For many casual fans, the NBA doesn’t really start until Christmas, when the league takes over the sports world for one of their defining days. But what if the real opening night was in December? That’s what Atlanta Hawks CEO Steve Koonin proposed in a presentation at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference on Friday. And it turns out that the league is open to the idea.
According to Koonin’s idea, the league would postpone the start of the season from mid-October to mid-December, in order to avoid much of the football season. The finals would therefore take place during the month of August, with the NBA draft, the free agency and the summer league also returning to the calendar.
“A big chunk is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to improve the odds,” said Koonin. “Sometimes getting away from the competition is a great way to increase ratings.”
This is obviously a fairly radical proposition, and should not only be fleshed out, but accepted by everyone, from players to broadcast partners. Even so, we should not reject it out of hand. According to Evan Wasch, senior vice president of strategy and analysis at the NBA, the league is open to the idea. Via ESPN:
“We certainly have no problem reconsidering the schedule. From Steve’s point of view, you have to think about the other stakeholders. They should be familiar with the finals in August rather than June, where traditionally the household audience is much lower. But the flip side of this argument is that there wasn’t a lot of premium content in this window, which is why the audience is lower. We’re open to that … there is no magic for [the season going from] October to June. “
“None of the ideas we are talking about now are new ideas. The question is not, do we just react to what is going on with the rankings or what is going on with the injuries or the load of the players or things like that. It’s like, “Can you make a better product? ‘”
There are a lot of things to consider here, and the league is not going to change the schedule so dramatically anytime soon – something as important requires a lot more discussion and consideration on the part of many different groups.
But as Adam Silver and Co. have shown with their other recent proposals – game reduction, season tournament, playoff reseeding – this current leadership group is open to bold ideas. Even if it is not that exact proposition, it would not be a shock to see the league shifting the calendar in one way or another over the next decade.