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Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

I have often wondered if professional sports in an effort to increase profits, increase the number of games in a season (MLB 162 games, NBA 82, NFL 16) plus pre-season, training camp etc. I think they may actually be decreasing their profitability because the quality of play suffers from the grueling schedules, not only sleep depravation but injuries and etc. Also, there could be a factor of over saturation; the games seem less special if they are on every day.

It would be interesting if one of the major sports leagues would experiment with a reduced schedule to test that theory ? Never happen I know.

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As a really close follower of the NBA, I can say they have been starting to show real concern with not wearing out their players, and they have incentive to take it even further. They haven't decreased the overall number of games, but they have been working really hard to minimize the number of back-to-back games, I think every team has had a decrease in back-to-backs each of the last 4 consecutive years. They also lengthened the calendar to more easily avoid scheduling games on consecutive nights.

A recent trend is "load management" where superstar players like Lebron James, Kawhi Leonard, and the Warriors, will sit out a large portion of regular-season games. The thinking is that if their teams are good enough to get to the playoffs without them playing all 82 games, so why risk an injury to your $200 million dollar player for a meaningless game instead of saving their energy for the playoffs?

This makes fans really mad because they pay for tickets to see the star players. Players I'm sure appreciate that it reduces mileage on their bodies and lets them stay fresh and avoid injuries.

Right, and now more and more we see teams that to be competitive have to have 3 superstars in order to keep from wearing out 1 or 2 stars.

11 out of 30 NBA teams had 100% home game attendance last season. 18 teams were above 95%. There's not that much margin for improvement there.

http://www.espn.com/nba/attendance/_/year/2019/sort/homePct

Edit: I can't find the numbers for courtside attendance, but it's possible that ticket income for the teams at the bottom of that list is either lower or higher than the overall % suggests, depending on how in-demand the highest priced tickets are.

Maybe but there's also a lot of ink about the drop in attendance in MLB games since the stopped looking the other way on steroids, maybe there are too many games to be able to be entertaining without drugs. Maybe NBA is on there way there, a third of the teams home games sold out seems like lots of room for improvement to me, I guess it's perspective.

Edit: Agree it's probably TV driving it. But just my perspective as Basketball fan, I would rather see 50 or 60 really great competitive games played by rested healthy and happy players than 80 games by tired players.

Oh yes, absolutely. My answer seems dismissive because I mostly follow the NBA, but in fact the relationship between the number of games, ticket prices, and factors affecting attendance is a fascinating topic.

Oh cool, I am also an NBA fan, I also think they are one of the better player leagues. If any league can work on this it is the NBA.

Does quality of play in any way matter to their income? If all the teams got say 20% better, would more people watch the sport? It's hard to say with any certainty that they would. I feel like the over-saturation argument has a lot lot more merit though.

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