The NBA Has Too Many Problems and Not Enough Solutions

Tanking gets all the attention. But the foul calls, the 82-game slog, the NBA cup, and the clone army of stretch-four offenses deserve some, too.

Let’s talk about the NBA’s problems. Not just tanking — everyone’s talking about tanking — but the full, embarrassing laundry list of structural dysfunction that has turned what should be the most watchable sport in the world into something you mostly catch in highlight form.

The league is very good at identifying that something is wrong. It is less good at fixing it. Commissioner Adam Silver is a smart man who gives thoughtful interviews and then presides over a product that keeps shedding casual fans. So let’s do what the league seems reluctant to do: name the problems clearly, and think seriously about what to do about them.

Yes, Tanking Is Bad — But It’s Mostly a Symptom

Tanking gets outsized attention because it’s visible and embarrassing. A team trots out its fifteenth-best roster in late March, loses by 30, and everyone politely pretends this is a competitive basketball game. It isn’t.

But tanking is mostly a rational response to the incentive structure the league created. You can’t blame teams for playing the game as it’s designed. The real question is why the league insists on maintaining a system where the optimal path to contention runs directly through years of deliberate failure.

The anti-tanking proposals floating around — flattening the draft lottery odds, eliminating the lottery entirely, adding a secondary tournament for bottom teams — are fine as far as they go. They’ll probably reduce the most blatant forms of tanking at the margins. What they won’t do is fix the deeper issue, which is that in a 30-team league with max contracts eating enormous payroll shares, rebuilding is genuinely hard, and losing for a transcendent draft pick is often the only rational strategy available to teams that didn’t win the Kawhi Leonard sweepstakes.

If you want to actually fix tanking, you have to make the regular season mean more. Which brings us to everything else.

82 Games Is a Joke, and Everyone Knows It

The NBA regular season is 82 games long. This made more sense in 1968, when the league had fewer teams, no cable television, and players weren’t yet openly resting on national broadcast games. Today it’s just an endurance test that nobody particularly enjoys.

Stars rest constantly — and reasonably so, given the physical demands of the job. Coaches have learned that regular-season games are bad trade-offs: the injury risk is real, the fatigue accumulates, and none of it matters until May. The result is a regular season where roughly half the marquee matchups don’t actually feature the marquee players.

The obvious fix — cut the season to 60 or 65 games — has been on the table for decades, and the league refuses to touch it because television contracts are built around game volume. Also, can we really break all the long-term NBA statistics?

This is understandable as a business calculation. It also makes the regular season less worth watching, which is bad for the business. These two facts are in tension, and the league is choosing not to notice.

The Foul Problem Is Ruining Actual Basketball

At some point in the past decade, a generation of NBA players realized that modern officiating rewards players who can manufacture contact at the three-point line, contort their bodies mid-air into a defender, and draw shooting fouls on plays that are not remotely shot attempts. James Harden turned this into an art form. Others followed. Some say that SGA takes this to another level.

The result is a miserable period of NBA basketball where games featured extended sequences of a guy dribbling 35 feet from the basket, lurching sideways into a defender’s outstretched arm, and then walking to the free-throw line. This was technically skilled and completely unwatchable.

The league has tried to crack down on this and deserves some credit for the effort. But foul trouble still distorts games enormously — star players sit for long stretches in the second and third quarters because coaches can’t risk fouling them out, which means the best players play fewer minutes in close games, which makes close games less exciting, which is the opposite of what you want.

A sensible reform would be to treat fouls as a resource rather than an existential threat: allow teams to voluntarily accept a penalty (say, the opponent gets a free throw) in exchange for keeping a player in the game. Other sports manage to keep their best players on the field. The NBA should stop designing situations where sitting Nikola Jokic for twelve minutes is the smart play.

Every Team Runs the Same Offense

Recently, I watched a video of Šarūnas Jasikevičius talking about how every team in the NBA plays the same. Well, that’s true.

Walk into any NBA arena tonight, and you’ll see: a point guard dribbling at the top of the key, four players spaced around the three-point arc, and a series of pick-and-roll actions designed to either get a rim layup or kick out to an open corner three. This is the modern NBA offense. Every team runs it. All thirty of them.

This is what happens when you have a league full of highly intelligent coaches with access to the same analytics. The math on three-pointers versus mid-range jumpers is real. The math on spacing the floor is real. The convergence on nearly identical systems is the rational outcome of rational people doing rational analysis.

The problem is it’s boring. Not every possession is boring, but cumulatively boring. There’s no team that feels genuinely different to watch. The isolation-heavy, mid-range-loving offenses of the early 2000s were inefficient, but they were also distinctive — you watched the Spurs for reasons that were different from why you watched the Suns.

It’s harder to regulate your way out of strategic convergence than it is to, say, shorten the season. But the league could experiment at the margins: adjusting the three-point line distance, modifying the shot clock after offensive rebounds, or changing the rules around the restricted zone. Small tweaks to incentives sometimes produce big changes in strategy.

The NBA Cup Is a Real Thing That Exists, and Nobody Knows How to Feel About It

In 2023, the NBA introduced an in-season tournament — officially called the NBA Cup — in which regular-season games in November and December are rebranded as group stage matches, leading to a knockout round in Las Vegas, and ultimately a trophy that is handed to a team that also has 60 more games left to play.

The idea was borrowed loosely from European soccer cup competitions, which is a fine inspiration in theory. The execution has produced something more confusing than exciting.

The core problem is that the NBA Cup is neither meaningless enough to ignore nor meaningful enough to actually care about. If you win it, you get a trophy, some bonus money, and a bracket line in your Wikipedia page that will confuse people in twenty years. If you lose in the quarterfinals, nothing happens. Your season continues, completely unaffected, as if the whole thing were a fever dream.

This creates a genuinely strange emotional register for fans. When your team gets knocked out of the NBA Cup, are you supposed to be upset? It happened to the Heat last December, and it felt like losing a preseason game — notable in the moment, immediately forgotten. When the Thunder won it, the celebration was real, but also slightly awkward, like throwing a birthday party for someone who already has a bigger birthday coming up in three months.

The tournament also collides badly with the rest of the problem. Teams that are already strategically resting stars throughout the regular season have absolutely no incentive to go hard in mid-November group stage games. So the NBA’s attempt to inject urgency into the dead zone of the calendar has partly produced more high-stakes games where the stars are sitting, which is precisely the opposite of what urgency is supposed to mean.

None of this means the concept is beyond saving. A version of this that replaced actual regular-season games rather than just relabeling them — combined with a shorter overall schedule — could be genuinely interesting. A version with real competitive consequences attached, not just bonus checks, could create stakes that fans respond to. What doesn’t work is bolting a tournament onto an 82-game season that already asks too much of players and fans alike, slapping a sponsor name on it, and hoping the novelty carries the day.

It hasn’t. The NBA Cup is currently in the awkward adolescent phase of a format experiment: too established to quietly kill, not good enough to defend with a straight face.

Final Take

The NBA has a great underlying product: extraordinarily talented athletes, genuine star power, moments of actual transcendence. What it lacks is a regular season that feels worth caring about and a structure that doesn’t systematically reward failure or punish fans who show up in December.

These problems are not mysteries. They don’t require new research. They require a league willing to accept some short-term revenue friction in exchange for a better long-term product. The NBA has been reluctant to make that trade. At some point, the casual fans who’ve quietly drifted away will be a lot harder to get back than a few lost broadcast dollars were to protect.