PARIS (George Eddy's International Show) - Sometimes good ideas take a long time before they go mainstream. If you have been following my columns over the years, you know that for two decades I have been a proponent of shortening the NBA regular season, eliminating back-to-back games and hard fouls in order to protect the players' health and well-being and to prolong their careers.

After feeling very lonely for a long time in this battle and hearing that business issues will always win out over health issues, of course I was pleased in the last week to see LeBron James and Dirk Nowitzki come out in favor of less regular season games while reducing back to backs.

LeBron said we have to protect the prize, the players, (think, goose that lays the golden eggs) because if the players get injured that doesn't help promote the game (think Kevin Durant).

Miami Heat head coach Eric Spoelstra said it would be good to find a way to reduce the 20-plus back-to-backs each season because everyone agrees that there are too many games in too short a period of time. Nowitzki added that he never liked back-to-backs, not even when he was a spring chiken at the age of 20! He also said that you don't need 82 games to decide the top eight in each conference and that between 60 and 70 games would suffice.

Since I am somewhat of a revolutionary, I would like to see the NBA play 40-minute games like everyone else to move closer to worldwide rules unification.

LeBron says the length of the games is not the problem, it's the number of games. He has lobbied succesfully for a longer break for the players around the All-Star Weekend and he seems like the perfect advocate for reducing the regular season now that the money will start pouring in with the tripling of the national TV contract in the U.S. over the next nine years.

This fabulous success in the TV negotiations puts new commissioner Adam Silver in a comfortable position to deeply reform the NBA and its schedule. His masterful handling of the Donald Sterling crisis reinforces his leadership and now is the time to get the owners to understand that it is in their interest to protect the players' health but also increase the meaning and importance of each regular season game as well as the quality of play in each game.

Nowitzki pointed out how easy it is to trample an opponent who has played four games in five nights with travel in between. This leads to one-sided games of little interest and isn't good for the image of the NBA in general because fans who pay to see these games feel cheated.

Studies have proven that tired players get hurt more often, too. I also agree with Dirk that it would be a good idea to limit the number of timeouts at the end of NBA games because they often drag on endlessly.

So the question is: how much revenue would the owners really lose if the regular season was reduced by 16 games or so?

They would lose the revenue from gate receipts, sponsors, local tv revenue etc... for eight home games. The national TV contract money would not vary because it represents several high-profile games a week and their number would not change.

I think a fair figure would be that players accept a 10 percent cut in their annual salary to compensate for the reduction in the number of games but since the new TV contract is going to increase the salary cap considerably they will still be making way more than they are today (the owners too!) and they would probaly add a year or two of longevity to their careers!

In my utopic revolutionary mind, the perfect NBA formula would be to simply play each team home and away which would produce a 58-game regular season with each game counting a lot more. We do away with conferences and divisions and the playoffs pit 1 versus 16, 2 versus 15 etc... over three rounds of best-of-seven games series which would eliminate the disparities of level between the conferences and the divisions that we see today.

If you want to keep the actual system in place because of tradition, you could add home and away games with division rivals to the original 58 and have a 66-game regular season and most important of all, NO back-to-back games, which would seriously increase the quality of play and impact of each individual game.

In the last few years, Gregg Popovich has had a lot of success (and received a lot of criticism and fines!) for resting his players during the regular season in order to have everybody in top shape for the playoffs. This will probably become a trend with NBA coaches in the coming seasons which is a good thing as far as keeping players healthy and prolonging the careers of stars like Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili, who continue to fill arenas!

As in modern society in general, many people have come to realize that more is not always better. Let's learn to live longer and healthier with a little bit less. Who knows, this may be an enduring formula for success!

George Eddy

FIBA

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