The NBA (National Basketball Association) season has 82 regular games with playoffs nearly a month after. The NBA season needs to be shortened. This number of games and level of commitment from the players is too much even for the fans to watch.
During the 2024-2025 NBA season three major NBA stars were injured. In the first round of the playoffs against the Indiana Pacers, Damian Lillard dove on the floor to grab a loose ball and tore his achilles tendon. During the second round of the playoffs, Jayson Tatum had ruptured his achilles. During the NBA finals, in game 7 against the OKC Thunder, Tyrese Haliburton drove with the ball and tore his achilles. Within the span of one playoff three major stars had torn/ruptured their achilles. Putting players through an 82 game schedule and then having to put them through a playoffs series is putting all players at risk for serious injury.
NBA players have often chosen to sit out games for rest or “load management”, and as such the NBA fines the player(s) for choosing to sit out for the reason being that is a damage to the brand, and viewers won’t watch. The largest fine in the 2024-2025 was to the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Philadelphia 76ers for $100,00 for sitting their star players. The NBA needs to realize having to make these players play all these games will result in injuries to the players, which will have the same result as load management as the players won’t be able to play due to injury, and the fans won’t watch.
Most NBA fans agree that watching games from November through December is boring and un-fun to watch. The NBA has tried to fix this issue by adding an “NBA Cup”, which is an in season tournament where the winning team gets a prize reward. This hasn’t fixed the issue of players getting hurt as it pushes them even more to play, and this hasn’t reduced the number of games that they play.
From the time the NBA regular season starts so does the NFL too, but the NFL season is much shorter and by the time the NBA playoffs end The NFL is starting back up ready to go. With all this the NBA should shorten their season to 50-60 games and have a day or two for players to rest and properly recover.
