Let's Fix the NBA

In the age of tanking and the corner three, answering requires knowing 60% of the league. The modern NBA is defined by an abundance of skill, spacing, and money. The on-court product reflects this evolution: the game is faster, more precise, and more technically advanced than at any point in the league’s history. And yet, the league’s underlying structure feels misaligned with the product it’s selling.

Over the past year, a series of scandals have underscored the NBA’s shifting ecosystem. The rapid integration of legalized sports betting into American culture (and inevitably, professional locker rooms) has introduced predictable vulnerabilities. At the same time, an increasingly restrictive salary cap has created conditions where circumvention is both tempting, and at times rational. Did Steve Ballmer really do anything Bill Belichick wouldn’t have? Of course, I’m only talking about sports here.

None of this is surprising. Systems evolve, incentives shift, and participants adapt accordingly. The league will respond, as it always does, with a mix of new rules and renewed focus on optics. Naturally, the league’s sportsbook sponsors are incentivized to keep contests fair for maximum profit-share, and with increased scrutiny and seemingly limitless access to data, cheating will become extremely difficult and its repercussions severe.

Cap circumvention will be difficult to police, but Adam Silver has a clear choice. He can make a visible, punitive example of the Clippers and reset the risk calculus for every owner considering similar arrangements. Or, he can settle for financial penalties and forfeited (middling) draft assets, a resolution tidy enough for the league office but insufficient in deterring owners with billions in liquidity from underhanded deal making. While David Stern generally took the ‘Go Big and Loud or Don’t Go At All,’ approach, media coverage can’t afford Silver the same shield. Making an example of the Clippers would be fair, but enforcing accountability hasn’t necessarily been the league's strong suit.

In the long run, neither issue is likely to materially damage the NBA’s position. The league, its partners, and its stakeholders are too financially aligned to allow that outcome.

The more pressing concern is not what these developments represent in isolation, but what they obscure. Beneath the surface, the NBA faces a set of structural challenges that have proven difficult to confront: a restrictive cap system that punishes internal success and ambition, an incentive structure that rewards losing, a regular season that struggles to sustain relevance, and a style of play that converges toward uniformity.

What follows is a framework for addressing those problems—both within the league’s current model and beyond.

The Competence Tax

In theory, the NBA’s current salary cap structure is designed to promote competitive balance. In practice, it has increasingly functioned as a deterrent to successful team-building.

The clearest example is the introduction of the second apron. At minimum, crossing the $210m payroll threshold requires ambition, requiring owners willing to pay expensive rosters for the chance to compete. In order to compete, teams have to do many things well—draft, develop, trade, extend, sign, coach, manage, and pay.

A franchise’s reward for ambition and competence is a series of cascading restrictions: limited access to trade exceptions, diminished flexibility in aggregating player salaries in trades, constraints on sign-and-trade transactions, forced draft-repositioning, and the elimination of the mid-level exception. The cumulative effect is not simply financial, it’s structural. Teams are, in effect, prevented from improving or meaningfully evolving once they’ve passed some arbitrary financial threshold.

This is an unusual incentive system. In most competitive environments, effective decision making— identifying and developing talent, constructing cohesive rosters— is rewarded. In the NBA, those same behaviors now trigger mechanisms designed to degrade rosters and redistribute players. The logic underpinning all this is borrowed from the NFL, a league built on parity and roster turnover. But the comparison is imperfect. Football distributes value across a large number of positions, the majority of which involve interchangeable labor. Carson Wentz was going to be the MVP before he got hurt. The Eagles still won the SuperBowl. Bill Belichick slaughtered a sacred cow during every off-season.

The NBA is different. It is a star-driven league, and its most compelling iterations have consistently featured elite players on elite teams operating at a sustained level of excellence. From the dynastic runs of the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers, to the dominance of the Chicago Bulls, to more recent eras defined by LeBron James and the Golden State Warriors, the league’s popularity peaks when its best teams remain intact long enough to establish identity and narrative continuity.

The second apron works directly against this dynamic. It does not just limit excess spending, it accelerates the breaking up of successful teams by enforcing an unreasonable level of roster rigidity. This also constrains aggressive teams, threatening to lock them into stagnant, non-competitive rosters precisely when their window to compete is open.

A more coherent approach would reverse the incentive. Rather than penalizing teams for retaining and developing talent, reward continuity. Implement cap mechanisms that reduce the financial burden of re-signing homegrown players to encourage long-term team-building while preserving flexibility for teams willing to spend into the luxury tax.

The goal should not be parity for its own sake, but competitive integrity: a system in which well-run organizations are allowed to sustain success, and poorly run ones are incentivized to improve rather than reset.

That principle applies even more directly to the league’s most persistent and embarrassing problem.

