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PLAYA VISTA, Calif. -- Every day is media day in Los Angeles. When celebrities and athletes who live out of town want to broaden their public appeal, they descend on the city and its landscape of sound stages, hideaways, beachside compounds and gleaming office towers where producers, publicists and image-makers broker meetings. The cyber-razzi want to be close to their prey, so they also call southern California home.

Until quite recently, the Los Angeles Clippers lived on the far outskirts of this world. Their long slog through the wilderness has been well-documented, and now, too, has their emergence as a legitimate NBA organization.

Nobody who thinks seriously about basketball in Los Angeles dwells any longer on whether the Clippers have reversed their history, or whether it’s even possible the Clippers could ever be spoken of with the same affection as the Lakers. It’s not that these questions have been answered, it’s that posing them has gotten boring. As Clippers team president Andy Roeser is fond of saying in response to existential questions about the team, “We’ll see.”

In the meantime, the Clippers have developed into one of the league’s more interesting teams. They feature two charismatic superstars, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, each with a personalized storyline or two. They established a signature style of play -- the capacity to do that usually means a team is really good. And Los Angeles is the only big market that can decisively say the resident NBA team is the city’s most popular. If the NFL’s exodus did one thing, it was to solidify Los Angeles as the country’s biggest basketball town.

No matter how big the swell of media interest, media day isn’t the place where an NBA team can advance compelling storylines. The court at the Clippers’ practice facility was literally covered by a layer of black porch turf. Not much actually happens at media day, but it’s still the day when organizations, players and coaches lay out the campaign’s talking points. The sound bites we hear just before training camp constitute the team’s stump speech heading into fall, the familiar litany of themes to be visited and revisited over the course of the season.

Clippers coach Doc Rivers manages this messaging as well as any coach in the league, which is why it’s so easy to imagine his succeeding in Los Angeles. The Clippers have made, if not a 180, then certainly a 150. Yet Rivers is the organization’s first coach who could both communicate and project credibility to his players and the fan base. Some past coaches excelled at one task but struggled with the other, but Rivers brings the whole package.

At Clippers media day, Rivers was the first guest greeted on stage by the Clippers’ bright radio broadcaster, Brian Sieman. Soon after the hire, Rivers quickly established a tendency to use “we” when speaking about past events from the Clippers’ point of view, a pattern that was noticeable again on Monday.

“The areas where we struggled were huge. One is transition. With the athleticism we have, we should be a better transition defensive team,” Rivers said on the podium. “And then guarding the 3-point line. We were 26th or 27th in the league in 3-point defense. And in a league that shoots 3s, we have to get better at that.”

Mood and tone might be Rivers’ strongest assets as team spokesman, but he’s not careless with his words in the slightest. Rivers wants to convey that he’s taking ownership not just of the future, but also of the past. When you coach the Celtics or Lakers, associating yourself with the mystique of an organization is easy, but with the Clippers, history isn’t something people who work for the team want to be constantly reminded of.

The Clippers have had a peculiar relationship with the media over the past few seasons. They’re a team that’s thrilled fans with aerial exploits, but also repelled some of the NBA League Pass cognoscente with their moodiness.

The flash point of this tension has been Griffin, who was worshiped when he first dropped from the sky, made dunking fun again and quickly cultivated a sensibility that made him the league’s best pitchman. On the court, Griffin produced as a high-usage scorer, efficient rebounder and elite passer. There’s room for improvement mechanically and defensively, but Griffin contributed an enormous amount of offense to a team that’s won nearly two-thirds of its regular-season games over the past two years.

It’s almost impossible to believe a person who looks like Griffin and has enjoyed his on and off-court success could ever want for confidence. But Griffin is far from impenetrable -- maybe farther than many. He endured a backlash, along with the empty innuendo (the requisite rap of being soft or a fake tough guy). And by accounts from Griffin’s teammates, he often served as a whipping boy last season when one was needed.

Ask Rivers about the twists and turns in Griffin’s evolving persona in the public imagination and he probably couldn’t tell you -- and if he could, he wouldn’t. What Rivers clearly understands is that his power forward has the potential to be coached up enormously. Part of that project includes steeping Griffin in the dark arts of the Thibodeau-constructed defense. Encouraging Griffin’s continued progress with shooting sensei Bob Thate is another piece. But above all of the component parts is something more vital, if less tangible: letting Blake Griffin know he’s going to be a better basketball player two years from now than he is today.

“One guy that has stood out to me is Blake,” Rivers told the audience at media day. “Just sitting in my office up there and looking down on him and watching him work. I knew he was a worker. I didn’t know he was the worker to the extent that he’s worked this summer. He’s put in a lot of time. I’ve been impressed with his scheduling. He does a lot of stuff and nothing gets in the way of his basketball, and that shows me a great sign of maturity.”

