I started watching and following the NBA properly about 5 years ago. I’ve always had a loose understanding of what’s happening and who the most popular players were, but I couldn’t tell you much more than that, but 5 years ago I started watching shows like First Things First and Undisputed on FS1 on YouTube, and they really sparked my interest.
Since then, I’ve tried to keep an interest in the regular season, but despite enjoying the game and the league, I just don’t get that excited about the results.The season starts in October and runs through to the middle of April. That’s 6 months worth of games which happen every night, so you can always watch games if you have that level of interest. With 82 games in the regular season, when a team loses it just doesn’t have that much impact. You could just check the league standings every 10 games or so which would be every two to three weeks and find out who is in the Playoff picture at that point. Even if you did do that, it can all change at any point, especially with the level of injuries there seems to be now. A team could be on track for 55 wins, but if you have a team with only one superstar like Luka Doncic with the Mavs, or Nikola Jokic with the Nuggets, you may end up with 40 wins if one of those guys get injured. With that being said, you could make the argument it’s not worth tuning in to the league until the All-Star break in February. From there, you’d have two exciting months of basketball leading to the Play-In tournament in April.
With the Play-In tournament now being a thing, 10 teams are effectively in the Playoffs when they start, so the chances are your team will make it if they are even semi-respectable. That’s the point of this post, the NBA Playoffs are exponentially more exciting and interesting than the regular season, to the point where it makes it hard to enjoy the regular season.
We are currently half way through the conference semi-finals as I write this, and I cannot tear myself away from the games. I don’t have NBA Gamepass, but I found out Bet365 show the games if you chuck £5 on your account, so when my new son Jaxson wakes up in the middle of the night for a feed, I get the game on and just watch that whilst feeding him. It makes doing the feeds in the middle of the night much more bearable. Every single game is meaningful and has a proper impact on who is likely to go to the next round. Injuries where players miss even one game can have a massive effect on the outcome of the series, and when you then think an entire season of 82+ games comes down to the series, it’s even more exciting. I just find it crazy that there can be such an imbalance between the regular season and the Playoffs. The Playoffs will always be more exciting, but I can’t go a week without watching the NFL games because every single one feels like it has a massive impact on the standings, but the NBA is the opposite.
Listening to the FS1 shows and other podcasts, it seems like ideas do bounce around on how they can change this, so it isn’t just me that thinks it. I know there are ideas to shorten the season, but the loss of revenue will mean that will never happen. It will be interesting to see if there will ever be a change, or whether I’m in such a small percentage of the audience, that it will just stay as it is! Either way, the NBA Playoffs are bloody awesome, and it’s three months of basketball that I cannot tear myself away from every year!