As the NBA season drags deep into another eternal January, you can annually make the case that the exercise borders on pointless. It was just last year that Kawhi Leonard dismissed the NBA’s regular season as 82 practices before the real basketball begins. And it was only this season that the league seemed to acknowledge the waning relevance of the five-month slog that preludes the playoffs, floating ideas like a mid-season tournament and playoff reseeding that might render a team’s win-loss record more pertinent.
There’s something to all of that, but there’s money in the current model.