As usual, great article today. Only one minor quibble with how you would tweak the NBA (and frankly all sports except the NFL need to fucking shorten their seasons much more than just 4 games): I can't see letting teams pick their opponents in the playoffs working for a couple of reasons. The first would be too much gamemanship going on such as a #1 picking a #2 to go against for whatever strategic reason they might come up with whether it was to show they weren't scared or they were on a roll and #2 wasn't, etc. The second reason would be somewhat related to the long season issue: for many fans (such as myself sadly these days) the seasons are way too long to get to know players and teams and thus only tune in come playoffs meaning that fans may not be able to establish their playoff 'relationships' properly given this format and thus the story line of the playoffs could be screwed up. Otherwise hard to argue with a lot of what you say and I especially appreciate you staying on the refs in an even handed manner... god I hope they fix this in the NBA at some point. I am a big Bulls fan and that Rondo foul last night and the subsequent shitty call didn't surprise me at all and, really, like the torture 'debate' these days me falling into complacency with shitty ref'ing is the saddest thing of all.