Lockout must end to avoid hoops nightmare

Commissioner David Stern grew a beard during the 1998-99 lockout, which shortened the season to 50 games and forced players to compete on little rest. (AP)

As Henry Abbott notes at ESPN.com, we’re about a week from the point at which the league and the players union must agree to the general parameters of a deal in order for the regular season to start on time, or close to it. And even in that best-case scenario, training camps and the preseason will be cut or reduced, and free agency will be even crazier than usual.

Everyone wants the lockout to end, obviously. But it’s important that it ends in a relatively timely fashion, because a compressed 50-game season like the one we got in 1998-99 is nearly as bad a basketball outcome as a canceled season. It’s not nearly as bad a business outcome, since the NBA would fill arenas, make its TV partners happy, begin the healing process with fans and avoid the stigma of joining the NHL in scuttling an entire year. That’s important.

But if you want the best basketball possible, if you want each team in the theoretical 2011-12 NBA to reach its full potential, then the season has to begin soon.

GALLERY: Revisiting the 1998-99 NBA lockout

This is not to say the 1998-99 champion San Antonio Spurs deserve some sort of asterisk, or that the season was a total bust. I watched the games and enjoyed them. The quality of overall play just wasn’t the same, and though you can’t blame that all on the lockout or the compressed schedule, just about anyone you talk to in NBA circles thinks those factors had a lot to do with the general decline in play. Teams in the NBA don’t practice all that much in a normal season, but they at least have a normal training camp and a full 82-game schedule to get familiar with each other. Cut that camp and play a schedule of near-permanent five-games-in-seven-nights stretches, and you’re going to find that players are tired and new teammates don’t know each other well enough in June.

You saw all of this if you watched EuroBasket and FIBA Americas, with their grueling stretches of five games in six nights and general lack of prep time. Star players, including Manu Ginobili and Pau Gasol, looked exhausted and slow by the end of those stretches and really could only summon their A-games when they got at least a day of rest. Boris Diaw and Joakim Noah miscommunicated more on basic defensive concepts in single quarters of games for France than Noah and Carlos Boozer would during a full week in Chicago.

In that 1998-99 season, the NBA squeezed 50 games into three months. Teams played nearly as many back-to-backs (about 15 or 16 on average) as they do during a normal 82-game season, and each club played about two back-to-back-to-backs — killer stretches that don’t exist in the regular schedule.

And the numbers were ugly. Teams scored just 102.2 points per 100 possessions in that season, the worst collective offensive performance since the league instituted the three-point line in 1979-80, according to Basketball-Reference. They played at the slowest pace in league history, averaging just 89 possessions per game. Dig a bit deeper, and you see the decline in scoring was almost entirely linked to bricktastic shooting; teams turned the ball over, earned free throws and grabbed offensive boards at around the same rate they usually did during the mid-1990s and early 2000s. They just missed more shots than usual.

Teams in 1998-99 shot just 33.9 percent on three-pointers, down from 34.6 percent the prior season, and they hit a disastrous 45.6 percent of two-point shots. That shooting percentage on twos is the lowest aggregate mark in the modern history of the league; shooting percentages jumped back up to 35.3 percent on threes and 46.7 percent on twos in the 1999-2000 season, and with the exception of a slight dip in shooting in the 2000-01 campaign, they have never really approached lockout levels.

As Kevin Pelton of Basketball Prospectus has noted, you cannot blame the lockout for all of this. Scoring per possession dropped off pretty steeply starting in the mid-1990s, as teams emphasized defense and the league allowed hand-checking. The league stalled this decline a bit by bringing in the three-point line for three seasons starting in 1994-95, but average scoring dipped all the way to 105.0 points per 100 possessions in 1997-98, the year before the lockout season. It jumped from the lockout low (102.2 points per 100 possessions) back up to 104.1 in the first post-lockout season, but it dropped again to 103.1 in 2000-01 and stayed around that level until the league killed hand-checking after the 2004 season.

In other words, the lockout-shortened season is an outlier, but it’s an outlier within a general trend of poor scoring. Still, scoring, shooting percentages and pace all reached their nadir during that season, and that isn’t a coincidence. Play will decline if you give players less rest and less time to get to know their teammates’ on-court tendencies and preferences.

And this doesn’t even get into issues of increased randomness in playoff outcomes and the larger potential impact of any injury. The 1998-99 season was, after all, one of the few in which an eighth-seeded team (the Knicks) upset a top seed (the Heat) in the first round. The more games you play, the better chance you have of seeing the true greats of the league rise to the top. This is why the NFL playoffs are unpredictable (what can 16 games really tell us?), and why Major League Baseball’s 162-game marathon guarantees only the very best will reach the postseason. (What happens in October is a different matter.)

This is not an argument that an 82-game season should be set in stone, or that a 50-game season is a bad idea on its own. Lots of international leagues play far shorter seasons than the NBA, and people like them just fine. There is a discussion to be had about reducing the length of the NBA season, though it’s a discussion that belongs in a fake world in which the league and its owners will actually entertain the idea. It is an argument against squeezing 50 games into three months. It might not be as bad as missing an entire season, but it’s bad enough that each side (and the fans) should view it as its own separate nightmarish scenario.