3 bubble band-aids the NBA should make permanent

The NBA had to experiment and try new things to pull off their bubble restart. But they may have stumbled into some tweaks that should be made permanent.

More than six months have passed since COVID shut down the NBA. Two months ago play resumed in the Orlando bubble, with the Finals underway between the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers. The league undoubtedly considers its stopgap measures a success, and in many ways, they have been. Still, owners, players and fans alike all hope for a return to normalcy sometime next season, though no one knows if or when that might be. While we wait, it’s worth considering whether these three measures, instituted specifically for the bubble, could promise a better NBA product if made permanent.

Rotating neutral-site NBA Finals

The Champions League Final. The Super Bowl. The NCAA Final Four. Three of the biggest televised sporting events in the world, all sharing the commonality of neutral-site arenas determined well in advance of the actual games. There’s no reason the NBA can’t take advantage of a similar set-up to improve the viewing experience for its biggest draw all year.

Imagine a television network knowing a year in advance where and when the Finals will be played, as opposed to now where they only know a few days in advance. Imagine what kind of unique camera angles or in-game features they could come up with and troubleshoot well in advance of the actual games. The Champions League Final, the Super Bowl and the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Final Four don’t feel like just another game, not just because of where they’re played, but how they’re staged. Give us pageantry. Give us something special with the court design. Give us in-arena light spectacles and sound effects that aren’t what we see and hear in every other arena during the season. These are the biggest games of the year. They should look and sound special.

Partisan crowds

In 2000 New York City enjoyed its first Subway Series in 44 years when the Mets and Yankees met in the Fall Classic. Fans too young to have seen the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants nevertheless grew up hearing talk of a golden age when parochial pride and interborough rivalries ran high. By 2000 the two teams had been playing one another in the regular season for four years. The passions of those mixed crowds bled through your TV screen; it stood to reason with the raised stakes of a World Series, that passion would be even greater. It wasn’t.

The problem was economics. With the exorbitant cost of playoff tickets, the true-blue fans who came to the stadium to cheer their team play Pittsburgh or Cleveland in August were priced out of the World Series. So a greater share of tickets went to rich casual fans, the sort who are only there for the scene and don’t know the difference between bunting as strategy versus decoration. Every time someone hit a fly ball to shallow right field in that Series, there were oohs and ahhs from people who assumed any ball hit up in the air was a home run.

The later rounds of the NBA playoffs are no more accessible to its diehards. But here’s where the league can borrow inspiration from its ultimate global competitor: soccer. When English clubs travel for an away game, they’re given a certain number of tickets to disperse among their supporters. If the NBA Finals are held in an arena seating 20,000 people, the league could guarantee 8500 tickets per team to sell to their fans while retaining 3,000 for players’ families, league officials, persons of interest and Drake. Give season-ticket holders first dibs. Offer contests to win Finals tickets — better yet, given the league’s image-consciousness, attach them to fundraisers or raffles for popular sociopolitical causes.

Think of the showcase: the highest levels of competition featuring fans all mixed in together, not only cheering in response to what’s happening on the floor but to thousands of opposing partisans. It could be beautiful. It could raise the intensity level that much more, which would translate through the broadcast to viewers watching on TV or some other platform. The fans in the arena and at home would both win.

Experiment with improving the quality of play

For the past 17 years, the NBA’s had 30 teams. Before this pacific stretch, it never went more than 10 years without expanding (or, as occurred five times between 1947 and 1961, contracting). The Association has never been afraid to tinker, whether legalizing zone defense, introducing the three-point shot, absorbing ABA teams, instituting a salary cap, changing the amount of time teams have to advance beyond half-court from 10 seconds to eight, adding the 24-second shot clock and dropping the shot clock from 24 to 14 after an offensive rebound, etc. Embracing a neutral-site final four could bring about a welcome change: better quality of play due to less time traveling from city to city.

In 1985 the NBA switched from a 2-2-1-1-1 Finals format to a 2-3-2, apparently because in the middle of the Celtics vs. Lakers monopoly Boston patriarch Red Auerbach was tired of all the cross-country travel; ostensibly it was also seen as better for the players. That 2-3-2 model lasted 29 years, during which time those 29 NBA champions went a combined 116-51 (.694 winning percentage) in the Finals. Know what they went the 29 years prior, when it was 2-2-1-1-1? 116-50 (.699). Since returning to the original format six years ago, those six title winners are a combined 24-9 in the Finals; had they lost just one more game, their winning percentage would be within a hundredth of a point higher of the other two.

Maybe traveling somewhat less after 10 months of play doesn’t make much of a difference. Maybe all the anecdotal talk of how great the bubble play has been is nothing more than the wearied gratitude of a fan base desperate for distraction or a sense of what life used to be like before the pandemic came. But it seems safe to say dropping to zero travel after the second round, coupled with the Finals’ more relaxed scheduling, would mean fresher legs and a better chance of the best teams’ best players being in the best health possible before what could and should be the best matchups of the season. If the league ever abolishes conference or re-jiggers the playoffs in such a way that the best four teams were all still standing at the end, the final four could really be something spectacular.

For the next couple of weeks, fans will focus on LeBron James versus Jimmy Butler, Antony Davis vs. Bam Adebayo, and Los Angeles and Miami’s supporting casts. Erik Spoelstra and Frank Vogel will renew hostilities begun when Vogel coached Indiana and Spoelstra’s Heat, led by LeBron, were heavy favorites. Next month the draft is scheduled to go down, with free agency right around then too. It almost sounds like business as usual. Of course, nothing’s normal anymore; that, more than anything, is the new normal. What better time to experiment with today’s novelties and see which if any become tomorrow’s traditions?