The Draft: You know how it works. Like all professional leagues in America, the NBA holds one every year. It's designed, of course, to give the crappy teams leverage in the acquisition of new, young talent. The NBA relatively recently even injected a draft lottery, to supposedly keep said crappy teams from tanking the latter portion of seasons (as if some can help it) in order to secure the best draft position. But mainly, the lottery gives those crappy teams something extra to get excited about in May, while they're watching the good teams on TV in the playoffs.
The Regular Season: The NBA plays an 82-game schedule. That's a lot of basketball. Then they put over half (16 out of 30) of the teams in the playoffs. This renders the regular season semi-meaningless. Teams have to really suck to not make the playoffs. The good-great teams go into each season knowing they'll make the playoffs and hence can dork-around through entire chunks of the season.
So, in essence, the regular season only serves to resolve the mystery of which good-great teams will be seeded where and which mediocre-sorry teams will manage to back in at the seventh & eighth slots in each conference (although for the past few years, the seventh & eighth seeds out West have been pretty darn good).
Turning It On Just For The Playoffs: Every year, fans and the media's "Talking Heads" yap incessantly about how some good-great team that's dorking-around in parts or all of the regular season won't be able to turn it on for the playoffs. And every year, fans and "Talking Heads" are proven wrong. This season, it was the Lakers (dorking-around most of the second half of the season) and the Celtics (dorking-around most of ALL of the season). I think you see where I'm going with this...I mean..."All That".
Free Agency: A bunch of teams, as usual, scrambled and made big headlines in adding players who "will put us o...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Los Angeles Lakers
