Mike Francesa: NBA regular season is ‘worthless’

The NBA regular season is a declining product, and unless they have a moment of reckoning, Mike Francesa believes it’s only going to get worse.

Between load management, teams tanking, and legitimate injuries, NBA fans can’t look forward to any one game by counting on the league’s best players to be on the court. Yahoo’s Tom Haberstroh recently released a stunning report: only 32.7% of nationally televised NBA games feature full availability of stars from both teams.

NBA fans knew it was bad, but Haberstroh’s research puts it into perspective just how little teams care about the regular season. And with there being no imminent reason for teams to start prioritizing the regular season, Francesa is forecasting doom for the NBA.

“The NBA better do a real big look in the mirror,” Francesa said this week on his podcast. “And they better have a reckoning about how terrible the product they are providing in the regular season is. The way good teams treat back-to-back games, is almost disgraceful. This is a league now, that if you want to be real, cannot schedule back-to-back games because the quality of play with the guys who do show up, is so poor, it is unbelievable.”

“No league in my lifetime has cutback the regular season because the players won’t budge on anything they’ve gained in their unions, they won’t go backwards. And the owners want to maximize regular-season dates because they think they need the income. If the NBA doesn’t come to an agreement on what a reasonable number of games is, schedule them properly, and have the teams commit to that schedule, I can’t tell you where their regular season is gonna be within a couple of years. Their regular season is almost worthless now.”

Bob Costas recently said he believes Major League Baseball could reach an agreement to reduce its regular season from 162 games to 156 during its next labor negotiations. As Francesa noted, leagues never get rid of games, but Costas argued MLB can recoup any lost revenue by expanding its playoff division series to seven games.

The NBA playoffs, however, are already long enough, especially with the addition of the play-in tournament. And Costas was talking about MLB reducing its regular season by less than 5%. The NBA will have to consider cutting its regular season by about 20% if it really wants any chance of eliminating load management.

“The regular season is without any meaning at all. And I love the postseason, but the regular season is worthless,” Francesa continued. “They have got to come to grips with that; if they don’t, they’re gonna continue to pay a very heavy price.”

The good news for Francesa and every other NBA fan who believes the regular season is a declining product is that commissioner Adam Silver doesn’t totally disagree. Silver has attempted to combat load management and tanking in recent years, to no avail. But while the NBA would argue against any claim that its regular season is “worthless,” they do at least acknowledge the issues.