Basketball needs fixing – ways to polish the rising sport

I know that football-crazed south Louisiana doesn’t want to hear this, but I’ll say it anyway.

Basketball is quickly catching the NFL and is emerging to become the premier go-to sport in the country.

I know it seems hard to imagine right now, but just trust me when I say this. Ratings throughout the NBA are up, and NFL attendance continues to fall each year.

With more and more fans incensed with the sport’s unpopular push toward safety and less contact, the NBA and its young stars will soon close the gap and become a legitimate contender for the top spot.

Hold your judgment until the future – let’s just let this thing play out.

The NBA is on its way up, and because of the sport’s global popularity, soccer could soon be rivaled in popularity by basketball as the new world’s sport.

But before that transition occurs, the league has to do a lot of things to clean its product up. Because let’s be real – a lot of things that occur within the sport are unfair, brutal and downright unwatchable.

Here are some things this humble fan would change if he were commissioner for the day.

If these things occur, I think the sport would be better inclined to take that next step to challenge Roger Goodell and his evil dictatorship within the NFL.

Five things the NBA should fix going into the future

Flopping – You can’t even touch a modern NBA player anymore without them falling to the floor with force – like they’ve just been run over by a truck. Flopping is out of control in the sport, and the problem is that there’s no real way to fix the problem. The league has started to fine repeat offenders for their misdeeds. But the first offense is just $5,000 – a drop in the bucket for an athlete who may gross $12-15 million in a season. Until the league starts to levy technical fouls or other punishments that will impact the specific game that the infraction occurs, the flops will continue, and the players will just worry about their fines as they come. Until then, this is a black-eye for the sport. How can anyone not be appalled when a 260-pound freight train like LeBron James stage dives to the floor when a 170-pound guard like Nate Robinson rubs him on a screen?

Replay rules – The NBA’s entire replay system is a joke. Inside of the final two minutes of the game, officials review EVERY play – obvious or unobvious. This system forces the final seconds of games to drag on forever – completely stripping the flow and energy from the arena. Instead of officials assuming they missed the call and replaying everything, a challenge system should be in place where teams can question three calls throughout the game – the entire game. This way, teams could also review egregious officiating errors that occur in the early stages of the game – something that doesn’t currently occur.

End hack-a-whoever – Current rules allow teams to hack poor free throw shooters away from the basketball and force them to the free throw line. The San Antonio Spurs and Oklahome City Thunder are notorious for taking advantage of this when an opponent fields a team with a below-average free-throw shooter. This is a strategy that can prove to be effective in short spurts. But effective or not, it shouldn’t be allowed in the game. It deems the game unwatchable and it completely saps the flow of the entire contest. Fouls away from the ball should be intentional fouls, and the victims should be awarded one free throw and possession of the ball. That would quickly remedy the problem and make this all go away painlessly.

End foul outs – More than any other sporting league in the world, the NBA is star-driven organization. Fans pay to see the players more so than they do to see the actual game itself. The NBA knows it, too. That’s the reason why the Spurs were levied a $500,000 fine for intentionally sitting its stars during a game without giving a reason for their absence. So because of this reality, the league should eliminate the rule that disqualifies players who foul out after committing six fouls. What I would do instead is make the sixth foul and every foul afterward a technical foul where teams get to shoot two free throws and keep the ball. This would still make players in foul trouble play cautiously. It would also allow the game to be finished with all of the star players on the floor – a win-win for fans. The challenge would be getting officials to actually be free with their whistles to give players their sixth and seventh fouls and so-on. In today’s NBA,

Loosen salary structure in the league – I’m shocked that I am saying this, because I used to be hard on the Miami Heat and the way that they built their roster. But after watching the Memphis Grizzlies trade away Rudy Gay for peanuts and the Oklahoma City Thunder shop James Harden for next to nothing, I think that something needs to change. I believe in a salary cap to keep competitive balance within the league. But I think teams that draft well should be rewarded for their good work. The current system that heavily taxes teams above the salary cap isn’t awful, but it should be loosened quite a bit. Teams that make good decisions shouldn’t be punished for that.