Yes congratulations to new NBA World Champions, The Los Ang.. [choke, gasp] The Los Angele [gu-huk!].. to Kobe Bry[bleearargggh!] I can’t do it. Stupid Lakers!
How is the NBA as a whole doing? Well, the NHL is catching up. Here are two things the NBA could do to that would improve the experience.
- Enforce the time rules. Free throw shots are supposed to take 10 seconds. They take slightly less than one TiVo fast-forward of 30 seconds. With the amount of free throws thrown every game this adds up. Simply enforcing the rules to chop a few seconds off each free throw would go a long way. 20 second timeouts aren’t 20 seconds. They are well over a minute. Enforce the rule! And reduce the number of timeouts. Games should not end with a timeout after every possession. Even more than the free throws the timeouts kill the flow of the game. Especially in the first half.
- Never start weekend games past 7:00. Especially for the playoffs!An NBA games take over 3 hours to play. You should never have to stay up late to watch the ending. If two teams in the same time zone play each other, the game should not start past 7:00 local time. This can be relaxed a little in the post-season, since more games are of national interest. 8:00 is allowable in that case. Maybe even 8:30 since West Coast viewers have to get to a set. But no later than that. And never on weekends! Why on earth would you schedule a weekend game at an hour that ensures most people won’t watch the end of it? It’s insane! I love the NBA, but I wasn’t going to stay up to nearly midnight to watch the free-throw and timeout contest that is the last 5 minutes of an NBA game. I went to bed. In the morning I’d watch the last few minutes and see who won.
When you’re losing my interest, you as a league have done something wrong. What are your ideas?