How to Make a New League Work.

            There has never been a better time to launch a new sports league. 

            This article stems from a disagreement that erupted among myself, John Walsh, Randy Vataha, and Rick Carlisle at a conference in February.  Walsh, Vataha and Carlisle argued that it is nearly impossible to launch a new major sports league now, because the salary costs would be prohibitive.   Each franchise would have to be backed by hundreds of millions of dollars.

            That answer is dead wrong; this is a perfect time to launch a new sports league, and I can explain why in seven words.

            A better product at a better price.  

            Look, I agree that to start a new sports league by trying to outbid the existing leagues for talent, at this time, would be a ruinous and self-destructive effort, akin to trying to drink Billy Martin under the table.  In baseball, for example. . .it takes something like $80 million, $100 million a year to pay a major league team.   If you were to start a new league the competition for talent would cause salaries to double or triple.  Let’s say you have 12 teams in your league; you need three to four billion a year to pay salaries—while you are establishing your fan base.   It’s suicide by red ink.

            But the salaries of the players are a two-edged sword for the existing leagues.   The salaries of the players make their product expensive.   The players get high salaries because the players have a lot of power.   That power makes it very difficult to fix the flaws in the product.

            Professional sports leagues, in my view, have a lot of dissatisfied customers—we all do.   There’s a lot of complaining, and it’s mostly justified.   The games are too slow.  They’re too expensive.   There’s too much showboating, and too much lackadaisical play.   The athletes are hard to relate to and hard to admire.   The fans sometimes exaggerate these things, but they’re not imagining them.   My point is that these complaints create an opportunity for a competitive league to thrive, despite the fact that it would have to begin with second-line stars. 

            If you want to start a new league, here’s the way to do it.

            1.  Choose a sport.

2.  Raise a substantial amount of money.

3.  Centralize control.

4.  Re-tool the game to get rid of the stuff that annoys the fans, and also to create an alternative vision of the game.

5.  Promote yourself as the best game in the market.

1.  Choose a sport.   Basketball is the obvious choice, for four reasons.  First, a new league has to succeed by developing a different and superior product.  While the NBA is a better game than it was a few years ago, I still believe that there are more obvious flaws in the NBA product than the other major sports. 

Second, basketball rosters are small, which limits the cost of talent somewhat.

Third, basketball has a very vibrant appeal.  Kids enjoy playing the game.   Old people enjoy watching it.  

Fourth, and most important, basketball has a large pool of players with some reputation and fan base.  One of the largest problems you would have, if you started (let’s say) a competitive baseball league, is that the press and public would ridicule the talent level.  People would say that your players couldn’t have played on their high school baseball team.   Of course, it wouldn’t be true, but the perception that these players couldn’t really play would be a serious problem.

In basketball, because college basketball players are stars, people understand that there are a lot of good players who don’t fit the NBA mold.   They have name recognition; they have credibility.    It gives you something to build on. 

2.  Raise a substantial amount of money.    My estimate is that it would take $400-$700 million, from a group of investors representing many different teams, and with some ability to raise additional funds. Finding the money would be the most difficult challenge of the new league.

You have to pay major league salaries at some level to be a major league.   You have to pay $300,000-$400,000 per player per year.   If you don’t, you’re a minor league.

And you have to compete in some of the biggest cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles.   You can round out the league with the “left out and eager” cities like Kansas City, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, but you have to go into some of the biggest cities and make a stand.

3.  Centralize control.   I’m not talking about Commissioner Landis-type power; I’m talking about a much more profound centralization of authority, not in an individual but in a company.

In order to make a new league work, you’re going to have to do things different from the existing leagues.    That’s going to kick up constant resistance from the athletes, coaches and franchise owners.  To move free of that resistance you’re going to need a clear vision of what you’re trying to do.  You can’t get that without a strong center.

Three examples.   First, if I were starting a league I would have a rule that any player who fails to hustle will be suspended for one game.   You hit a ground ball to short and don’t try to beat it out, one game suspension.   You walk up the court in a basketball game, one game suspension. 

            Part of what you’re trying to sell is the idea that this league is different and better.   How is it different and better?  Well, for one thing, we don’t tolerate not hustling.

            Obviously the teams are not going to suspend their best players for failing to hustle.   The league has to do it.   The league has to say, “This is what we are trying to accomplish; this is the product we are trying to create.   If you don’t like it, get out.” 

