NBA will never have a night like MLB just did

Compare a dejected DeMar DeRozan after Game 82 to an ecstatic Evan Longoria after Game 162. (Reuters;AP)

As an NBA writer, I felt a twinge of envy Wednesday night as I was glued to the TV, flipping to three different baseball games that together would determine two playoff spots. The NBA could never have a season finale quite like that, even though it experimented last season with having all 30 teams play on the final day of the regular season in hopes of maximizing postseason positioning madness.

The NBA is built to provide lots of excitement, but not the kind of regular-season excitement Major League Baseball generated with its wild-card races. Some thoughts to distract from the lockout rhetoric:

• The most obvious reason is that so many teams make the NBA playoffs, and those playoffs generally unfold in a predictable way, at least in their earliest stages. There are exceptions, of course. The Grizzlies upset the top-seeded Spurs, handicapped by Manu Ginobili’s elbow injury, and few guessed the Mavericks would emerge from the crowd of very similar teams — in terms of quality — at the top of the league. The Rockets famously won the 1995 NBA title from the sixth spot in the Western Conference, but that team suffered a handful of injuries  in the regular season and reinvented itself on the fly with the Clyde Drexler-Otis Thorpe deal. They were the defending champions with the league’s best player (yes, even including the late-season comeback of Michael Jordan), and it was not a shock when they picked up their play in the postseason.

But in general, low seeds do not win in the NBA playoffs. There are no hot pitchers squeezing three starts into a seven-game series, no scorching goalies, no five-game series. Sometimes a wacky matchup can help an underdog (see Memphis’ big men abusing San Antonio’s smaller lineups), but the NBA, for better or worse, is designed to make sure the best teams advance the furthest. The drama late in the NBA’s regular season centers mostly on teams that have no chance to do any serious damage in the postseason and the race for home-court advantage, which involves a series of tiebreakers most fans find inscrutable.

The league could change this in two general ways:

1) By tweaking its playoff system in some dramatic way. Examples: Allowing fewer teams into the playoffs; holding a postseason tournament between conference bottom-feeders to determine the last couple of playoff spots (a popular suggestion recent years); using some sort of soccer-style relegation system (as my colleague Andy Glockner suggested today); or going back to a five-game first-round series that at least in theory gives lower-seeded teams a slightly better chance to pull an upset.

None of these things are likely to happen in the near future, though they are all fun to talk about.

2) By changing the salary-cap system in a way that creates parity. This is in fact why the owners claim they are fighting for a hard team-by-team salary cap. I remain unconvinced that even these sorts of draconian spending limits could tilt competitive balance significantly in a sport dominated, to some degree, by superstar players.

• I’d guess that the NBA is the league among the Big Four in the U.S. in which teams are most prone to what some might call tanking, but what I’ll call “not trying their hardest.” It’s not just that teams with the worst records have the best odds in the draft lottery, or that teams at either end of the standings are more likely to play their inexperienced guys when the games lack real meaning. Those things happen in other sports, too, even if a top NBA draft pick is more valuable than a top pick in other sports. The Phillies and Yankees certainly didn’t play their A-teams on Wednesday, and there have been lots of examples in the NBA of an elite club’s B-team playing its tail off against a lower-tier team with its playoff fate at stake. (The 2009 finale between the Cavs, having clinched the top seed, and the Sixers, jostling for position at the bottom of the conference, is just one recent example.)

And those younger players who get more floor time in April — the D-League call-ups and 10-day signings — have their NBA futures to play for, so they have plenty of incentive to try. But there are just fewer of those guys in a league with 15-man rosters that often have just 13 players. Baseball’s late-season call-up system allows teams to trot out lineups full of scrappy youngsters playing for spring training invites and future big league money.

But this might be even more central to my theory: In basketball, it’s just easier to put in a “blah” effort without anyone noticing. Baseball, at its core, is a series of static one-on-one duels between pitchers and batters, and it’s hard to loaf through one of those encounters in a way that’s not obvious. Pitchers with little at stake might experiment with their weaker pitches, but they are not going to toss batting practice meatballs to help hitters and extend an already very long game. Hitters aren’t going to blindly flail at pitches out of the strike zone as a courtesy to opposing pitchers. Hitters care deeply about their stats, and in baseball (unlike basketball) the aggressive pursuit of one’s individual numbers is almost always a good thing for that person’s team.

Football players could certainly run routes at something less than full speed or hold back a little bit on a tackle. Just watch the Pro Bowl. But doing so in a regular-season game, in which an opponent might be working hard, is a very good way for player to get himself or a teammate hurt. It’s also a way to get on the bad side of coaches and front-office guys in a league without truly guaranteed contracts.

But in basketball, you have 10 players darting around the court in a fast-moving game involving something like 90 short possessions over 48 minutes. Who beyond the coaches and the junkiest of junkies will remember that time in April when Andray Blatche broke off a play and launched an off-balance 20-footer? How many people will notice that Monta Ellis’ defensive stance is a little more upright than usual in Game 82, or that the Raptors are switching pick-and-rolls a little more than they did a week ago?

The differences in effort levels are subtle and readily forgotten, and it’s easier for basketball players to strike a wink-wink agreement with an opponent to play a bit more casually than usual. And those 10-day contract guys, with the most incentive to try really hard, might rightfully believe their ticket to the NBA lies in them scoring bundles of points at the expense of team cohesion.

This is not a shot at the NBA or its players. The 82-game season is exhausting. It’s hard to begrudge a player an easy night at the office when nothing real is at stake for him or his team. And once Game 82 is over, we get the playoffs, when everything is at stake and at least some of the second-round series are pretty evenly matched.

But barring a major systemic change, the NBA’s regular season will always lack drama compared to that of most other major sports.