According to ESPN’s Marc Stein, the NBA season will start a little bit earlier in 2017-18:
1. League sources say there’s a strong likelihood that the start of the 2017-18 season will be moved up a week to 10 days, which is yet another measure aimed at reducing the number of back-to-backs teams face over the course of 82 games.
This is great news for two reasons:
1. Back-to-backs will be reduced, which means that players will get more rest, and be more energized each game. This is helpful for improving the overall quality of basketball played during the regular season. As Stein points out in his article, NBA teams this season play an average of 16.3 back-to-back games, down from last season’s average of 17.8. The more we can reduce that number the better.
2. It will probably mean a shorter preseason, and preseason basketball is the most boring, unnecessarily long, monotonous form of NBA basketball. Everybody wins!
