Want to spice up pro sports? KILL THE PLAYOFFS
Regular season’s value has been too diminished
On a Tuesday night in December, the Toronto Raptors played host to the Miami Heat in a meeting of two of the best teams in the NBA’S Eastern Conference. It was a close, hard-fought game the visitors ultimately took in overtime, yet the atmosphere in Scotiabank Arena was largely tepid.
On that same night in the NHL, the New Jersey Devils played at home before an announced crowd of a little over 12,000 fans. The Columbus Blue Jackets lost at home in front of 14,000 fans and change. The Florida Panthers had a crowd of just over 10,000. And even the Philadelphia Flyers, hosting the Toronto Maple Leafs, entertained several thousand empty seats at the Wells Fargo Center.
In Major League Baseball, attendance dropped again in 2019, the fourth straight season in which there has been a decline in people paying to watch the sport in person.
The underlying reason for all of this malaise is this: professional sport on this continent is broken. My Postmedia colleague Colby Cosh wrote in late November that his position on North American pro sports was that “it needs some acid thrown on it.”
To this, I say: Yes. And my particular destructive chemical would be: Kill the playoffs.
No, seriously.
Cosh was writing on the news that NBA commissioner Adam Silver had hatched a plan to fundamentally alter the business of his league. The crib notes of that plan have four points: a slightly shorter regular season, playoff reseeding to ensure that dominant regular-season teams have a better chance of advancing deeper into the playoffs, an endof-season “play-in” tournament that would force teams on the playoff bubble to fight each other for a chance to get into the postseason, and a midseason tournament for the purposes of handing out an extra trophy. Congrats to the Milwaukee Bucks, winners of the 2022 Oscar Robertson Midseason Classic presented by Burger King, or something of that nature.
All of these things are intriguing in their own way, but they also nibble around the edges of what is the fundamental problem with North America’s big leagues: No one cares about the regular seasons any more, because the playoffs are all that matter.
Ultimately, what the Silver proposals are trying to address is the plain fact that for much of the NBA calendar, the games themselves, the product that the league is selling to the public, has lost a considerable amount of its appeal.
This isn’t something that has happened quickly. Sixty years ago, the NBA had eight teams.
Six of them made the playoffs, which began in mid-march and ended less than four weeks later. The NHL had six teams and four made the playoffs, which lasted a tidy three weeks. Major League Baseball had 16 teams, but the playoffs had just one series. It lasted eight days.
But as the leagues have expanded over and over again, the playoffs have expanded along with them, for the simple reason that a 30- or 32-team league with only six postseason spots would mean vast numbers of teams playing utterly meaningless games for much of the latter half of their regular seasons.
Instead, though, vast numbers of teams are playing mostly meaningless games for much of their entire regular seasons. The big playoff fields, combined with a decades-long push toward legislated parity — with tools and mechanisms intended to sprinkle talent evenly among teams — has created a world in which long regular seasons are merely extended preparation for the only games anyone cares about. Kawhi Leonard infamously called his 82-game schedule with the Toronto Raptors last season just “practice” — and he was not wrong about that.
Hockey, being a particularly random sport with few scoring opportunities and heavy reliance on luck, has long been associated with regular seasons and subsequent Stanley Cup playoffs that bear little resemblance to one another. Just three of the last 17 Stanley Cups have been won by the team with the best record over a full 82-game schedule.
In basketball, there is much more scoring, which tends to filter out the statistical noise and gives stronger teams a better chance to advance in the playoffs — consider the paucity of big first-round NBA playoff upsets relative to the routine occurrence of such a thing in the NHL.
But the NBA has been moving rapidly toward a save-it-for-theplayoffs attitude in recent years. The San Antonio Spurs started resting their star players simply because they realized they could, and then Lebron James decided he didn’t really need to play defence until after the all-star break because he could make the Finals anyway, and then last year the Raptors and Leonard somewhat unintentionally provided a road map for what really matters in the NBA.
With Leonard coming off a lost season and his health uncertain, the Raptors told anyone who would listen that they didn’t care about win totals and were focused solely on getting ready for the playoffs. Leonard was given the equivalent of a quarter of the season off to rest, then he turned into a world-destroying force in the postseason as the Raptors became the most unlikely NBA champions in memory. He also barely made it through the two-month playoff grind with his health intact.
Suddenly, the blueprint was obvious for all to see: Rest your stars as much as is needed during the regular season. By the time play began this fall, guys like Leonard and Joel Embiid were sitting out early-season games not because they were hurt, but because they didn’t want to be hurt later. The Los Angeles Clippers kept Leonard out of a nationally televised ESPN game, “load management” became the fuel for a week of sports-talk, and somewhere in there were almost certainly the seeds for Silver’s push to turn his league’s regular season into something more than games that can be easily skipped.
In related news, the television ratings on both ESPN and TNT in the United States this season are off by more than 20 per cent. This is how revolutions are born.
Even in baseball, where once the long regular season filtered out all but a couple of contenders for a final showdown, it is no longer unusual for a team to provide proof of its greatness over 162 games and then flop in the postseason. In 2019, four MLB teams won at least 100 games, but it was the 93-win Washington Nationals who won the World Series after gaining a wild-card berth.
Baseball fans in New York and Los Angeles could be forgiven for taking a pass on the whole of the coming regular season and paying attention again in October. The playoffs have made everything that preceded them feel decidedly unimportant. All those games feel like practice, as a certain mostly silent basketball player might say.
And so: Kill the playoffs. It’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. The top soccer leagues in Europe provide an example of what it looks like when teams compete over a regular season that does not merely set the stage for an entirely new season that determines the champion.
In England’s Premier League, to pick one example, each of the 20 teams plays the others twice, home and away. At the end of the campaign, the team with the most points wins the title. That’s it. There’s no need to throw all the teams into some kind of knockout tournament at the end, because it was the season itself that told everyone which team was best. It’s perfectly simple, and it has the effect of placing much greater weight on every game on the schedule.
Last year, Manchester City and Liverpool had historically great seasons, and one of the title-defining moments came in January, when a City defender saved a goal by millimetres, preserving a win over Liverpool and two crucial points. There’s nothing close to an equivalent type of match in North American leagues, where a random mid-season showdown between title contenders is never worth anything more than bragging rights. The Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers will meet in early March and it will simply be a curiosity.
Europe’s leagues have other traits to be admired. There is promotion and relegation between divisions, giving every team incentive to improve and eliminating the scourge of tanking. There is no such thing as player drafts, the insane anachronism held over from another era, which today allows a bunch of rapacious capitalists to employ workers who must forfeit their mobility rights if they want a job. And the Euro leagues also have — hello, Adam Silver — various midseason tournaments to spice up the calendar even further.
Skeptics will say that none of this change is possible here, because the playoffs are where leagues and teams make big money. But they do that at the expense of the regular season. How much would the business model change if a weekday game in December suddenly had significant title implications? What if every regular-season point really mattered?
The NHL has long been the fourth of the big pro leagues here, and it’s easily fifth or sixth if U.S. college sports are included in the tally. All the expansion it has undergone hasn’t fundamentally changed any of that. So while Silver is fiddling, Gary Bettman could bust out the dynamite and show the path to a truly altered league, one that restores the importance of the whole of its calendar, that gives fans a reason to care again from the start to the end of the season.
You want change, fellows? Think big. Kill the playoffs.
To the battlements!
Suddenly, the blueprint was obvious for all to see: Rest your stars as much as is needed during the regular season.