“Pay for Play” is a column by Wyatt Allsup about the role of money in the world of sports.
At the end of a postseason in which a record nine NBA All-Stars have missed playoff games, it looks like the team who will hoist the trophy will be the one which has remained the healthiest. The NBA’s primary objective is to make money, but the league’s rush to play as many games as possible has jeopardized the health of its athletes and damaged the product on our TV screens.
Following a hectic pandemic-shortened season last year, the NBA pushed hard to get back on track, with opening night in December coming just 73 days after the conclusion of the 2020 NBA Finals.
While the NBA’s revenue for the 2020-21 season is down about a third from projected numbers due to a lack of fans in stadiums, the league expected to lose about 40% of that projection. As a business, the NBA did better than anticipated, but its fans paid the price in other ways.
The abbreviated 72-game season was jammed into a shorter window than usual, causing more back-to-backs and fewer days between games. Speaking as a fan, this resulted in the most boring NBA season I have watched: Countless injuries to many of the game’s top stars gave us a dry regular season, an underwhelming postseason and a Finals matchup that has left many wondering who the best team actually was this season.
The Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers were two teams that were heavily favored by many early on in the season. I personally looked forward to another chapter in a historic rivalry between NBA legends LeBron James and Kevin Durant. Watching other future Hall of Famers James Harden, Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving share the game’s biggest stage with them would have made for great TV as well.
Some might say that injuries are a part of sports or that it’s refreshing to have some new competition in the Finals, but there’s nothing entertaining about watching the league’s best players sit on the sidelines. Harden and LeBron are two of the most durable stars in league history, and they both missed extended time this season while not looking quite like themselves in the postseason.
Durant played just 35 regular-season games, and Davis and Irving were both forced to watch while their teams needed them to avoid elimination yet fell short in their absence. According to ESPN, NBA All-Stars missed an average of 13.7 games this regular season, and a record nine All-Stars have missed at least one playoff game, including young stars Trae Young, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jamal Murray, to name a few.
Injuries do occur in sports, but this year’s spike in frequency and severity has to be linked to a very short offseason and a lack of in-season rest stemming from the decision to play an overly ambitious 72 games in 145 days. Athletic trainers point to the limited time for players to properly recover and train during a condensed season.
The shortened season should have comprised about 55 to 60 games; the league’s revenue would have taken a hit, but the NBA is also responsible for protecting its athletes and putting the best product forward. In the long run, this year’s losses would likely be worth it for a league that needs to revive fan interest — the 2020 NBA Finals saw record-low TV ratings.
Hopefully, a longer offseason and a normal schedule will cut down on the injuries that ruined so much of this season, but the damage is already done in some ways. The severity of the knee injury that the Los Angeles Clippers’ Kawhi Leonard suffered in the playoffs remains unknown, but there has been speculation about a torn ACL. If that were the case, he would likely miss time at the beginning of next season, making Clippers games less interesting.
Another contributing factor to this year’s particularly slow regular season is the addition of the NBA Play-In Tournament, which was first introduced last season in the Orlando bubble. At the time, it was appropriate to give teams a fair chance to make the playoffs, given that the regular season was shortened without notice by the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, however, the play-in only reduces the already low significance of an individual regular-season game. With so many games in a season, games in the regular season tend to feel a bit meaningless, like the players aren’t really trying. Plus, some players, like Leonard, take regular season games off in order to get the rest they need.
It can be boring to watch a random game in February with stars sitting out for rest or injuries. Adding four more teams to the playoff picture doesn’t help. The regular season can hardly be competitive when two thirds of the teams in the league are still alive at the end of it, allowing some teams to coast until it counts.
While the Play-In Tournament was entertaining to watch, it diluted the regular season and put some playoff teams like the Golden State Warriors at a disadvantage. The Warriors finished the season with the eighth seed and were eliminated by the ninth-seeded Memphis Grizzlies in the Play-In Tournament, removing yet another superstar, Stephen Curry, from this year’s playoffs.
Commissioner Adam Silver recently announced that the Play-In Tournament will be here to stay in 2022, which I fear will make for another low-stakes, uncompetitive regular season. The average margin of victory this season was among the highest in NBA history.
Players have expressed discontent with the play-in, but the NBA will continue to act in its best interest financially. However, the league should also consider the effect that its poor management is having on its fans who watch the games.
Fans don’t want to watch hundreds of games in a season when most of them are irrelevant or end in blowouts. The play-in creates a playing field in which several teams are rebuilding, several are contending and the teams in between can be bad and make the playoffs anyway, resulting in lopsided playoff competition.
It makes the regular season less eventful and less important, leading some fans to only tune in for the playoffs, which might not be competitive either. When that happens, the league cannot have nine All-Stars missing playoff games, or even dedicated fans will start to lose interest.