The NBA Should Replace Its All-Star Break With a Basketball World Cup

Just when the WNBA season is getting interesting, the league is taking an 18-day pause to allow star players to fly to Europe and risk suffering injuries that’ll keep them out of the playoffs.

Talk about a terrible idea.

And at the same time, a potentially great idea for the NBA.

Imagine scheduling the men’s FIBA World Cup during the NBA dog days of February …

• The NBA already recognizes its players are dead-tired and its TV ratings have been load-managed to Holey Moley levels by February.
• The NBA All-Star Game is, not coincidentally, scheduled in February, but has turned into an annual disaster that is sandwiched by what many players enjoy most – the week-long break in the schedule.
• Meanwhile, there’s little to watch sports-wise in between NFL playoff games in late January and early February, lowlighted by two weeks of lead-up to the Super Bowl.
• And there’s been so little interest in recent basketball World Cups -- partially because of confusion stemming from its previous name, the World Championship -- it's a bit embarrassing to soccer that it has to share its prestigious name. The last two basketball World Cups have been relegated to various sites in Asia, with the next one set for something called Qatar.

Let’s be honest: A basketball World Cup’s popularity is directly related to Team USA’s interest level, and that hasn’t been great of late. A US team that featured the likes of Joe Harris, Harrison Barnes, Mason Plumlee and Kemba Walker couldn’t advance past the quarter-finals in 2019, before we sent Bobby Portis and Walker Kessler – along with no reigning All-NBA first-teamers – in 2023 and lost in the semifinals.

I can fix this …

First the particulars: 24 countries, all games played in NBA cities, with each national team given a designated site for a week-long “training camp” leading into one week of round-robin contests and six days of knockout play. Total required time: 20 days.

The schedule is dictated by the NFL.

• This past January, the NBA would have completed its “first half” on Saturday, Jan. 17. The Celtics, among others, had played exactly 41 games on that date.
• Then there’d be a travel day for the participating teams and players to get to their respective camp sites and their fans to arrive to start scouting out venues for three weeks of soccer-style celebration. American sports fans would be watching that Broncos-Bills thriller.
• Camps open on Monday, Jan. 19, and run a full week, plenty of time to rest up key players, get everyone else on the same page and even schedule an exhibition or two against the local college teams. Or in Cape Verde’s case, local high school squads.
• The NFL played its conference finals on Jan. 25 this year, and the basketball World Cup round robin would start the next day, benefitting from the publicity provided by the enormously popular football playoffs.
• Twenty-four teams, separated into six pools, means half the field plays Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the other hand on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. That’s six games a day, dawn to dusk – like the opening round of the NCAA Tournament, only in this case on your TV dial, 9 a.m. tips in Athens and 9 p.m. starts in Sydney.
• Take Sunday, Feb. 1 off to watch the excitement of the Super Bowl teams arriving at their ultimate site, then identify our top 12 teams – two from each pool – and play four play-in games on Monday, quarterfinals on Tuesday, semifinals on Wednesday and Thursday, the bronze-medal game on Friday and the championship showdown on Saturday, Feb. 7, one day before the Super Bowl.
• NBA play resumes on Monday, with an extra break given to teams whose star players most likely could use it.

The schedule fits like a glove. And the event checks all the boxes left unchecked by the current All-Star fiasco.

Think about the NBA schedule from Jan.19 to Feb. 7 this past winter. Absolute boredom. The only significant occurrences in and around those dates were Jimmy Butler III getting injured and Jayson Tatum dunking during a rehab workout.

Instead, now you’d have a full two weeks of the type of emotional, hand-checking basketball so sorely lacking under the current arrangement.

Participants would be asked to play no more than seven games in three weeks, so they’d get a break they need from the NBA grind. The rest of the league would enjoy a full-blown vacation.

Now the best part …

Each national team’s host site would be decided by a draft. Hear me out on this one.

Using the final NBA playoff results and standings for non-postseason participants from the previous season, the top team would be rewarded with its choice of World Cup entrant.

If we started this tournament next January, the Knicks would get first choice. New York likely would snatch up Team USA. Perfect.

Then the Spurs take France, the Thunder take Canada … all the way down to the 24th team – Dallas in this case – getting the last team standing. (Does Mark Cuban own any Angolan bars?)

What about the other six NBA teams? They’d have had a chance to play their way into the top 24 with – imagine this – meaningful games in March and April.

Tank that!

Throw in about $10 million – or 5% off all tariffs for a year – to participating countries and you’d probably get the world to sign off on the idea.

Did I mention a basketball World Cup would be held EVERY year? A REAL world championship, held on the biggest stage, annually.

This would be so big … they’d label it The Big Jig in London, El Madness De Febrero in Brazil.

It’s a win (high TV ratings in non-Super Bowl February sports)-win (less tanking)-win (less load management)-win (creation of the world’s premier basketball tournament)-win (foreign-level party time in 24 American cities) situation.

And one more thing: NBA All-Stars (no game, just plaques) can then be selected in June based on what they did for a full season, rather than on reputation.

Or we can watch pitchers and catchers arrive at spring training. Your call.

To allow our event to stand on its own two feet, maybe we should call it the World Flute.