Four on Four

JC Bradbury explains his scheme to improve the NBA:

I don’t know what it is about the game that has changed—maybe it’s my preferences that have changed—but I don’t enjoy the game very much any more. I think the problem is that there are too many people on too small of a court. Sometimes I feel that I’m watching a rugby scrum, waiting for an orange ball to pop out towards the hoop and hope that there is no whistle. My solution would be to increase the size of the court, which of course won’t happen since the court is constrained by the size of arenas. I think this would open up more passing and reduce fouling.

If you wanted to do something along these lines, the smart move would be not to make the court bigger (constrained by arena size), but to make the game four-on-four instead of five-on-five and then possibly make the court somewhat smaller (but not as much as 20 percent smaller). That would open the game up without requiring bigger arenas, and would also serve to de facto un-dilute the talent pool.

I, however, basically agree with Tyler Cowen that I like the existing NBA just fine and don't really care that others don't like it. One thing that's true of basically all of the existing American sports leagues is that if you eliminated some of the poorly-performing franchises things would be more fun for the fans of the remaining ones.