A bold idea to fix the end of the NBA regular season: Introducing Tiebreaker Day

For all of the talk about how close the standings have been throughout the 2022-23 NBA season, the final day of the regular season is looking pretty dull. All 10 Eastern Conference seeds locked officially as of Friday. The top four seeds in the Western Conference are all locked as well. There is a bit of movement possible within the next five Western Conference seeds, but it is both minimal and unlikely.  

After one of the tightest regular seasons in NBA history, all that’s really likely to be settled on Sunday is who will earn the No. 8 and No. 9 seeds in the Western Conference. In a fun twist, the New Orleans Pelicans and Minnesota Timberwolves will play each other, and if the teams above them in the standings all take care of business, the winner will take No. 8 while the loser falls to No. 9. 

These problems haven’t been confined to the regular season finale. Friday featured a number of marquee games ruined by rest: Kings vs. Lakers, Mavericks vs. Bulls, Kings vs. Warriors and Bucks vs. Grizzlies are all games that should have mattered but ultimately didn’t. The problem has grown so dire that it’s worth wondering if the NBA should even bother trying to create competitive matchups in the season’s closing days. The odds of both teams taking those games seriously are relatively slim.

So I’m going to propose a possible solution to this, and it’s a relatively simple one. The NBA’s current scheduling procedure is to release an 82-game schedule for all 30 teams during the offseason that ends on either the first or second Sunday of April. This idea would follow that approach with one major exception: the schedule for the last Sunday of the regular season would be left blank. All 30 teams would play on that final Sunday, but their opponents would be based on the standings. Priority would be given to the following matchups:

• If two teams in the top 11 of their conference standings are tied after 81 games, those two teams must play one another.
• If two teams that have been eliminated from playoff contention are tied after 81 games, those two teams must play one another.
• If two teams that have clinched spots in the top 10 in separate conferences are tied, those two teams must play one another so long as they do not have a tie in their own conference that needs to be settled first.

As you can probably tell from the headline, we would call this gimmick “tiebreaker day.” It would…