Another Blogger Has Ideas on the NBA Regular Season Schedule

You cannot really call me an NBA fan anymore. I tune in for Timberwolves playoff games out of solidarity for my friends and my adopted home, and every couple years, I take up someone's offer of a spare ticket. However, my interest has waned considerably since I obsessed over the Mavericks and talked myself into the likes of Shane Larkin, Nerlens Noel, and Dennis Smith Jr. being the guys who would halt the team's post-championship slide into mediocrity.

I do like the slower pace, imperfection, and vastly superior atmospheres of college basketball more, but I have never been one of these people who thinks the NBA isn't real basketball. Most of my faded interest is because my favorite athlete of all-time retired and my team just could not stop associating with men accused of harassing and assaulting women. The rest of it is that I just do not want to spend as much time as I did when I was a teenager watching literally every sport. The Mavericks betrayed me — and have spent every moment since making sure I never come back — but the NBA as a whole is more like an old friend I drifted away from but still want to check in on every once in a while.

That also makes me kind of a catty jerk who can't mind his own business. Like everyone who doesn't routinely watch the NBA anymore, I have strong opinions on the NBA. Continuation fouls are way too generous! (They were when I watched, too.) Being able to challenge fouls is stupid on its face, even speaking as someone who generally supports video review in sports! The ninth- and tenth-place teams in each conference have no business playing postseason games! The NBA Cup is silly! Nike has made a mess of the league's uniforms! A league that makes such absurd amounts of money does not need to give floor space, jersey space, and so much of the screen to ads!

This post is not about any of that, though. (For every criticism I list above, I have even more for the sports I do watch closely — on and off, I've been drafting a baseball manifesto for years.) I want to offer my opinion on something most people seemingly agree on, whether they play in or coach in or just follow the league: The regular season needs to be shorter.

How much shorter? Honestly, not much. The 82-game season has lasted for so long because it worked. Getting to watch your team for an extended season, with familiar rhythms, chances to see everyone else in the league, and narratives whose arcs are much longer than the playoffs, is kind of the whole point. For most of the league, a 41-game season ticket package is a great deal for someone who loves attending basketball games.

The problem is that playing basketball is harder. Not only is the player pool dramatically more athletic across the board than even 15 years ago; players are also asked to play more basketball.

Here's what I mean: The Celtics averaged 94.8 total possessions per 48 minutes in 2025-26, making them the slowest-paced team in the NBA. That mark would tie them for the 5th-most possessions in the 2010-11 season. The league average that year, 92.1 possessions per 48 minutes, would comfortably rank as the slowest team this year.

If you take the difference between the average pace in 2010-11 and the average in 2025-26 (99.4 possessions per 48 minutes), an NBA team plays 600 more possessions per season than they did 15 years ago. That is six additional games' worth of possessions. It's a staggering increase in workload generated just by play styles evolving, pushed along by shortening the shot clock to 14 seconds after offensive rebounds in 2018-19.

The result is that players do not play as many games as they used to play. Thirty-three players in the 2010-11 season started at least 80 games; only six did this season. When one of the four who started every game, Donte DiVincenzo, tore his Achilles on Saturday, it's easy grasp the reasons for load management. If you don't rest or treat minor injuries with excessive caution, you risk catastrophe.

That does make a worse product for fans. Everyone wants to see stars when they come to town. When they only play around 70 games, that means there's about a 1-in-8 chance the ticket you buy to see a Shai Gilgeous-Alexander doesn't mean you get to see Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

So, for players and for fans, let's make an NBA schedule that's around 70 games. We'll leave the playoffs, the play-in, the NBA Cup, and every other aspect of the league calendar alone because this post is not supposed to be that comprehensive. I have three goals:

1. Shorten the regular season by enough to lessen workloads

2. Keep the regular season long enough to still provide a good volume of entertainment

3. Maintain — to a reasonable point — a regional bias to keep travel easier, make sure teams play games in their own time zone more often, and foster rivalries

The league is probably heading this direction soon but waiting on the addition of two expansion teams, likely in Las Vegas and Seattle. With that in mind, we will base the schedule on a 32-team NBA, which I have divided thusly:

Click to enlarge.

The only team that moved from one conference to the other is the Timberwolves. Their closest two neighbors have long been the Bucks and Bulls, and no one in the Twin Cities likes starting playoff games just before 9:00 p.m. because they happen to be in the Western Conference. The other teams in Central Time do not escape this fate, but we can at least save this one (which is conveniently based in the same city as me).

