It’s already a thing in many major sports played around the world. Football(/Soccer), Baseball, and possibly most of all Cricket. I propose we make the NBA regular season more interesting by adding variance to home courts.

You saw the NCAA accidentally do this to their women, which, is SO INSANELY NEGLIGENT. Honestly. Everyone involved should lose their jobs for either not following protocol or for having shitty protocol. No one ever heard ‘measure twice, cut once’? No one?

But this is about making things all wrong on purpose. Oh yeah. Let’s get weird.

It’s a Thing Already

Football (the global kind) is played on pitches of slightly varying lengths and widths, with goalie boxes that vary some as well. We’re unfamiliar with that idea in America, because most soccer fields are made to fit within football stadiums, where rigid field dimensions are an integral part of the game. One of my favorite Twitter accounts details the weirdest high school baseball stadiums in Ohio, where they just fit them into whatever weird plots of land they have.

In baseball, however, you see teams that will build stadiums to reflect their relative strength. It’s an open secret that the New York Yankees built the new stadium with short walls to encourage more home runs. Baseball is about large samples of individual matchups, so obviously on a small scale it’s hard to tell, but over 81 games, you can see the difference borne out.

The Colorado Rockies have a compound home field advantage in that they are used to conditioning in the higher altitude, AND the thinner air means baseballs fly through it with less resistance. Coors Field, home of the Rockies, has been heralded as the best hitter’s park for decades. That moniker means that it is harder for pitchers to get batters out, generally. We’re comfortable with different home stadiums in baseball, because it is a relatively small variation. We’re at home with the idea that there are different surfaces on which to play tennis.

Cricket pitches can vary wildly for a number of reasons. It’s similarly popular to football and baseball, across the world, and feature games between nations and teams across great distances with some regularity. Cricket pitches can vary based on size, topography, and the clay that they are played on. The different kinds of clay can dramatically impact how the ball bounces and moves. In addition, the length of time a Cricket game takes means that the field can change during the game, with cracks developing as the ground dries out.

The Concept

You know what else is dried up? The NBA regular season.

I find it hard to tune in night after night, with my favorite team subject to local blackouts, the other games frequently resulting in blowouts, and often instead opt to watch some reality television with my Fiancée (until 4/13!). The in-season tournament breathed some much-needed life into the NBA’s fall period, but with that in the rearview, the trade deadline was the only thing that drew my interest. I listen to a daily NBA roundup podcast, No Dunks, and over the past couple of years I find that more enjoyable than watching the games. Part of the problem, you could argue, is that the Spurs aren’t that good. They’re my favorite team, and watching them win is more compelling. Honestly, I would watch them lose this season too. But I can’t as a result of how local TV contracts work.

So, as someone barred from watching the most exciting prospect since LeBron, my only option is typically something like let’s watch Anthony Edwards and the Timberwolves try to dunk all over the, uh, Trailblazers? Oh for the love of…

I would be much more drawn in, if, say, the Trailblazers had no offensive arc under the basket, such that there was no place where an offensive player could legally avoid a charge call. This means that any time Anthony Edwards skies to attempt a poster over a properly placed DeAndre Ayton, he would get called for an offensive foul. He wouldn’t stop trying though, and we’d get a more and more incensed Ant trying to take heads off.

I understand that was a deeply specific example, more on the way. But first, ground rules. I left the dimensions of the floor the same, though I would be open to widening it if a team really wanted to. Making the floor any smaller would really restrict movement, and that’s not more exciting, which is the opposite of what we want. So. No overall dimension changes. The baskets stay in the same places. Shot clock remains the same. General rules of basketball all still apply, this is just about where the paint is on the floor.

An Actual Example: The Atlanta Hawks

Okay, that last one was convoluted. Let’s think about how this could actually be applied. I took a team’s shooting profile, in this case, the Atlanta Hawks. You can see in the image below (stats and graphic courtesy of positiveresidual.com), that the Hawks shoot well around the arc, except on the right wing. So, under this new ideology, we just eliminate that compulsion. In case the below is tricky to read, it shows how well the Hawks capitalize on scoring opportunities relative to the rest of the league. You can see that they perform better in the areas with darker red hexagons, worse in the darker blue. The number and size of hexagons is reflective of quantity. Now, for an example of what the Hawks floor could look like under my new rules. Green is 3pt Land, gray is 2pt.

As you can see, we’ve taken that problem area and just eliminated it. There’s no rule that says the hawks can’t shoot from there still, but they’re disincentivized as it’s now abundantly apparent that it’s the lowest value shot on the floor for them. They can continue to shoot from there, but will continue to reap below-average results. This is a relatively tame example.

Another example of how this could work would be for the Sacramento Kings, who suffer from the NBA’s worst Free Throw %. They shoot 4% below the league average, which would be worse if they didn’t also shoot the 10th fewest free throws per game. So, as a low volume, low efficiency free throw team, they could benefit from a change like moving the Free Throw line back. Here’s their shot chart, and my suggested bizarro court. We’ve moved the 3pt line down to where the top of the FT circle used to be, only 20 feet from the basket. and we moved the FT line to the 3pt distance, 23 ft. The Kings have not been good shooters. We are doing anything we can to keep them from driving into the paint to get fouled. Frankly, we’re also trying to encourage a little more diversity in shot taking as well.

They can’t be much worse than they already are, so they should probably make it even harder. Conversely the Hawks, who get to the line more than any other team and shoot it at 80%, would probably benefit from the other end of this ideology, and moving the line a bit closer could be beneficial. I do understand that free throws are deeply rooted in practice and sameness, so maybe any change at all would throw everyone off. But that said, wouldn’t this be cool to watch players try to figure out?

Serious Business: The Playoffs

Now, I understand that this is the best collection of basketball talent the world has ever seen. So we should just allow them to play basketball, at some point. I propose that we put the silly part of the season after the in-season tournament and before the all-star break. That would give us several weeks of the fun, before teams settle in for their final seeding push pre-playoffs.

The playoffs should be played on the same floors, so that when a team is crowned champ, it’s clearly due to the play, and not the Gerrymandered floor. Ironically, we live with a level of corruption that we would never accept in our sports leagues. In American politics, whoever wins gets to do this for the whole next season/election. But I digress.

Why it won’t Happen: Sport Gambling

America’s new favorite vice, legalized sports betting, has more or less destroyed America’s ability to enjoy sports for the spectacle. I don’t support sports gambling, but I understand that it is inescapable in our society. A lot of people don’t enjoy watching sports. Rather, they enjoy being right. So, they watch games, and when they are proven right, they are happy. The gambling industry found a way to monetize that desire, and as a result the sports entertainment machine has been invaded by gambling gamesmen. The addiction to sports gambling is not so simple as a slot machine. Winning a sports bet gives the bettor the feeling that they knew something imperceptible to most, that they are smarter than the oddsmaker, and they have bettered them. It’s particularly addictive to competitive people, people who see an obvious disadvantage as something to be overcome, not a bad deal.

Anyway. Pardon the digression. The oddsmakers would never allow this much weirdness to happen. It would be far too hard to set lines. The sports books would be forced to not offer lines on the weird floors. The NBA and really all of American sports have gone ahead and bent the knee to the sports betting overlords. They won’t shorten the season because to ESPN and DraftKings those games are inventory. I wouldn’t expect these changes to be implemented. So it goes. I will still be tuned in for the playoffs.

Anti-Standom

(Noun) Resistance to becoming overwhelmingly enamored or obsessed with a person or thing.