Charles Barkley at the 2022 NBA All-Star Game. Credit: Kyle Terada/USA Today Sports.

Suddenly everybody’s favorite talking point is that the NBA is irrevocably broken and on the verge of collapse.. or something like that. With ratings down this year and growing discontentment about the league’s three-point heavy style of play, it seems like everybody has an idea about how to “fix” the league. Naturally, one of those people is the most prominent voice around on all things NBA – Charles Barkley.

Barkley made news during his Tuesday interview with Dan Patrick by stating that he was listening to NBC and Amazon about potentially working with them next year in spite of TNT licensing Inside the NBA to ESPN. Barkley being able to get out of his TNT contract would certainly be news to everyone, most especially his bosses at Warner Bros. Discovery.

But also in the course of the interview with Patrick, Barkley dropped a popular idea on one of the ways in which the NBA can boost fan interest – pushing the start of the season back until Christmas Day.

“You know the best ratings we’ve ever had were the year we went on strike, Dan, and started on Christmas. I think we need to seriously consider starting at Christmas because listen, you’re wasting your time going up against the NFL and college football. They own the weekends now. But I think if we started at Christmas, there’s no other sport that we’d have to compete with if we started at Christmas. College football would be over, pro football is winding down, we’d have the entire calendar late December, January, February, March, April, May, June to ourselves. I think it’s something we really need to consider, plain and simple,” Barkley said.

As Barkley correctly recalled, there was actually one season in recent history when the NBA did start at Christmas. The 2011-2012 start was delayed because of a lockout so the NBA regular season tipped off on Christmas Day in a shortened 66 game season. And you know what? People loved it!

At ESPN, Michael Wilbon wrote this at the time:

The funniest thing about these five months of melodrama is that the NBA will begin the season precisely when and how it should anyway. Play should never for any reason commence before Thanksgiving and probably not until the first week of December, at the earliest. Truth is, a tripleheader on Christmas Day with Kobe, LeBron, D-Wade, Dirk and D-Rose, plus the Knicks in the Garden hosting the Celtics, is probably better than these two quarrelsome parties deserve. It’s as though they stumbled into beginning the NASCAR season with Daytona.

Pushing back the start of the season by a couple of months would allow the NBA season to end in August instead of June. And by doing so, the association would move from competing against pro and college football in the heart of their seasons to going longer in the summer to compete with baseball and… not much else. It would also separate their season from the NHL so that the Stanley Cup Final ended when the NBA Playoffs began and give them their own unique calendar.

Of course, the NBA Christmas showcase is not what it once was given the NFL has said that they now own Christmas Day even though it’s been a multi-decade basketball tradition. But even with the NFL encroaching on their turf, it would be way more impactful to begin the season then compared to a random Tuesday night in the middle of late October.

A Christmas start makes all the sense in the world. However, with the NBA signing new media deals and a CBA that runs through the 2029-2030 season, don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.