, the bi-annual exception, the Larry Bird exception, the Early Bird exception, and the non-Bird exception, the current salary cap has so many loopholes it should probably be working as a tobacco lobbyist.

This cap still gives big-market teams the chance to sign premier players and avoid paying the luxury tax by giving all but the most incompetent and greedy the chance to navigate a payroll that exceeds the salary cap but falls short of the threshold needed to pay the luxury tax.

The NFL has a system of salary egalitarianism, and the MLB has instituted a blueprint for small-market teams to compete successfully against big-market ones.  But the NBA has merely come up with a muddied, indecisive mess that benefits only the biggest market teams and the most established franchises.

Suggestion: Install a hard NFL-style cap.  You have a number—your team's payroll stays under that number, or you forfeit every game until your team's payroll is under that number.

Salary caps create greater parity and competition throughout the league, and with a hard cap teams would have to decide who's worth more: big name free agents or unproven draft picks.  If college players lose out financially, they may stay in school to hone their skills until they're a more sure-fire NBA commodity.

This would probably improve the parity in the league, rather than having the current class system of professional (Celtics, Spurs, Pistons) and minor league teams (Bobcats, Supersonics) occupying the same conferences.

2) Get Rid of the First Round of the Playoffs

There is no more pointless regular season then the NBA regular season.  Why? Because teams fight for 82 games, and inevitably there are two or three teams every year who finish under .500 that still make the playoffs.

Championship teams are rewarded for a stellar regular season by having to waste their energies against a team nobody expects to beat them (if you're thinking Celts/Hawks went seven, ask yourself this—even after Game Six, did you really think there was any chance in hell the Hawks were going to win?).

In the current format, no eighth seed has ever made an NBA Finals, let alone won a championship.  Playoffs are for teams who expect to win championships.  Making the playoffs, especially in the NBA, is not an accomplishment in itself.

Suggestion: Go to a six-team or even a four-team format in each conference.  The only way to make every NBA game count is to have fewer playoff teams.

The NBA, more than any other professional sport, rewards mediocrity.  It rewards guys who can shoot but can't play defense (I'm looking at you Carmelo Anthony), guys who can shoot but refuse to pass (Kobe, Kobe, Kobe...but with that team, can you blame him?), and guys who can do it all but can only be bothered to do some of it some of the time (Rasheed, you could have been a contender).

The only way to make the NBA more competitive is make certain goals harder to attain.  The NBA is the only place where teams are content being a playoff team.  In other sports the goal is to go to the Super Bowl, win the Stanley Cup, or go to the World Series.  In the NBA, showing up seems to be enough.  The league rewards teams for that, and we, the playoff-viewing public, pay the price.

1) More Transparent Officiating

Be honest.  When Tim Donaghy said publicly referees helped manipulate the result of a 2002 playoff game, there was a little part of you that thought—and probably still thinks—it could be true.  It certainly adds a little fire to the smoke when the Lakers shot 27 fourth quarter free throws in that game and only ended up winning the game by four points.

It also doesn't help that rather than initiating an investigation, David Stern treated the matter like Tony Soprano, saying that Donaghy is a rat and you can't trust a rat, while ordering all his refs to shut their mouths.

In the NFL there's instant replay, so it's easier to get a bungled call right.  In MLB strike zones may vary from umpire to umpire, but those umpires are consistent on the games they call, in how they call them.

The NBA, and what does and does not constitute a foul, is often muddied and usually exists in a black hole where not even the most seasoned NBA announcer can say definitively what constitutes a foul and what does not on a consistent basis.

So long as this remains the case, there will always be questions and allegations, and the NBA will slowly become about as credible as a Don King fight.