The NBA: Where pointless playoff games happen

(Illustration courtesy of Maddison Bond)

Hey everybody. I haven't written anything in like two weeks because I've been distracted by schoolwork. (Damn you, education system!) I've been so busy (or lazy) that I even wrote something about the NBA playoffs like a week and a half ago and I never bothered to post it.

Now, because I'm still a lazy S.O.B., I'm just going to repost verbatim what I wrote two weeks ago, in which I hypothetically suggested that the Heat would go up 3-0 against Milwaukee. And since that's exactly what happened, I figure it's still relevant. After all, the fact that the playoffs were predictable enough that I could forecast how an entire series would play out shows that, yes, the NBA playoffs are horribly, horribly flawed.

Commence writing from two weeks ago!

...

We’re only four days into the interminable Bataan death march that is the NBA playoffs, and already, I find myself longing for the good ole days when the early games actually mattered. Believe it or not, the first round used to be the best part of the playoffs. The series were best-out-of-five’s, there were multiple basic cable games going on at once, and teams would occasionally play on back-to-back nights. It was the closest thing the NBA had to March Madness.

And then one day an accountant walked into David Stern’s office with a calculator in his hand, and he pointed excitedly at it and declared that after extensive research, the NBA would actually make more money if there were more playoff games. And Stern was like, “Are... are you sure?” “I’m positive,” the accountant replied. And Stern was like, “My god. This changes everything.”

Since that fateful day, the NBA playoffs have epitomized the phrase “too much of a good thing.” The first round, which was once exciting, is now a grueling best-of-seven and is padded so heavily that it takes close to three weeks to wrap up all the games. It’s like going to a Nine Inch Nails concert and waiting three hours for them to sing because the crappy opening acts refused to leave the stage. You’re not going to that concert to see those terrible bands, the same way you’re not tuning into the playoffs to see the Milwaukee Bucks play the Miami Heat. I acknowledge that the first round (and opening acts) have to exist, but as long as they’re existing, they should at least be interesting, and more than anything, they should dispensed with as quickly possible so the marquees people actually want to see can commence.

But no, says the NBA. That terrible Bucks-Heat series that could easily be resolved in five games? That series needs to exist in a best-of-seven format, so that you have as many chances as humanly possible to see the Bucks get their asses kicked by LeBron and company. The beauty of the old best-of-five format was that every game was at least watchable. Even when a No. 1 seed took a 2-0 lead against a No. 8, you could still justify watching Game 3 because you knew that the underdog could at least win their home games and even the series. And if they didn’t -- well, then the series was over. In a best-of-five, the series never got so lopsided that any games were completely superfluous. That’s certainly not the case with the best-of-seven format. If the Heat go up 3-0 on the Bucks, that series should be over; it’s laughable to suggest that Miami would still need to prove themselves as the better team one more time. And yet there would be a Game 4, and once in awhile teams that are down 3-0 will magically win a game and push the series to a Game 5, and if the Bucks did it, Miami would still have three more chances to annihilate them.

Basically, there’s no sincere reason for the first round to be a best-of-seven. The disparity between the teams is so pronounced that the outcome is almost always identical to what it would have been in a five game series. More to the point: there’s nothing gained by having a bad team like the Bucks that’s down 3-0 play even another second of basketball; no team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit, and the list of teams to overcome a 3-1 deficit is still relatively short. So for the sake of brevity, why can we not just assume that Heat would continue to obliterate the Bucks if it was a best-of-seven, or a best-of-nine, or a best-of-infinity? Are these series really so compelling that we need to see every last ounce of action out of them, to the point that it takes almost three weeks just to get it out of the way? (God I love rhetorical questions.)

Unfortunately, this is the path that the NBA has chosen to take. I could kick and scream some more for the first round to be shorter again, but I know just enough about business to appreciate that the NBA and TNT and ESPN and NBA TV make money from these horrible, unnecessary playoff games. And as long as that money exists, the games will exist.