Fruit From a Poisoned Tree

Ironically, the actual players who belong to tanking teams usually give high-effort performances. Perhaps because they are all auditioning for a guaranteed contract. Still, it illustrates the point: tanking is not a failure of effort, it is a rational response to the NBA’s incentive structure. At its core, the problem is straightforward. The league rewards poor performance with access to elite amateur talent. While the lottery system introduces variance, the underlying mechanism remains intact. The worse a team performs, the greater its opportunity to acquire a player who can alter its trajectory.

Proposals to mitigate this dynamic have focused on incremental reform—flattening lottery odds, limiting the number of consecutive years a team can remain in the lottery, and introducing the play-in tournament. These measures address symptoms, not causes. As long as losing improves a team’s access to future talent, the incentive to lose competitively will persist. The math is too clean.

The logical conclusion is impossible to avoid: the draft itself is the source of the distortion.

In most industries, highly skilled labor is not assigned—it selects. Elite candidates select organizations based on compensation, developmental infrastructure, competitive opportunity, organizational competence, and location. A twenty-two-year-old physics-computer science double-major from MIT is not assigned to the worst tech company in the Fortune 500 to preserve competitive balance. Would Zion Williamson really have chosen to play for the Pelicans?

Professional American sports, by contrast, operate on a system that restricts agency at the entry point under the threat of exclusion. This is not only accepted, it is celebrated.

The draft is a labor rights violation dressed in television pageantry. The only reason it has survived this long is because the pageantry is excellent.

A different model would treat incoming players as participants in a managed market rather than assets to be allocated. Prospects could enter the league at seventeen, signing with teams via cap space, two-way contracts, or developmental pathways tied to the G-League. Baseline protections like guaranteed health coverage after fifty appearances and restrictions on agent contact would be built in. College programs would also benefit from continuity, as one-and-dones become optional rather than strategically mandatory. This will raise the level of every player entering the NBA.

The primary objection to such a model stems from fears over concentration of talent—the concern that top prospects would gravitate toward established or high-profile franchises. This is reasonable but overstated. Roster spots are finite. Salary caps impose hard limits on accumulation. Perhaps most importantly, opportunity remains a powerful counterweight. Prospects are unlikely to prioritize marginal brand advantages over playing time, development, higher salaries, and a clear path toward impact.

Take European football, the most instructive global comparison. Their talent distribution is shaped by financial constraints, organizational competence, and competitive opportunity. The result is not a perfect balance. Instead, it creates a dynamic equilibrium in which well-run clubs consistently outperform poorly run ones, without requiring those clubs to fail first in order to improve.

Would the NBA be worse off if Cooper Flagg had chosen the Celtics as a free agent? Or if AJ Dybantsa signed a four-year, $80M deal with the Jazz? Almost certainly not. Marquee young players on competitive teams generate more interest than marquee young players assigned to rebuilding ones. Some organizations will overpay for young talent and be punished for it. Others will succeed. Both outcomes produce better television than a franchise deliberately losing in February.

Abolishing the draft would not eliminate inequality between franchises. It would, however, eliminate the league’s most direct incentive to lose games deliberately.

The Far Too Regular Season

The NBA regular season is both the league’s primary content engine and its most visible structural weakness.

There are 1230 “episodes” of the NBA regular season, making up the 82-game schedule and fifty percent of league’s revenue through associated television contracts. But the majority of these games have little urgency and limited stakes. Load management further dilutes the product, turning low-stakes games into low-stakes games without good players, as teams optimize for post-season performance rather than regular-season results. And it doesn’t help that all the while, they must compete with the NFL for the spotlight.

From a business perspective, the league’s reluctance to shorten the season makes sense. Gate receipts, local television contracts, and existing national media deals are all calibrated around current inventory levels. Fewer games would mean immediate revenue contraction. Fine. You can’t cut games. But maintaining volume does not require maintaining format.

A more concentrated structure—forty minutes instead of forty-eight, two twenty-minute halves, four total timeouts each, no challenges but automatic review—would address pacing issues, restore continuity, and decrease in-game margin of error. End-of-game sequences, which can stretch to disproportionate lengths, would regain a sense of continuity. This means a more coherent viewing experience, both in arenas and on television.

Combine that edited format with a league seasoning starting on Christmas and ending in August, and suddenly the NBA will have dodged three to four months of competing for ratings with the NFL, while simultaneously picking up two additional months of previously dead air time in professional sport.

The same logic applies to the postseason. Early-round series, particularly in the first round, often lack competitive tension. Reducing these matchups to best-of-five formats would increase the variance and elevate the stakes of each game, even at the cost of some inventory.

These adjustments do not solve the deeper question: what should an NBA regular season game mean? But they point toward it. In a media landscape where a Netflix series can claim more weekly viewing hours than an entire conference’s worth of regular season games, the NBA cannot afford to treat volume as a proxy for value. The question is not how to protect the existing inventory. It is how to make each unit of that inventory worth protecting.

