NBA Schedule 2011: Basketball Better off Starting on Christmas Day
Forget about BRI and system issues. Forget about the difference between decertifying and disclaiming a union.
If there's anything the NBA lockout has taught us, it's that the 82-game season is too long and that starting basketball on Christmas Day makes more sense than tipping off in late October or early November.
There's already tremendous excitement building for the start of what still figures to be an epic 2011-12 campaign with an equally-epic quintuple-header across TNT, ABC and ESPN on December 25th. The day begins with the Boston Celtics, led once more by the trio of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen, visiting Madison Square Garden to take on Amar'e Stoudemire, Carmelo Anthony and the New York Knicks in a battle between the old and the new in the Eastern Conference.
Then comes a rematch of last year's NBA Finals, when LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and the Miami Heat return to Dallas to watch Dirk Nowtizki and the Mavericks try on their shiny new championship rings. That game will be followed promptly by a meeting between Derrick Rose's Chicago Bulls and Kobe Bryant's Los Angeles Lakers at the Staples Center in what may well be a preview of the 2012 NBA Finals.
For those of you who just can't get enough, the slate will continue with Dwight Howard and the Orlando Magic matching wits with Kevin Durant and Oklahoma City Thunder and, in the nightcap, Blake Griffin and the Clippers colliding with Monta Ellis and the Golden State Warriors in Oakland.
In other words, opening night of the NBA season is going to be awesome, thanks (ironically enough) to the lockout. It would seem that commissioner and squat overlord David Stern felt compelled to give the legions of fans turned off by the bad blood between the owners and the players a blockbuster schedule to come back to as a means of hanging onto casual observers and reigniting the passion among diehards.
An excellent strategy, to be sure, so why doesn't the league just do this every year? Most people don't really start paying attention to what's going on in The Association until Christmas anyway. Close followers of NBA basketball will tune in whenever guys are on the court. The key for the league is to figure out a way to initiate and hold the interest of the rest of the sports world, and not just for the playoffs.
That purpose can also be served by shortening the schedule, or at least spacing out the games a bit more. Forcing guys to play back-to-backs and four games in five nights in some stretches wears out the bodies of the players and, in turn, the fleeting attention spans of the fans by putting forth a sloppier, less entertaining product.
If the owners and the players are truly concerned with growing and improving the game for the sake of their pocketbooks, they'd best look into ways to make the games more meaningful, or at least of a quality that's worth watching. Creating scarcity isn't the only or entire way to accomplish that, but it would certainly help.
By moving up the start of the seasonal calendar to late December, the NBA would be able to limit the overlap with the NFL and college football seasons, thereby giving it a greater chance to compete with the general American sports attention span and the money that comes with it.
And, of course, there's just so much more of a "wow" factor to exciting matchups on Christmas Day than on some random Wednesday or Thursday night during the fall. The NBA can give no greater gift to its fans than good games, and what better time to give than the peak of the holiday season?
