Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra says he’s open to learning potential benefits gleaned from the NBA’s 44-minute game experiment. As opposed to shortening individual contests by several minutes, though, Spoelstra makes it clear he would instead prefer if the league cut entire games from the 82-game regular season schedule.
The quotes below are courtesy of CBS Sports’ Zach Harper. Asked his opinion on Sunday’s 44-minute exhibition between the Boston Celtics and Brooklyn Nets, Spoelstra mentioned reducing a season’s number of games unprompted.
“I don’t think it’s a matter of how long the game is,” Spoelstra said. “I think there’s too many games, to be frank. I think if there’s some way to find a way to cut out some of the back-to-backs so there aren’t 20-plus of them. I think that’s the bigger issue, not shaving off four minutes in a particular game. But I’m open to seeing what happens with that.”
We agree with Spoelstra. An 82-game regular season is not only too long in a vacuum, but its ill-effects are exacerbated by the severe toll of teams playing games on consecutive nights.
Every NBA team will play at 17 least back-to-backs this season, while the Charlotte Hornets and Detroit Pistons are tasked with playing a second game in as many nights a league-leading 22 times. The Atlanta Hawks, Denver Nuggets, Milwaukee Bucks, Philadelphia 76ers, and San Antonio Spurs will play 21 back-to-backs.
Ironically, the league has never has never been forced to schedule more of those games than this season. The extended All-Star break was intended to serve as a legitimate rest period for players, and it finally will. But a consequence of lengthening the annual February siesta is that teams will have less rest leading up to it and after it because schedulers had to make the same amount of games fit in a calendar containing four fewer days.
That’s a problem, obviously, and one we’ve never understood better than today. Spoelstra and his fellow coaches have surely been informed of similarly depressing numbers to those included by ESPN’s Tom Haberstroh in a recent piece studying the on-court influence of players’ sleep patterns (Insider only).
According to a recent study by Jeremias Engelmann, an ESPN contributor and developer of the real plus-minus metric, back-to-backs have a measurable impact on a team’s ability to play up to its abilities.
The study looked at 13 seasons’ worth of data and found that teams that play a back-to-back on the road perform 1.5 points per 100 possessions worse than if they had had a rest day in between. It might not seem like much, but a 1.5-point decrease is roughly the equivalent of playing the Dallas Mavericks compared to the Minnesota Timberwolves last season. Said another way, a day of rest equates to half the value of home-court advantage.
That’s huge, and certainly better justification for shortening the schedule than the still-viable one that so many games de-incentivizes player effort on a nightly basis. A lack of rest contributes to that, of course, and is chief among the many reasons why we’ve long been a proponent of cutting the regular season by at least 20 games.
But it’s an unrealistic proposition. The league would sacrifice hordes of ad revenue and gate money by reducing a season’s number of games, and will always refuse to do so unless player opposition to the current schedule becomes so fierce that it impacts future CBA negotiations. The ripples of such a stand by the players are endless, though, and would surely involve them sacrificing cash, too.
Maybe shorter games is the only viable potential adjustment, then. What would glean far more positive effects on player health and quality of basketball is cutting the schedule, however, a long-held notion gaining sweeping support throughout the league – all for naught, unfortunately.
Do you agree with Spoelstra?
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