            Second example:  The league cannot permit franchises to fail.   You need to select very carefully the cities where you want to compete, based on reasoned criteria such as size, media, and competition.   I’m not saying that you can’t ever abandon a city if it doesn’t work, but what happens too often in startup leagues is that cities are chosen by investors, and fail because the investors make arbitrary choices.    This damages the entire league; the failure of Louisville damages Memphis and Little Rock, and often the league collapses.  You need a centralized investment structure that does not allow a franchise to collapse simply because a single investor runs out of money or patience.

Third example.  If I was starting a new league, I’d like to have uniform numbers issued by the league, with players numbered in order of their tenure. ..the player who had been on the team longest was #1, second-longest #2, etc. 

            It’s different, but there’s value simply in being different.   Being different sends a message that “we’re not trying to be a second-tier NBA here.  We’re doing our own thing.”  Half the people would like it and half the people would hate it, but you’d get fierce resistance from the teams that didn’t like it.   They’d talk about “hallowed” numbers—44 for a power hitter, or 23 for a shooting guard, etc.--and you’d have lectures from talk show hosts about how people love to associate players with uniform numbers and how you’re trashing tradition by doing this.  

            It’s a petty issue, but this is my point:  In order to establish a new league, if you’re not going to try to compete dollar for dollar for the established talent, you have to offer a different product.   You have to put as much daylight as you can between yourself and the other league.   Wherever there is an Option A and an Option B and the NBA has chosen Option A, you take Option B. 

            You’re going to get fierce resistance to those petty changes, because people like to do things the way they have always done them—and you can’t be fighting constant battles over petty issues.   You have to be able to say,  “this is the way we’re doing this”, and make it stick. 

            4.  Re-tool the game to get rid of the stuff that annoys the fans, and also to create an alternative vision of the game.

            You start by cutting the dead time out of the game.  

Second, systematically review the recent changes in the sport, and ask whether these are changes for the better from the standpoint of the fan.   If they don’t make the game better for the fans, figure out how to turn them around.   You can almost always reverse a change in the game with some very small rules change that is essentially invisible once it is in place.

Third, review all of the little arbitrary decisions that shape the game, and see if you can find some that might be done better some other way.  

These are some of the basketball rules that I would or at least might change to re-make basketball for a new league:

I probably wouldn’t use “basketball” in the name of the league.  I’d probably use “hoops” or “roundball” or one of the other street names for the game. 

I would eliminate timeouts called by teams.

Until the 1970s the only timeouts in basketball were those called by teams, and those were generally used to stabilize the team during runs or to adjust strategies.    Now there are scheduled timeouts, and the team timeouts are rarely used for those purposes.   They are generally used now to save possessions

a)  while falling out of bounds,

b)  when the ball-handler is double-teamed and can’t get off a pass,

c)  when there is a scramble for the ball and somebody claims to have possession of the ball, but with no real chance to establish clear possession of it,

d)  when a player can’t get the inbounds pass inbounds because a cheerleader is distracting him by pinching his butt.

Sorry.

Anyway, I don’t think any of that helps the game from the standpoint of the spectator, and I’d get rid of it.   If a player falls out of bounds with the ball, it’s a turnover.   Who’s got a problem with that?   When a guard picks up his dribble and is double-teamed and trapped, that’s a tense moment in the game.   Resolving that tense moment by calling a timeout is a copout.

            All sports accumulate dead time within them in the same way that all houses accumulate dust and dirt.   To freshen up the game you have to attack that dead time.  I’d have two scheduled timeouts per quarter, eight per game, plus the quarter breaks—and that’s it.

            I’d shorten the clock from 48 minutes to 40.

            Four ten-minute quarters, with scheduled timeouts after four minutes and eight minutes.

            I’m not sure I can convince you of this, but the basic mistake that the NBA has made, from which most of their other problems flow, is that they have allowed the best teams to win too often.   “Uncertainty” and “excitement”, in a sporting event, are closely related concepts.   The more certain and foreseeable an outcome is, the less interesting the game becomes.

            Increasing the number of trials allows the better team to win more often.  If a golf tournament lasted only one day, 18 holes, how often would Tiger Woods win the tournament?   Ten, 15% of the time, I’m guessing.

            If tournaments went two days, he might win 20-25% of the time; in three days, 30-35%, and, in four days, he probably wins 40 to 50% of his touraments.   If touraments lasted seven days, he would win nearly every tournament—simply because he is better than everybody else, and eventually the cream will come to the top.

            The same thing in a basketball game.   As you increase the number of possessions for each team, you increase the likelihood that the better team will win.   The NBA made five mistakes in designing their league, all five tripping over the same wire.