I first wanted to have four divisions of eight teams, essentially merging each top cell with the one below it (Northwest with Pacific, and so on). The weirdness of the Mountain and Southwest added extra motivation: It feels wrong to split the Mavericks from the Texas Triangle, but everyone else in the Southwest would be a more awkward partner for the Nuggets and Jazz. The Mavs and Thunder are too close not to be in the same division. The same goes for the Rockets and Pelicans. But then again, the Grizzlies are closer to the Mavericks and Thunder than to the Rockets and Spurs. Wouldn't throwing everyone together make more sense to resolve all of these issues?

What stopped me from going with four divisions of eight was walking out the whole scenario. We'll get to that momentarily.

Here are the schedule rules I came up with:

A. 4 games each against 3 divisional opponents (4 x 3 = 12)

B. 3 games each against 4 conference opponents (4 x 3 = 12)

C. 2 games each against 8 remaining conference opponents (2 x 8 = 16)

D. 2 games each against 16 cross-conference opponents (2 x 16 = 32)

This lands us at 72 total games. Cutting exactly 10 games from the current schedule feels neat and tidy, doesn't it? If we take literally the earlier predicament about six games' worth of added possessions, we've made up for that increase and then some. The fact each team would still have 36 home games means I don't think fans would suffer from major spikes in ticket prices. (I admittedly trust no cartel of billionaires to not hike prices anyway.)

The final number is also pretty good on its own. Ninety-six players appeared in 72 or more games this season, more than 5 times the number that appeared in all 82 games. Considering the extra days off the shortened schedule provides — which, if we want to finish the playoffs earlier in June, does not have to mean 10 days off for 10 fewer games — we could probably expect more players to hit the 72-game mark with this schedule.

Initially, I thought the opponents in Rule A would be three protected members of a given team's eight-team division. With this in mind, I assigned all 30 teams their new protected matchups. Using the Mavs as an example, they were set to play the Rockets, Thunder, and Spurs twice at home and twice on the road every year; and the Nuggets, Grizzlies, Pelicans, and Jazz three times every year.

The problem was that the only place this made sense was resolving the aforementioned conflicts within the merged Mountain and Southwest divisions. In the other three eight-team divisions, the most logical protected matchups were almost always between teams that would be in four-team divisions with each other. In the Eastern Conference, I literally never took the option of mixing and matching. Below, I've highlighted every time I chose a protected opponent that was not in a given team's four-team division:

At that point, why overcomplicate things?

After coming to that conclusion, here are those rules again, with some expansion on Rule B:

A. 4 games each against 3 divisional opponents (4 x 3 = 12)

B. 3 games each against 4 conference opponents from other division (4 x 3 = 12)

B1. Each year, the divisions rotate their matchups with each other. For example, in Year 1, the matchups might be Central vs. Atlantic, Midwest vs. Southeast, Southwest vs. Mountain, and Northwest vs. Pacific. In Year 2, they become Central vs. Southwest, Atlantic vs. Midwest, Southwest vs. Pacfic, and Mountain vs. Northwest. In Year 3, they become Central vs. Midwest, Atlantic vs. Southeast, Southwest vs. Northwest, and Mountain vs. Pacific. In Year 4, the cycle resets.

B2. The home-road split between opponents alternates cycles. For example, if in Year 1, the Timberwolves play the Celtics once at home and twice on the road, then in Year 4 (when the cycle resets), the Timberwolves would play the Celtics twice at home and once on the road.

C. 2 games each against 8 remaining conference opponents (2 x 8 = 16)

D. 2 games each against 16 cross-conference opponents (2 x 16 = 32)

Here is what that might look like in a given year for the local Timberwolves:

And just for fun, for the resurrected SuperSonics:

This proposal achieves all three of my stated goals. It reduces the season, but not too much, and it preserves enough regionality to make logistical sense. The only year-to-year variation is simple to understand and implement. Perhaps it treats too much of a team's own conference as separate in a given season, but the most straightforward way to avoid that is to move back closer to 82 games. And we're not doing that.

If the league expands again, that would screw this all up, of course. When it happens, though, I'll let someone else who doesn't watch the NBA anymore blog about the replacement schedule.