Former New York Knicks star Carmelo Anthony wants to see fireworks on Independence Day—on the hardwood.
Anthony offered a radical adjustment to the NBA calendar on his “7PM in Brooklyn” web series, suggesting that the league get with the holiday spirit in more ways than one.
“Start the league on Christmas,” Anthony proposed. “Maybe take it further a little and [go] to a week or two in July. Fourth of July is a major holiday. Game 7 [of the NBA Finals], 4th of July, I’m saying it’s about moments now.”
“Start the league on Christmas … It’s about moments now.”
Melo proposes an NBA season change to eliminate the dog days 🤔@FDSportsbook pic.twitter.com/hc1BM36Dvj
— 7PM in Brooklyn (@7PMinBrooklyn) March 29, 2025
The NBA season currently runs from October to June with each team playing 82 games. The length of the season has been called into question amidst debates about the league’s ratings and popularity, with some calling for a shorter season. That format has remained unchanged since its institution in 1967-68.
The last possible day of the 2025 NBA Finals is slated for June 22.
Anthony told co-hosts Kazeem Famuyide, Rudy Gay and Monica McNutt that the ideal season would last “65-to-68 games,” reasoning that would kill off a current format where teams are rolling out less than desirable lineups in the final stages of the regular season.
“The last 15 games, guys [are] done,” Anthony explained. “It’s teams who are completely checked out by All-Star Weekend. To have teams travel and force them to play and now the guys who’ve been here, the veteran guys, the money guys, they ain’t playing … Now it’s a fine line between your stars playing, who’s really playing for something, versus a team with the stars’ not playing, putting guys out there that’s not ready to play against guys who’s ready to go for the playoffs.”
Anthony says that fans get “real basketball” at the start of the season but things get “s****y” in the last week of January, calling that the “whack part of the season.”
McNutt countered the Christmas idea by mentioning the NFL’s invasion into the Yuletide territory, but Anthony says the league will have to “do that anyway” so it might as well be a landmark occasion.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has made some radical adjustments to the NBA calendar as is, such as the introduction of an in-season tournament. He addressed the idea of a shorter season at the 2019 NBA Board of Governors meeting, saying it could be done in the interest of “maximizing viewership.”
“I think a fair point from fans could be if ultimately the science suggests that 82 games is too many games for these players, maybe you shouldn’t have an 82-game season,” Silver said at the time, per Steve Aschburner of NBA.com. “I accept that, and that’s something we’ll continue to look at.”