First, they made the clock too long, making too many possessions per game.  Second, they made the shot clock too short, making even more

possessions per game.  

            Third, they scheduled too many games, 82 in a season.

            Fourth, they made the playoff series too long, again draining more excitement out of the game.

            And fifth, they made the three-point line too deep, weakening the ability of the three-point shot to even things out.

            The cumulative effect is to make it too foreseeable who will win, thus draining excitement.   On a certain level, people know who will win—not every game, of course, not every round of the playoffs.   People know too much about who will win.   It leads to players standing around, not really playing hard.   It leads directly to showboating and not hustling, because it doesn’t really matter, the better team will win anyway. 

            As the NBA has made the wrong decisions on all of these issues, the college game has made the right decisions. I think almost everybody who goes to very many basketball games knows that the college game is a vastly better game.   But I think that most people attribute this to dollars, to the age of the athletes, or to something else.   In my opinion, the real source of the NCAA’s advantage is simply the rules.   The NBA has chosen badly in respect to all of these rules.   The NCAA has chosen well.  I would reverse all of those things, in the American Hoops Association, starting with shortening the game clock to four quarters of ten minutes each. 

            I would lengthen and vary the shot clock.

            The 24-second shot clock creates a second difficulty for the NBA game.   It over-regulates the pace of the game.  A constant pace is unnatural to basketball.   Part of the genius of the game is that the pace of play has natural variety.  It was a terrible mistake for the NBA to take that out of the game.

            Here’s what I’d do.   I’d make the shot clock, in the first quarter, 45 seconds; in the second quarter, 35 seconds; in the third, 25 seconds; and, in the fourth, 15 seconds.   Early in the game, you allow the coaches to set the pace.   As the game goes on you gradually quicken the pace until, by the fourth quarter, when one team is trying to catch up, you’re mandating a frantic up-and-down the court type of game.  

            What happens now, in the last minutes of a close game, is that one team fouls, forcing the other to shoot free throws.   The trailing team is trying to increase the number of possessions, effectively giving them more time to catch up.

            I don’t like that.   That’s stretching the clock by constantly stopping the game.   We don’t want you constantly stopping the game.   We want action, not stoppages.  

            Move the rim up just a few inches.   This was first proposed by James Naismith’s grandmother, and there are people who want it as high as twelve feet.   It has never been done because, frankly, that idea is crazy.   You’d make basketball look kind of like grenade-lobbing practice.

            My notion is that the height of the goal should be such that some players can dunk, but not everybody.   Ten-foot-four, ten-foot-six, something like that.  . .I think it helps the game.

            Allow variation in the size of the court.    In the time of Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, NBA courts were not all the same size.    They have been standardized at 94 feet by 50 feet.

            This was a mistake.   Baseball benefits enormously from having fields of differing dimensions, and, in my view, basketball would benefit even more.   My recommendation would be that courts should be 94 to 100 feet long and 50 to 54 feet wide.  

            A larger court allows for a different style of play, emphasizing different skills.   The larger the court, the more important speed becomes.   A larger court emphasizes dribbling and passing skills.

            Variation in court size allows different organizations to build their teams in different ways.  You can do that anyway, of course, but you can do more of it when you can emphasize strengths by matching them to court conditions.

            Shorten the three-point line, or allow some teams to shorten it.   The NBA three-point line is 23 feet, 9 inches.   I’d allow teams to move it in as close as 21 feet.

            Make the rim a quarter of an inch wider. 

            To offset the negative effects of the higher rim on shooting percentages.

            Limit substitutions. 

            When I first became a basketball fan college basketball teams basically started their five best players and let them play until they fouled out.   In all sports, the movement over time is toward more and more substitutions.   I would push back on that a little bit by making a rule that substitutes can enter the game (excepting injury) only during the timeout.   You start the quarter; you play four minutes.  

            Free substitution allows coaches to hide weaknesses, which is generally bad for the sport.   What sports are about, in a sense, is exposing and exploiting the other team’s weaknesses.   Free substitution allows coaches to hide things that ought to be exposed.

What I am essentially trying to do is to get the game to step out of line.  If there is a line of teams—the NBA, the top NCAA teams, the Continental Basketball Association, etc.—if there is a line and you’re playing the same game those teams are playing in the same way they’re playing it, you’re inviting comparisons between your players and the NBA players.   You can’t win that comparison.

When you change the game, you step out of line, making comparisons less direct.   You give people something to talk about, other than what’s wrong with you.

