Friday, December 18, 2009

On Paul Pierce's ideas of NBA rule changes

Paul Pierce has three ideas to fix the NBA

1. Eliminate the age limit.
2. Cut the regular season from 82 games to 60.
3. Raise the rim 3 inches to 10'3"

Some thoughts:

The NBA age limit is a joke: Kids just camp at a college for one year, and then turn pro at 19. How they use a scholarship with no intention of getting an actual education or being anything more than a one year mercenary shows the pointlessness of the age limit. There's little difference between a 17 or 18 year old entering the NBA and a 19 year old. If Stern thought going to school mattered, he should have made the age limit 22 or 23.

As for the rim... yeah, there's no way they would do it, especially given you have to dip into international and college basketball and get everyone to do it for it to work, but I think it would do the game some good to force people to learn how to shoot and pass again. The NBA product today, while a little better than recent years, is still garbage and a big reason why is because there's a lack of polished, fundamentally sound basketball.

And I actually agree with his idea for the 60 game season. Much of the season is a giant sleepwalk. We don't need 82 games to figure out who sucks and who doesn't (after 20-25 games, for example, we have a pretty good idea of how good the 2-win Nets are), especially if you're letting more than half the league into the playoffs.

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