Commissioner For A Day: It's Time For A Four-Point Shot In The NBA

It is not a good practice, just as a general rule, to steal Big Ideas from widely maligned and mostly forgotten MTV stunt-programming. But people that play by the general rules or adhere to best practices or “have actual ideas of their own” seldom make history, and I was not going to spend my one hypothetical day as NBA Commissioner aiming low. I would instead be firing away at the 25-foot basket that MTV’s justly forgotten Rock N’ Jock celebrity basketball game instituted. Metaphorically, anyway. I didn’t like the idea of the 25-point shot on the 25-foot basket. It seems stilted and stupid. I went for another, much more reasonable idiotic concept suggested by those Rock N’ Jock games. I pulled up and shot my shot on the idea of adding a four-point shot to the NBA game.

Is this a good idea? Certainly not, as evidenced by the fact that people smarter than me have never seriously entertained such a thing—there are rumors about it every now and then, all of which the NBA has vigorously denied—but then I am not in the good idea business. Judge Dan McQuade invited me onto Commissioner For A Day to hear out the ideas that I wanted to see come to pass, not the ones that I necessarily thought were “good” or “feasible” or “honestly advisable if given significant thought.” And I have a lot of ideas that fit that description, as it happens.

And so it was that I made the case for the four-point shot. I will not spoil the video by telling you here whether my idea passed muster or not. I will say that the video ably illustrates both my dazzling natural standing ability and widely praised capacity for drawing straight lines, and that there is a brief cameo from Dean Cain in some archival footage. I will also add, at the risk of spoiling things further, that if Antoine Walker were considering a return to the league, he would do well to schedule it during the one glorious and stupid and blessedly brief day that I was allowed to be in charge of everything. Tomorrow, when I am no longer NBA commissioner and have to go back to my blogs, the NBA will be better off. Today, though, we’re pulling up from deep.