The NBA Finals currently take place in June, but under Koonin’s suggestion, the series would occur in August, during the less threatening MLB summer playoff chase and the NFL’s scheduling Achilles’ heel: preseason.

“A big piece is you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to enhance ratings,” Koonin said, per ESPN. “Sometimes, moving away from competition is a great way to grow ratings.

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“If King Kong is at your door, you might go out the back door, rather than go out the front and engage in a hand-to-hand fight with King Kong. Many times, at the start of the NBA season, we are competing with arguably the best Thursday Night Football game with the NBA on TNT, our marquee broadcast, and we get crushed and we wonder why.

“It’s because at the beginning of the season, there’s very little relevance for the NBA. The relevance is now. That’s when people are talking about it.”

This simple yet outside-the-box idea could ruffle the feathers of head honchos in other sports leagues. But not the NBA, which is open to Koonin’s concept.

“We certainly have no issue with reconsidering the calendar,” said Evan Wasch, the NBA’s senior vice president of strategy and analytics, who also took part in the panel. “To Steve’s point, you have to think about the other stakeholders. They need to get more comfortable with the Finals in August, rather than June, where traditionally the household viewership is a lot lower. But the flip side of that argument is there hasn’t been a lot of premium content in that window, which explains why viewership is lower. We’re open to that … there’s no magic to [the season going from] October to June.”

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The NBA reportedly was considering altering its schedule with a reseeded playoff format centered around the four conference finalists (though that plan may be eliminated before an April vote among the NBA’s Board of Governors), a midseason tournament and a play-in round for teams on the playoff bubble. Those proposals, which were being considered for the 2021-2022 NBA season, would reduce the NBA’s regular season from 82 games to 78 or 79 games.

“None of the ideas we are talking about now are new ideas,” Wasch said. “The question is not, ‘Are we just reacting to what’s happening with ratings or what’s happening with injuries or player loads or things like that?’ It is a question of, ‘Can you make a better product?’ ”

The NBA has thrived at appealing to young viewers but offseason drama surrounding its superstars moving from team to team has played a role in overshadowing the on-court product itself. Wasch views a potential schedule shift as a way to put eyes back on what takes up the majority of the NBA calendar.

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“I think the general consensus is our playoffs are really entertaining, competitive product and teams are going all out in those games and our fans are engaging in it in a way that is commensurate with that,” Wasch said. “That maybe is not the case for each one of our 1,230 regular season games.

“For us, the conversation is not just about, ‘Do you cut games for the sake of cutting games?’ It’s, ‘Is there a way to use the rest of our calendar that is not the playoff time to create a more exciting product, a more exciting game of basketball?’ ”