What if the NBA schedule looked like the Formula 1 schedule?
By Miles Wray
It’s easy to forget that the NBA schedule is completely insane. For somewhere between six to eight months a year, every NBA player and coach is being pushed to the absolute limit, taking on an absolute maximum workload. Overnight cross-country flight? That’s a chance to get in some more film study. A day off? There’s one or two available per month. Maybe. Anybody who can be called an NBA lifer, no matter how thin the résumé, is impressive. That means they’ve spent most of their adult lives just a few hours away from the next tip-off and/or flight.
The positives abound. With the 41 home games per year, plus the playoffs, all that money at the gate helps the players live their enviable lifestyles. Plus, as a fan, you know that you will never want for basketball — there is no humanly way to get through even half of the 1,230 regular season games, and then the playoffs start. That unrelenting schedule also imposes a sort of meta-game over each individual contest: winning in the NBA means you have found a way to master your individual opponent while somehow conserving energy for the long-term.
It only occurred to me recently that there’s no real reason that the NBA schedule has to be this way. Dr. James Naismith did not descend from Mount Sinai with the law of 82 games inscribed in stone tablets. While I understand there’s no way the NBA is going to change this anytime soon — and there is, truly, something comforting about that 82-game tradition — I think it’s worth realizing just how much the NBA game is defined by its incredibly difficult schedule.
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This season I see the effects of the NBA schedule on every facet of the game after spending my first season as a diehard fan of a very different sport, with a very different scheduling philosophy: Formula 1 racing.
Formula 1 is an international auto racing championship, and the cars look like this. The first reason I wanted to get into Formula 1 is that I always, always want to witness the entire season of a sport or even a team. Since this is impossible to do with all 1,230 NBA games and even requires making some consistent social sacrifices to hit at 82 games of a certain team, I have this nagging feeling with just about every NBA game I watch that I am watching my Netflix episodes out of order — I am not seeing the entire story.
But Formula 1: each race, or Grand Prix, lasts somewhere from 90 to 120 minutes. And in the eight-month season (March to November), there are about 20 races a year. (The top 10 finishers in each race get a fixed number of points, with the year-long point total determining the ultimate champion.) If the NBA is an all-you-can-eat buffet, Formula 1 is an espresso shot.
This is admittedly a bizarre reason to become interested in a sport, but Formula 1 rewarded me. After keeping close tabs on the entire 2017 season, plus diving into several books about the history of the sport, I am completely on-board for 2018 and beyond. (Over the summer I decided to watch a NASCAR race to see if I was somehow a total motor racing junkie, unbeknownst to myself. Well, NASCAR is terrible, and boring. Formula 1 races require more skill, are safer for the drivers and have a much-more-refined competitive balance.) Plus, I did it: I got all 20 races in. And, as you can imagine, with a race about every other week — oh, plus Formula 1 takes the in-season month of August off — it was pretty easy to do.
There are a ton of ways that Formula 1’s not-maxed-out schedule make for a more compelling — and, I’d argue, profitable — sport:
- The 20 Grands Prix take place in 20 different countries. Formula 1 could no doubt squeeze in a ton more races if they stayed more in Europe, where many countries have more than one capable circuit — plus, motorsports giants Germany and Finland don’t currently host a race. But since there is no true home for Formula 1, it is equally at home for so many audiences around the globe. If there were, say, 30 regular season NBA games each year, it would be so much easier for teams to play games in international venues — maybe even as the home team — an obvious money-maker in the long run.
- There were 20 drivers in Formula 1 this year, so, with 20 Grands Prix, that means there were 400 possible entries. How many times did a driver miss a race due to injury or illness? Three. Not three per driver — three for the whole sport, all year! This meant we all got to see Formula 1’s toughest competitors every time out. You can’t be guaranteed the same thing if you buy an NBA ticket even a week in advance.
- Not only were Formula 1’s giants on the track at every race, they were competing at the complete height of their powers with every lap. A Formula 1 race can absolutely hinge on a lost half-second in a three-second pit stop — and the entire cumulative points championship can absolutely hinge on a single race (sometimes a single lap), since there are so few races in the year. That means there’s no such thing as a race with “playoff intensity” in Formula 1: they are immediately intense, right from the season-opener. (Ironically, in 2017, it was the last two races of the year that contained the least drama, as Lewis Hamilton mathematically clinched the championship, and celebrated accordingly, after the 18th race.)
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I’d argue that this last point is what matters most: that nearly every lap of the Formula 1 season is as taut with meaning as the next one. There is no time for character-building losses — each missed opportunity to get more points is a devastating one. There are few people on earth who enjoy a February night deep in sub-.500 League Pass more than I do. Still, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling subtly gipped with the arrival of the playoffs each year — “Oh, this is actually what this team looks like at full strength?” Those sudden playoff changes are proof: the quickest and easiest way to improve the quality of the game is to schedule a lot less of it.