82 games is fine, actually
It's the time of year where the schedule and tanking discourse take center stage. This is all pointless. The schedule is fine.
“…When something becomes what you want, it can only get worse.” — Chuck Klosterman, Football (2026)
I’ve thought a lot about the above quote since I read it a few days ago. Probably because I was already thinking about it. I wasn’t thinking about it as it relates to football, but subconsciously about the NBA. Particularly, it resonated with me when I think about the construct of the 82-game NBA schedule, even before this week’s deluge of tanking discourse.
Do I think the Utah Jazz pulling players in the 4th quarter of games is cool? No, of course not. Is it hilarious that they won the game anyway? Absolutely, shout out to Brice Sensabaugh. Is it stupid that they got fined for winning a game? Yes. Is it also funny? Of course. But that’s not the point.
The point is that a lot of the fuss of the moment is just a byproduct of football being over. The other faction is a small but vocal subset of NBA fans, media members and aspiring front office executives who are obsessed with “fixing” something that doesn’t need fixing. When you stare at a blank wall for a while, you will soon start to see things that aren’t there.
All of this is a long way for me to get to my main point, which is that I’ve become an 82 Game Evangelist. Since the 1967-68 season, 82 games has been the standard. And despite previously feeling like cutting the season down to 70 or 60-something games would be the best thing for my beloved NBA, I’ve become a Born Again 82 Games Believer.
The inescapability of the schedule is one of the only things that connects one era to the next. Well, that and the undeniable and timeless importance of defense, rebounding, being able to hit a jumper and hitting the open man. As someone who actually values history and the history of the game and doesn’t believe, like many in power want us to believe, that we are at “the end of history,” I’ve become even more staunch in this belief.
Styles change, players shift them, but Oscar Robertson and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander can always share in a truth that has lasted for nearly 60 years: 82 games is a real bitch. And that’s why it works. Whether you’re flying commercial like Oscar did or private like SGA does, it’s still hard. It’s SUPPOSED to be!
It’s easy for me to say, I know. I’m not playing, I’m sitting and watching and am eager to have my favorite show on TV more nights a week. But the more I hear people submit solutions like cutting the schedule, I am looking around the world of basketball in places that aren’t the NBA, and finding 82 games isn’t the problem. The problem is that the NBA’s leader thinks the league is a tech company and now most front offices and player agencies operate their orgs as such, constantly looking for data to manipulate.
First and foremost, there’s the problem that most of these players develop chronic injuries due to early specialization. Due to this, you will see various types of load management strategies even at the high school level. Forms of load management also happen in other pro basketball leagues, most notably modern college basketball, which is itself now a pro league.
Take the case of presumptive top pick Darryn Peterson at Kansas. He has missed several games with a variety of different injuries that never seem to last longer than one game, leading to cries of “load management” in a season that features fewer than half the games of the NBA. According to The Athletic, Peterson has been “severely limited” in the second halves of other games, raising questions around the Kansas program about whether the motivations go beyond winning and losing that night’s game.
Of course there are! In the case of Peterson, getting to the league and being as healthy as possible when he gets there is of the utmost importance, much to the chagrin of college basketball fans. But it’s the truth. Peterson’s agent and management teams are approaching it as such, leading to many awkward press conferences for Kansas head coach Bill Self, who is one of the last remaining stewards of the old college game.
In the NBA, teams want their best players to be available for the playoffs first and foremost. If team staffers look at the chart of one of their best players and it has any indicator in the red, they will find a way to keep them out, in service of being ready for a more important future game down the line. If the game they’re scheduled to play is against a team they might face in the playoffs, all the better. In fact, the Thunder just did this on Feb. 4, holding out all of their best players in an ESPN-televised tilt against the Spurs.
It’s about giving your opponent “less data” to study for future matchups that we, as media and fans, have told them matter more. When everything has a data point in the NBA’s quant culture, there will always be something to game, something to manipulate, and some perceived advantage, no matter the damage it does to fans who spent half of their rent check on tickets for a family of four. Thinking that teams will suddenly start treating every regular season game in good faith, just because there are fewer of them, is naive and childish.
When the data becomes the only basis of decision-making, there is no consideration, only calculation. And this type of calculation isn’t only reserved for the NBA among pro leagues.
The EuroLeague plays far fewer games than the NBA and often times the best players on a team are the oldest ones. Those players have their minutes monitored all season and are saved for the season’s most important moments. An example from recent history: in 2022-23, Sergio Rodriguez averaged 15 minutes a game and came off the bench for Real Madrid all season. But in the EuroLeague championship, he played nearly double his amount of minutes (28) in the championship game, because they were saving their best guard for the biggest moment. But if you happened to spend money to go watch Real Madrid play a regular season EuroLeague fixture, he may have only played 10-12 minutes or not at all.
There will always be a data point to potentially manipulate. There will always be a perceived advantage. And sometimes those perceived advantages will actually become real advantages. And if they don’t, the front office cultures in the NBA that mirror tech and finance firms will tell themselves that their process was right.
All of this is a long way to say, none of this is going to change if they cut the season to 70 games. All that will mean is less basketball. It won’t make the remaining basketball automatically better. And anyone who believes that cutting games will suddenly get teams not to manipulate things in their perceived favor is naive to the degree that the NBA has been changed forever due to its proximity to finance and big tech. It makes sense, of course, the people who own the teams come from that world. It’s why Adam Silver keeps talking about integrating AI in game broadcasts even though it’s something no fan wants. Applying the tech way of doing business to these teams and this league is why we got here. Cutting the games is another example of this misguided thinking that the NBA is a tech company and must be “optimized,” in order to be good.
The league has made significant efforts to lessen the schedule’s impact. They have cut down on the number of back-to-backs, start the season earlier and have even implemented baseball-type matchups where teams play a back-to-back against the same team in the same city. Unlike years past, teams don’t even have to get on a plane between games for a back-to-back. It’s more humane than it’s ever been, but it’s still hard.
It should be! And instead of embracing that hard as a badge of honor, too many people are obsessed with eliminating one of the only things about the league that endures. And as we watch the NBA’s continued tinkering of the All-Star Game lead to a flailing product only attended by corporate partners, I’m afraid overly focus-grouped notions like shortening the season or eliminating the draft will lead to the rest of the product looking like the All-Star Game.
So this is my message to Adam Silver when it comes to the schedule or the draft: do nothing. But if we’re talking about eliminating teams fouling up three in the final seconds of a close game…that’s another story.