The terms of the NBA’s July restart for the 2019-20 season are already set, with eight regular-season games followed by the traditional eight-team bracket formats for the Western and Eastern Conference.
In all, to win the league’s championship, a team must win four best-of-seven series — and that remains the case this season.
That’s a much longer path to a title than in baseball and football, of course. In Major League Baseball (MLB), there are only three postseason rounds rather than four, and the first is best-of-five, rather than seven. In the National Football League (NFL), depending on whether a team earns a bye, a team must win either three or four single elimination games.
That leads to significantly more variance than in the NBA, and more teams believing they have a legitimate shot to win a championship.
In a recent appearance on Anthony Pompliano’s Pomp podcast, Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey elaborated on that dynamic. He said:
It’s the hardest to win a title in the NBA. There’s less variance. The favorites have a much bigger edge. … On an individual game basis, an NBA game is generally the most predictable of all the major sports. And just to make sure the right team wins, we play seven times. We should be one-and-done and the NFL should play seven times, for example, if you wanted to try to balance out the general variance.
In my opinion, we should have shorter series so there’s more variance injected. Because right now, it’s too deterministic. It’s why you’ll see teams win six times in eight years or three times in five years. … It’s rare that you just win one, because once you get a systemic edge — which has happened many times, it’s usually you have the best player in the league — you end up winning multiple times.
To Morey’s point, in the 2010s decade, the Golden State Warriors won the West for five consecutive years. Meanwhile, the East was won eight straight times by a LeBron James-led team — first the Miami Heat for four years, followed by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the next four.
By contrast, MLB’s reigning World Series champion is the Washington Nationals, who were a Wild Card team after not winning their division.
The argument in favor of the NBA’s system is that it likely ensures a more “deserving” champion, since a higher number of games decreases the possibility of upsets. It also produces more playoff television revenue.
But in terms of pure entertainment value, and improving fan engagement by convincing more fans that their team could actually win a title, there’s certainly an argument for formats with increased parity.
The NBA isn’t making such a change any time soon, but it could be an idea worth considering in the next round of collective bargaining talks. The NBA once had the first round of its playoffs as a five-game series rather than seven, but the league changed to the current format in 2003.
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