Jake Yono My Current Thoughts About The NBA After The 2024 Finals

JY Journalism

5/28/24

Hello everybody, it's been a long time but I am back to business as school and track have taken up my time in the last month but now since it's summer I will be posting more articles about various sports and topics going on. Since the NBA Playoffs are in full swing with the Eastern Conference finals ending and the Western Conference finals continuing on I will be writing about that as well as a couple problems I believe the NBA has and how they can fix them. Again I am back and let's get started.

As of right now, the Boston Celtics have secured their spot in the NBA finals and the Timberwolves extended their series against the Dallas Mavericks in game 4 last night in a very tight contest forcing a game 5 with homecourt advantage. Leading up to this, Minnesota swept the Suns in 4 games then battled with Denver for 7 games last round in which they defeated the defending champs with Anthony Edwards leading the team in scoring with 27.5 points per game during this series. The Maverick's path here was by beating the Clippers and then the Thunder both in 6 games by a reasonable margin with Luka Doncic almost averaging a triple-double with 28 points, 9 rebounds, and 9 assists per game this postseason. The Pacers first beat the Giannis free Bucks in 6 games then they beat the New York Knicks in 7 games with game 7 being in New York. During this series Jalen Brunson led both teams in scoring averaging 30 a game in this series, He is someone special and a guy teams must watch out for. Finally, the Celtics played the Heat without Jimmy Butler and took them in 5, then they beat the Cavs in 5 games who were truly outmatched with Jalen Brown and Jayson Tatum. In the East finals, they played the Pacers without Tyrese Haliburton for the last 2 and a half games which weakened them with the average margin of victory only being around 7 points the Pacers played one heck of a series and just like New York they are another uprising team to watch out for. Also In this Western Conference Finals series, the margin of victory has been very small as it only being 4 and a half, so far this has shown that the Mavericks have one of the best closing backcourts in the NBA with Luka and Kyrie as this team has played in the most clutch games this postseason with 9. This series is not over yet, as they always show on TV teams are 154-0 in closing out a series when leading 3-0, this is very hard to do but I think the Minnesota Timberwolves can do this with Anthony Edwards, KAT, Naz Reid, and Kyle Anderson playing at their best and trying to stop Luka and Kyrie for 3 more games.

Although the NBA playoffs have been great so far the NBA has a couple of major problems according to me. First I believe both of these problems stem from the league's financial purposes. The first one is that the season is way too long. When I say this I mean players aren’t taking 82 games competitively in my opinion in terms of players resting and the overall meaning of the game in the long run. One game can but most of the time not influence a playoff spot or seed significantly in the beginning and/or the middle of the season, this is why the season must be shortened. The league realized this by implementing the 65-game rule for players to earn awards but they will probably not shorten the season length. Another alternative is shorting the lengths of games to 40 minutes instead of 48 but the league cares about all-time stats so this probably won’t happen shortly. An example from other leaguers is the NFL which contains 17 games and every game means way more than having 82 games in the schedule the same thing goes with college football and college basketball having 30-35. This means every game matters more than the NBA schedule. It’s very unfortunate watching the NBA playoffs and seeing how talented these players are and realizing very few of these high-flying competitive-style actions happened during the regular season.

My other issue is the time of games being played on the West Coast for example in the regular season games are starting at 10:00-10:30 on TNT and ESPN with good teams on the network's prime-time nights. For example on April 4th on TNT the Nuggets and Clippers faced off but since it was in LA, the game tipped off at 10:00 pm Eastern time this has been going on for years but I guess the league sees it as the best way to make money, this game was a competitive worthwhile to watch the game but it is at 10 p.m. on a random Thursday make it very tough to watch. If it was earlier on a weekend day it would be easier and more enjoyable for more fans to watch. The NFL a competing league has their prime-time games starting at 8:30 on average even if it’s on the West Coast. The NFL is different because most of their games are played on Sundays but there is no cramming in of West Coast night games which makes it an enjoyable experience for all. The NBA should take a look at this and I think this problem can more likely be solved than the first problem.

Wrapping this all up, it has been a great NBA season especially in the playoffs, not for my Detroit Pistons though as they were the worst team this season and only got the 5th pick in the draft from the lottery, hopefully, they can pull it together and rebuild. Good luck to the Mavs Timberwolves, and Celtics as they hope to win an NBA title. If the league solves these problems I think it will be more enjoyable and competitive to all involved in it.