DEVALUATION

 

               In my columnizing days I covered the U.S. Open tennis tournament annually, and got a kick out of the way the New York crowds cheered for the underdogs in early-round play and, after some won, complained that famous players were gone. Much the same thing now is happening in all our major sports as playoffs expand and more teams are added.

               Exhibit A was the just-concluded baseball World Series. With the post-season tourney field newly expanded to 12 teams from 10 the finalists were a No. 6 seed, the National League Arizona Diamondbacks, and a No. 5, the American League Texas Rangers. The D’Backs came into the Series with an 84-78 regular-season won-lost mark, the third-worst record ever for a World Series contestant (the two worse were the 1973 New York Mets, at 82-79, and the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, 83-78, who won). The Rangers brought a 90-72 record to the fray, setting the two-team win total at 174. That was the lowest such figure ever for the event.

People in Arizona and the Dallas area couldn’t have been happier, of course, but the rest of the nation was underjoyed. Television ratings for the five-game Series (won by the Rangers four games to one) were the lowest on record, with viewership averaging less than 10 million a game. By contrast, about that many people tuned in to the NCAA women’s basketball championship final last March between LSU and Iowa.

The TV numbers were the latest—and most vivid—recent example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. In answering public demand to expand their playoffs our sports major leagues have devalued both them and their regular seasons, our major entertainments and their main sources of revenue. The more games our teams play the less valuable each becomes. This invokes another popular saw, the Law of Diminishing Returns.   

Exhibit B (or, rather, 1A) is the National Basketball Association. It spread its playoff tent last season with a complicated arrangement of “play-in” games, and wound up with a final involving the Miami Heat, which had only the seventh-best won-lost record (44-38) in the Eastern Conference.

Schedule length in any sport is determined by commerce, not competition. They’re all too long, topped by MLB’s 162 games, but the NBA’s 82-gamer is the most problematic because its first half (the months of November, December and January) is played in the shadow of the National Football League, the undisputed champion of the airwaves. Until Christmas only aficionados pay much attention to the hoopsters, and then not really until the playoffs approach around March.

The NBA is trying to remedy that this season with an in-season tournament plucked whole from England’s soccer Premier League, the theft extending to its terminology (“group play” and “knockout rounds”, with a “cup” that goes to the winner). Running from November 3 through December 9, it’s being contested initially by six units of five teams each followed by a single-elimination go-around culminating in a final. All games save the final will count in the regular-season standings, with winning-team players pocketing $500,000 each.  That’s a nice prize even in a loop in which eight-figure annual salaries are common. So far the tourney has been met mostly with guffaws, but at worst it couldn’t hurt.

The NFL also has extended its playoffs in recent seasons and beginning last year did the same with its regular season, going from 16 games to 17. That addition (about 6%) is equivalent to 10 more MLB games. Schedules change only in one direction (longer), and sports leagues loathe odd numbers (home-road equity, don’tcha know?), so another boost to 18 games surely will follow.   

In the NFL the main consequence of more games is more injuries, the unavoidable result of football’s bruising nature. After about week three of the schedule every player is nursing some sort of hurt, and more-serious, game-missing injuries are common. Football is unique in that its most-valuable players—quarterbacks—also are its most vulnerable, and this year fully one-third of its putative starting QBs have missed at least a game while healing. The big question each year at playoff time isn’t so much which team is best as which is healthiest.

As NBA basketball becomes faster and on-court collisions harder and more frequent, injuries become more common, and the too-long schedule more of a grind. The league has recognized this by going corporate, legitimizing star absences with what it calls “load management.“  That means it’s okay for players to sit out games from time to time for no other reason than rest.

As I reported in my blog of last May 15, the league’s dozen-best players (Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic, Luca Doncic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, Kawhi Leonard, Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, Ja Morant, Damian Lillard and Jimmy Butler) missed an average of 23 games each last season, or about 28% of their teams’ schedules. Theatrical plays notify patrons through program notes when leads are being replaced by stand-ins. NBA teams should do the same.

Indeed, they should go further by putting a warning on tickets saying the purchase price doesn’t guarantee the presence of either team’s stars. Fans bear the costs of schedule devaluation, as they do most things. But hey! It’s only your money if you give it to them.