This shift, taken seriously, leads to a more radical set of possibilities.

The Tyranny of Efficiency

Basketball has never been more solved.

Teams now operate with a shared understanding of what constitutes an efficient possession: three pointers, shots at the rim, and free throws. This has produced extraordinary offensive output. It has also produced convergence. Across the league, stylistic differences have evaporated. Offenses increasingly rely on the same geometry: drive-and-kick actions designed to generate corner threes, spacing principles that prioritize maximum shooting gravity, and shot profiles that minimize midrange attempts. These are not trends so much as conclusions, arrived at independently and then adopted universally.

From a competitive standpoint, this is logical. From a product standpoint, it is limiting.

A league where every team is pursuing the same optimal strategy risks diminishing one of sports’ most valuable qualities: variety. Distinct styles create distinct identities. They produce contrast, unpredictability, and more compelling matchups. When those differences erode, so too does some of the texture that makes the game engaging over time.

At various points, the league has intervened to shape how basketball is played—adjusting rules to open up the floor, increase pace, and encourage skill development. A similar intervention is now necessary, not to restrict offense, but to reintroduce diversity into how offense is generated.

Two structural changes would address the current imbalance.

First, eliminate the corner three. At twenty-two feet, it is materially shorter than above-the-break attempts while also being uniquely difficult to defend without compromising the paint. And the shot’s prevalence has reinforced a specific offensive loop: collapse the defense, kick to the corner, relocate, repeat. This is forty-percent or more of an NBA offense. Removing it would disrupt that loop, forcing teams to find different answers.

Second, move the three-point line back to a genuinely demanding distance. Three-point attempts are currently worth fifty-percent more than two-point shots without being fifty-percent more difficult, a mathematical imbalance that analytics have identified and teams have exploited. Recalibrating that ratio by increasing the distance does not eliminate the three. Narrowing its efficiency advantage will reopen the strategic viability of midrange scoring, post-play, and interior creation. The objective is not to reduce skill, but to raise its threshold. By making the most efficient outcomes more difficult to achieve, the league will incentivize innovation rather than replication.

A similar recalibration is needed in how the game is officiated. Over time, the interpretation of contact has shifted decisively in favor of offensive players. While this has contributed to increased scoring and fluidity, it has also introduced distortions, particularly in the proliferation of marginal foul calls and techniques designed to exploit them. Harden, Embiid, SGA. When an offense can reliably generate free throws from minimal or incidental contact, the game becomes more legal exercise than athletic contest.

Restoring that balance does not require a return to more restrictive eras of physicality. It requires a specific, more consistent definition of what constitutes foul particularly on jump shots and perimeter actions. Reducing the frequency of marginal calls would reward defensive discipline without materially diminishing offensive creativity.

Taken together, these changes would make the game more demanding, more varied, and more strategically open. The result would be an evolution that preserves the gains of the modern era while growing the ways in which teams can succeed.

Leaving the Bubble

Basketball is quickly becoming the world’s second game because its barrier to entry is essentially zero. All you need is a ball and a hoop.

Since the Dream Team, the NBA has spent nearly five decades building a global fanbase it has barely begun to monetize. In many countries, there are now fully realized basketball infrastructures. The league pulls players from over 40 countries and has broadcast relationships across Europe and Asia. It generates enormous organic fandom in markets served primarily through highlight packages at 3am local time. More than that, arguably the five best players in the league—Jokic, Wembenyama, Gilgeous-Alexander, Doncic, Antetokounmpo—are foreign.

What the league has not done is build a structure that takes this seriously. But an international circuit of six to eight games per team per season, played in countries around the world, would because:
- It creates additional revenue streams that could eventually offset the cost of a shorter domestic schedule.
- It gives the league a credible global identity rather than a domestic product with international highlights.
- It makes domestic games a more exclusive event. Scarcity is a feature, not a bug, and the league currently produces so much inventory that individual games are already structurally prevented from feeling important.

The cities exist. From London to Shanghai to Mexico City, these are established markets with existing basketball infrastructure, broadcast relationships, and young audiences. Six international games per team is not a radical imposition on an 82-game season. It is an additional revenue stream, a marketing strategy, and a structural argument for why the schedule can eventually get shorter—all at once.

A Repositioning

The NBA regular season serves primarily as a sorting mechanism. Its purpose is to determine playoff seeding for a postseason that decides the champion, resulting in meaningful competition compressed into a small portion of the calendar year. But this is not an inevitable design. It is a legacy one, inherited from a mid-century sports economy focused on survival. In European football, success is not determined solely by a knockout tournament, but mainly by sustained excellence over the course of a season. A league table crowns the champion, while promotion and relegation introduce stakes at both ends of the standings. Cup matches provide stakes. Every match contributes directly to an outcome that cannot be deferred.

