Shane Battier thinks the NBA should be a lot more like college

Apr 13, 2010, 2:57 PM EDT

Duke graduate, face-guarding aficionado, and all-around nice guy Shane Battier sat down with Jason Friedman of Rockets.com yesterday with a bunch of ideas regarding how the NBA could be improved. And I do mean a bunch. What kind of rule changes does Battier want to see? You’re not going to believe this, but the former Wooden award winner and national champion at Duke thinks the NBA should be a lot more like college. Battier’s proposed rule changes include:

-Replacing All-Star weekend with an eight-team single-elimination tournament at midseason, similar to what they do in Spain. Battier adds that “you could even shorten the games to two halves of 20 minutes each.”

-Have the last two playoff spots in each conference given to the winners of single-elimination tournaments at the end of the regular season

-Shorten the first round to a best-of-five series, giving the underdog a better chance to win

-Shorten the regular season to 58 games

-Make technical fouls count as personal fouls, like they do in college

Battier is one of the league’s true good guys, and there’s nothing wrong with a great college player (and very good pro) wishing the NBA was a bit more like college. But it is just a little funny.

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C - Apr 13, 2010 at 4:04 PM

“Shorten the regular season to 58 games”
That will cut revenue by about 30%. Either players and owners would need to take 30% in salary and profit or they’d need to cut expenses (especially player salary) by 30%.
Are they willing to do that? No.

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C - Apr 13, 2010 at 4:22 PM

Well that wasn’t clear. I shifted away at the last minute from point another point and ended up with a mess.
I meant “Either all players and owners would need to take 30% less in salary and profit or they’d need to cut enough roster spots and other expenses to save 30%. I can’t see either happening.
The latter would be pretty difficult. Maybe if you cut back to 10-11 roster spots and changed some other things about the NBA lifestyle and collective bargaining agreement you could save 20-30%. But why go to all that work just to break even at best?

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C - Apr 13, 2010 at 4:43 PM

No way the union would agree to cut around 100 NBA jobs as would happen in that scenario.
Cutting the number of roster spots and at the same time expanding might work to lower team costs, if you could get high enough expansion fees and probably also expand league TV revenue (get back on network TV more?) enough to get the owners to agree to it. Very unlikely.
Battier might end up working for the league office. But I’d give him Stu Jackson’s job with a focus on the officiating rather than making entertainment or financial impact proposals.

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C - Apr 13, 2010 at 4:47 PM

No way the union would agree to cut around 100 NBA jobs as would happen in that scenario.
Cutting the number of roster spots on a team and at the same time expanding might work to lower team costs, if you could get high enough expansion fees and probably also expand league TV revenue (get back on network TV more?) enough to get the owners to agree to it. Very unlikely.
Battier might end up working for the league office. But I’d give him Stu Jackson’s job with a focus on the officiating rather than making entertainment or financial impact proposals.

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