- You can re-sign players that you acquired on draft night for any amount of money, but if it’s above the max, it only counts as a max contract on your cap. If the player is traded, their salary reduces to the max. This means that a superstar player gets a bonus for staying with their original team, but loses the bonus if they get moved. You can’t make them lose the bonus only if they request a trade, because then players would be encouraged to sandbag without formally requesting.
- Add an Ironman Award for the player who plays the most minutes in the regular season.
- Switch the other statistical awards, like the scoring title, to total points instead of points-per-game.
- Pay players per game that they actually play, prorated to 70 games so they can make above their original salary if they play more than that. Give them injury insurance that kicks in if they are unable to play more than 50 for legit medical reasons and compensates them to that amount.
- Make penalties for flopping, flagrant fouling, accrued technical fouls etc cumulative throughout the player’s career. So dirty players can either stop or be out of the league completely within a few seasons.
- Let the Euroleague champions, the #1 NCAA Team, a group of streetball players who win a national tournament, or the WNBA champions (gender equality / entertainment) play against each other and have the top two play against the top two NBA teams left in the Semi-Finals In-Season Tournament Final. With the same cash award available to them ($500,000 per player) if they beat the NBA teams and win the Finals.
- Make the worst team in the NBA have lesser odds of getting the #1 pick then the second, third and fourth worst teams. That would be the end of tanking.
How do they handle that though? Would that mean teams would have 6 guys on the court when one runs in and the other is running off? Or do they have to tag out like wrestling?