The appeal of such a system is not philosophical. It is practical. It maximizes the number of games with meaningful consequences. Reframing the NBA along these lines would require a structural shift, but it would also unlock a fundamentally different kind of product—one in which every game carries weight, and in which success and failure are distributed continuously rather than episodically.

The Great Expansion

A potential remodel begins with expansion: the league grows to forty teams, splitting into two twenty-team tiers: Division A and Division B.

This means that ten new franchises enter the league, all initially placed in Division B. There are plenty of cities ready for consideration: Las Vegas, Seattle, Mexico City, Montreal, Nashville, Baltimore, Kansas City, Honolulu, Baja California, San Diego. New franchise owners could pay an admittance fee—say, $5B—distributed equally among the thirty existing ownership groups. Ten franchises at $5B each is $50B in new capital, $1.67B to every current owner before a new game is played.

Beyond simple growth, expansion serves a strategic purpose by creating the population necessary for a tiered system while broadening the league’s geographic and commercial footprint, domestically and internationally. This would also accommodate a broadening talent pool.

A Two-Tier Structure

- Division A represents the league’s top, competitive tier.
- Division B functions as both a developmental environment and a pathway to advancement.
- At the end of each season, the bottom three teams in Division A are relegated, while the top three teams in Division B are promoted.
- A playoff between the fourth-from-bottom team in Division A and the fourth-place team in Division B determines the final participant in Division A for the following season.

This system introduces consequences across the entire standings. Contention is no longer limited to championship pursuit. Avoiding relegation becomes a parallel objective, ensuring that a significantly larger portion of the league remains competitively engaged throughout the season.

Managing Financial Risk

The primary objection to relegation is economic. Franchise valuations are predicated on stability. This means guaranteed participation in the league’s top tier, consistent media exposure, and predictable revenue streams. Relegation introduces variance.

To mitigate this, financial mechanisms would need to be built into the system. “Parachute payments,” would be distributed to relegated teams over multiple seasons, to offset short-term revenue loss and provide a buffer for operational adjustment. A separate salary cap environment for each division would align costs with competitive context — higher in Division A, lower in Division B — while preserving upward mobility. Transactions between divisions would be allowed.

Crucially, the presence of a second division does not eliminate value. It redistributes it. A controlled two-tier system establishes a floor for franchise relevance while preserving the upside associated with promotion and success.

Redefining the Season

With this new structure, the regular season becomes the central competitive mechanism.

A 57-game schedule—each of the nineteen opponents played three times, with seven international games woven in—feeds into a league table that determines the Division A champion outright. There is no postseason tournament required to validate the result because the best team over the full season is recognized as such.

A league table rewards consistency. It does not put the same emphasis on individual moments. A concurrent knockout cup competition, open to all forty teams, with randomized draws broadcasted as complete events, addresses that gap.

The new structure would also provide Division B teams with a path to glory existing independent of promotion. It would give mid-table Division A teams a second objective when the title race has resolved. And it offers the league a parallel content calendar—high-leverage, single-elimination games interspersed throughout the regular season, which the current league format cannot generate on its own.

All teams in Division A and the Top 4 teams by record after 22 games in Division B would automatically qualify for the Second Round.

Qualifying Round
- After Game 22
Second Round
- After Game 30
Round of 16
- After Game 38
Quarterfinals
- After Game 46
Semifinals
- After Game 50
Final
- After Game 54

Together, the league and cup structures create a layered competitive calendar: consistent stakes throughout the table, punctuated by the volatility of elimination play.

A Different Kind of Product

The totality of these changes redefines the NBA’s offering.

Instead of an 82-game prelude to a post-season tournament, the league becomes a continuous competition in which every game directly influences outcomes at both the top and bottom of the standings. The number of “meaningful” games increases, not by adding inventory, but by redistributing stakes.

This has implications beyond competition because it reshapes the league’s value proposition as a media product. Games become more consequential, which means narratives develop organically over the course of a season rather than being deferred to the playoffs. International interest, already a strength of the NBA, can be further cultivated through a structure that mirrors globally familiar formats and offers its product live.

None of this is easily achievable. Owners will have to accept short-term uncertainty in exchange for long-term structural health. It challenges assumptions that have defined the league's interwoven monopolistic and champagne socialism philosophical backbone.

But if the objective is to build the most compelling version of the NBA—not just as a sport, but as a global entertainment product—then incremental reform may not be enough. At some point, the question is not how to refine the existing model, but whether the existing model even reflects the best version of the NBA.

The product has evolved. The incentives have not. That gap must close—ideally by design, not in reaction to a decaying financial environment.