Mark Cuban’s proposal to trim quarters promises financial stability and player rest, yet threatens to upend historic scoring benchmarks and sideline crucial role players across the league.
Dallas Mavericks’ now minority owner, Mark Cuban is no stranger to making headlines. His most recent suggestion for the league did just that, as seen on BasketballNetwork.
His proposal to shorten NBA games by two minutes per quarter is interesting to say the least. While he makes good points about the WNBA, NCAA, and Olympics all playing 40 minute games, I don’t think this idea is coming from the right place.
With so many injuries and the subsequent load management to combat those injuries, there’s inevitably talks about shortening the NBA season every year. Money is always the biggest issue whenever the topic is broached.
Cutting a handful, or even more than a dozen games out of each team's schedule will presumably take a big chunk of revenue away from the league. Each game removed is a paycheck out of the pocket of the players, plus no ticket sales, no concessions sales, and who knows what else.
It’s understandable why nobody would want to risk that kind of pay cut, which might be why Mark Cuban had a different idea.
If they were to keep the 82 game season, but cut the games down to 40 minutes, each team would have 3,280 minutes without overtime. For comparison, that’d be roughly the equivalent to cutting 14 games out of each team's schedule. Only 16 more total minutes than if the current schedule was cut down to 68 games.
Owners still get their 41 home games every year and players get their 82 game checks. It seems like the best of both worlds from their perspective, but doesn’t solve the issue at hand.
If shortening the season is about keeping players healthy, how does this help? Are the eleven players who averaged over 35 minutes per game now going to play 25-30 minutes nightly?
The Rockets had three guys in the top ten, with all four of their main starters averaging over 33 minutes. Tari Eason and Reed Sheppard each got more than 25 minutes per game, with fans still thinking Reed didn’t get enough time.
Points per game might be an even bigger problem. Are the thirteen players averaging 25 or more points per game going to be happy averaging 20? Will we be happy with no one averaging 30 points?
People are willing to do that in the Olympics and in college before they get to the league because that’s how it’s always been.
Just like the best players in the NBA have always played a certain amount of minutes, allowing them to get to a certain amount of counting stats.
It’s hard for me to imagine SGA going from averaging over 30 points per game for four straight seasons, then having a sharp decline, despite it having nothing to do with his own game.
We would’ve never got to see James Harden average 40 points through 40 games back in the 2018-2019 season.
Kevin Durant just scored 2,000 points for the eighth time in his career, as covered on Roundtable. He did that on impressive efficiency, while playing the third most minutes per game.
Add in the fact that he only sat out four times in the regular season, and you can see how much has to go right to score that many points in a year.
It’s one of the many statistical achievements that signifies greatness, but we’d never get that again.
I think shortening the games would throw the statistical history all out of whack, as well as minimizing bench players. Most importantly, it wouldn’t necessarily help prevent injuries, which seems to be a big part of why it would be implemented.
