Why the NBA's new $76 billion TV deal marks the perfect time to shorten the season

Many of the NBA's problems boil down to how long the season is -- here's how and why a new schedule could work

By Sam Quinn Jul 25, 2024 at 10:53 am ET• 11 min read

The Denver Nuggets have owned the Los Angeles Lakers since the beginning of 2023. In that time, they have played eight regular-season games and the Nuggets have won all eight of them. They've played nine playoff games and the Nuggets have also won eight of those. Yet when discussing the second of those series, a first-round victory this spring, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope made a somewhat startling admission on The Draymond Green Show. "We felt the Lakers should have beat us," the now-former Nugget said.

The series went only five games, but the Lakers led all five games at halftime. Two of them were decided by a single possession and none by more than 11 points. The most one-sided rivalry in basketball turned into a coin flip because, according to Caldwell-Pope, the Nuggets were simply exhausted. "You know how like, towards the playoffs, guys get their rest?" Caldwell-Pope asked. "But I feel like that's where we spent most of our energy and our time trying to get first place." By the time that Lakers series arrived, the Nuggets were spent. They lost one round later in an upset against the Minnesota Timberwolves. They blew a 20-point Game 7 lead in that series.

We see some version of this story play out pretty much every year. There were 15 series played in the 2024 postseason, and 10 of them included at least one All-Star still in his prime missing at least one game. In 2023, it was seven out of 15. None of this accounts for players who enter the postseason hobbled, like Joel Embiid and Karl-Anthony Towns did this season. It also ignores teams playing through entire series with half of their role players out, as the Knicks did against Indiana this spring or the Timberwolves did against the Nuggets in 2023. The modern NBA playoffs feel far less like a test of skill than a war of attrition. It has become increasingly common for fans to wonder if the best team really won. 

There are a number of viable explanations for why this is happening. NBA athletes are more explosive than ever, and perhaps that makes them more injury-prone. ESPN's Baxter Holmes has done some very interesting reporting about the dangers of pushing young players too far at the AAU level. It's also worth noting that injuries aren't exactly a new phenomenon, and they aren't exclusive to basketball either. But Caldwell-Pope spelled out the dilemma many teams and veterans face during the season. They can either prioritize rest or they can prioritize winning. In a perfect world, those shouldn't be things that anyone needs to decide between, so the simplest solution would be building more mandated rest into the schedule. The logical way to do that would be to shorten the schedule.