If you implemented all of these rules changes, the game would still look the same.   The scores would be about the same, the shooting percentages. ..most things would remain about the same.   But you would change the athletic values of the game just a little bit, which it is essential that you do.   When you make the courts wider, longer, and move the rim up a little bit, you make some players less valuable, and other players more. That means that some players could succeed in your league who could not succeed in the NBA—while some players who do succeed in the NBA would not be able to play in a league like this.   A big, slow NBA center probably couldn’t play in this game.  That means that it is no longer true that everybody in the NBA is better than everybody in your league.   It can’t be true, because you’re not playing the same game. 

One more thing I would want to do. . .

            Create multiple meaningful championships.   Create “leagues” within your association.   Let’s say you have 32 teams, which is ambitious for a new league, but let’s say.   Make four leagues, a pre-season tournament and a post-season tournament; you’ve got six champions a year.

            What the NBA has done, and what Major League Baseball and NCAA basketball are doing by inattention to this issue, is smothering all of the championships except one, making everybody a loser except one team.   The conference championships no longer mean anything in the NBA, which has reduced its regular season to a fight for position in the post-season. 

            This is unnecessary, and, in my view, unwise.   There are things you can do to prevent it:

            Have a pre-season as well as a post-season championship tournament.   Make the pre-season tournament one and done, the post-season tournament a series of three-game matches. 

            Put all the teams into the tournament(s), with minimal seeding advantages.    If only 20 or 40% of the teams make the post-season tournament, the regular season tends to become a fight for position in the “real” championship, the post-season championship.   But if everybody makes the post season, the regular season stands alone—it’s own race, it’s own deal.

            Take ten days off after the regular season before the post-season tournament.   Build in time to celebrate the pennant races, have championship parades, present trophies and announce awards.   Prohibit anybody associated with your league from doing anything to make news during that ten-day period, other than the awards and celebrations.  Prohibit practices until the last two days of the ten-day period.  Prohibit coaches from talking about the post-season championship until the practice sessions.

            The worst thing baseball does is to end the season on Sunday, and start the playoffs on Monday or Tuesday.  You can have a dramatic three-way pennant race, and. . .poof, it’s gone.  Nobody remembers it, because nobody has time to talk about it before the playoffs are on.

            Manipulate the symbols to magnify the regular-season championship.   Make the trophy for the pennants larger and showier than the trophies for the post-season tournament.   Make the presentation ceremony more dramatic.  Make the MVP trophies larger.   Regulate the size of the pennants that can be hung in your arenas, with the largest pennants being for the regular season.  

            Pay the largest bonuses for regular-season championship, smaller bonuses for the post-season championship.

            If you do these things, you can prevent the post-season championship from devouring all of the other championships, and make the season more satisfying to more fans.  

            I had a fifth item in the master plan here. . ..

5.  Promote yourself as the best game in the market.

Before I get into that, though, I wanted to explain why this is a great time to launch a new league.   Three reasons:

1.  The existing leagues have gotten so large and fat that they’re immobile.   They can’t make adjustments to compete, can’t move quickly and adapt.   They’re vulnerable to a smaller, lighter, quicker competitor.

2.   The media explosion is really just beginning.   The media in thirty years will be incomprehensibly bigger than it is today.   New media needs and feeds new product.

3.  American urbanization continues.   Our biggest cities—New York, Chicago, LA—are not appreciably bigger now than they were thirty years ago.   More and more other cities are growing into million-plus metropolises without sports franchises.   San Jose is bigger than San Francisco or Oakland.   Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a million-three.   We have 70 urban centers now, but we’re stuck on 30 franchises per sport.

You can’t go to the people and say “We have better players than the NBA.”  You’ll look stupid, and you’ll lose all credibility.

But what you can and should do is aggressively say to the public “The American Hoops Association:  It’s a better game.”   You run ads saying “You won’t see this in the AHA (show tape of basketball players standing around), or this (show tape of flagrant showboating), or this (show player calling timeout while falling out of bounds).  But you’ll see plenty of this (show clips of exciting AHA action.)”  

You choose aggressive slogans:

”The American Hoops Association:  We play the best game in the world.” 

“American Hoops:  Pro Basketball can be exciting.”

In other words, you put out an exciting game—and then force the NBA to deny that you have a more exciting game.  I think it will work.

It would work in baseball, too. . .same principles.   Football, I don’t know.   You’d have a big advantage in football, in that one of the nation’s premier markets is not served by the NFL.    I don’t have a hundred million to invest; I don’t know anybody who does.   I still think it could be done.