Too bad the Bulls are trash, otherwise I'd be more into the NBA
Same here!
Outside of North America, they'd be in serious danger of being relegated this season.
Mike
They deserve to be relegated
That ship has sailed, now that G-League teams have affiliations like you have for MLB and the NHL. Would be interesting to see teams like the Cavs, Bulls, and Knicks be relegated to the G-League. Only issue is that some G-League teams share an arena or play in the exact same city as their parent, and the arenas are too small. It would work in the case of the Long Island Nets (Nassau Coliseum, though downsized, is adequate and far enough away from MSG and Barclays to be viable), but in the case of the OKC Blue, they play right across the street from Chesapeake at Cox Convention Center, so having 2 NBA teams in OKC is a little much.
I've mentioned in interesting and engaging local 'sports bar' conversations here over the past few years that should the NCAA ever implode - and yes, there have been events in recent years that if followed to their logical conclusions would result in such an implosion - that whatever succeeds it, such as a conversion to an overseas private sports club model, could well become a part of a pro-rel federation with the current NBA being its 'first division'. Imagining current D-1 college teams being converted into private sports clubs with no upper age limits, completely separated from the academics side of their legacy universities, with other new clubs emerging and so forth.
IMHO, basketball would be an ideal sport for such an organizational model.
BTW, under my model, the current 30-team NBA would remain as it is now, with the playoffs continuing as they are now (top eight teams in each conference in a seeded bracket) and the teams that are in last place in each conference plus a wild card (second from bottom team with the worse record) at the end of each season being relegated. For the three teams that would be promoted to replace them, the one geographically farthest east would go into the Eastern Conference, the one geographically farthest west would go to the Western Conference and the one geographically in the middle would go to the conference that lost the wild card team, where the teams would remain for their respective tenures at that level.
Under that, as of this typing, the Cleveland Cavaliers, the New York Knicks and the Phoenix Suns would all relegate if the season ended today.
Mike