NBA officiating needs more bias

To make the regular season matter, we need playoff home cooking from the refs

The NBA playoffs are incredible (even when the Knicks get eliminated), but the regular season? It’s a bit of a snooze fest.

This has always been an issue for the league. The regular season slog is essentially downstream of the fact that scoring is so common in professional basketball, which means less randomness in the outcomes. In soccer or hockey, even an inferior team is often just one lucky shot or weird clang off the crossbar from tying rather than losing. A single bad pitch with runners in scoring position can swing a baseball game.

An average NBA game, though, has more than 100 possessions, and the fact that the Cavaliers are +9.2 per 100 possessions while the Wizards are -12.2 makes it unlikely that the inferior team will come out on top. In the playoffs, the teams are all good, so it’s exciting. But in the regular season, you get a lot of duds.

This tendency has gotten worse in recent years, to the point where avowed NBA fans aren’t watching regular season games. Even the literal co-author of “Abundance” is calling for fewer games:

Not only are a large minority of regular season games bad, but now, even the ones that are good don’t seem important. You could have a Clippers-Bucks game in December that features a dramatic 18-3 fourth-quarter run to cut the lead to two, but who cares?

The ill-conceived play-in tournament ensures that only genuinely bad teams will miss the post-season, meaning that good teams never really need to sweat the standings.

But the larger issue is that securing a high seed and home-court advantage in the playoffs just doesn’t seem to matter anymore. The Knicks won on the road twice in Boston, then got blown out at home. They had home-court advantage against the Pacers in the conference finals and squandered it with two painful losses before winning one on the road. The decline of home-court advantage largely reflects officiating becoming better and less biased. That’s “good” in the sense that the officials are supposed to call the games correctly. But since one role of the regular season is to determine playoff seeding, this unbiased officiating can make the regular season feel a bit pointless.

I’m not fanatically committed to the 82-game regular season, but at this point, I don’t think 65 pointless games would be very fun either. What we need is a situation in which being the three seed is a lot better than being the six seed, so everyone gives a damn about the games.

Here’s my pitch for how we get there.