Lots of coaches say lots of nice things about lots of players on media day, but Rivers is doing something larger here -- he’s bringing back the old Blake Griffin narrative, the one about the kid who conditions by running up sand dunes, treats his body like a temple and rides himself harder than anyone else could. Rivers, fascinated by Griffin’s ability to move the ball, opened a dialogue with Griffin about how to utilize his skill set in the pinch post, where refined big men such as Pau Gasol and Kevin Garnett prospered as both scorers and facilitators.

When Rivers talks generally about the anatomy of the Clippers, the team he describes has two superstars. Paul doesn’t require much reassurance about his role, but Griffin never really discovered his precise function in the offense under Vinny Del Negro. He got plenty of touches down on the box, but they weren’t connected to any greater system of principles, or those principles were never communicated clearly.

Rivers might have been talking to the media on Monday, but the message was targeted at his 24-year-old power forward. That message? This is your team as much as it is anyone’s, and we’re going to help you claim it.

There was a time when the Milwaukee Bucks lorded over the NBA’s Central Division as perennial contenders. In the mid-1980s, Don Nelson still had a modicum of structure in his nightly war plan (Nellie’s Bucks consistently ranked in the bottom half of the league in pace), and the Bucks ran off seven straight divisional titles between 1979 and 1986.

Sidney Moncrief was a rock in the backcourt. Out on the wing, Paul Pressey established himself as a prototype for what would become the modern-day defensive stopper. Marques Johnson joined him out there as one of the more reliable, high-percentage wings in the league. When the Bucks swapped Johnson for Terry Cummings, they adapted seamlessly, and Cummings would become a top-10 player during the latter half of the Bucks’ golden period. Alton Lister anchored a defense that was routinely in the top three.

Soon after that stretch, expressions like “small market” entered the league’s lexicon, and the NBA’s better players became empowered to be more selective about where they’d build a career. Gradually, places with cold weather and less cosmopolitan sensibilities had a harder time attracting talent. To play in these markets, stars have to accept a lower Q rating, and that represents lost dollars in today’s sports economy. All of this produces a compounding effect: the belief among players that building a winner in that city is near impossible.

The Bucks organization has always retained its reputation as one of the league’s classier outfits, but it couldn’t fight this tectonic shift. The franchise simply didn’t have enough mitigating factors to overcome it. Like their city, whose spirit has been sapped by new insurmountable economic realities, the Bucks began to fight an uphill battle.

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Since Milwaukee struggles to recruit the kind of players who can single-handedly deliver home-court advantage in the playoffs, that leaves the Bucks with two general directions to follow. They can tread water as a league average team with the hope that, with a break or two, they can add 10-12 wins to their .500 record, join the adult table and continue to build from there. The Indiana Pacers, the former employer of Bucks assistant general manager David Morway, have deployed this strategy in recent years. The Bucks' alternative is to deliberately place themselves in a position to acquire a collection of high draft picks who could morph into an elite core -- the Oklahoma City Model, now a proper noun in the NBA.

"Guys are going to say, 'I want to be a part of this because they're winning,' or you need to be a team, like Cleveland, that gets two No. 1 picks or three or four top-five picks, and a guy says, 'I see what they have,' ” Bucks general manager John Hammond said.

The treading-water strategy needs a public relations professional. The basketball intelligentsia mocks teams that seem content to chase the No. 8 seed, especially in the East (No. 8 seeds in the West are usually pretty good and generally have legitimate aspirations to finish higher). The maxim, “If you’re not contending, you’re rebuilding,” is regarded as smart thinking. Some league executives publicly adopted another neologism -- “the treadmill of mediocrity" -- to describe what many of them see as a fatal condition. A popular notion exists that nothing short of running the table with a series of mid-first-round picks as the Pacers did, a team is a long shot to contend with this blueprint, even though there's little evidence that losing ultimately leads to winning.

The more clever teams looking to improve seek to capitalize on the glitch in the league’s incentive structure. Blow it up, pick high, nail those picks (and every front-office guy believes he was born to evaluate prospects), and you’ll play in late May. Don’t you know that the market inefficiencies that come with the existence of the NBA draft were meant to be exploited? We don’t make value judgments about the ethics of tanking, because aesthetics are irrelevant. These are the rules as they’ve been designed by the league, and the job of an executive is to succeed within those confines.

Under the leadership of owner Senator Herb Kohl and Hammond (a contributor to the assembly of the Pistons’ teams of the early- to mid-'00s), the Bucks have squarely situated themselves in the survivalist camp. Their goal each offseason is to shoot for as many wins as possible. The catalog of transactions in pursuit of this goal isn’t without blemishes -- and management will own up to the Harris-Redick deal -- but that’s been the consistent tactic in Milwaukee.

The Bucks’ brass articulates its rationale behind this strategy. Part of that argument is based on principle, while the other half is the stated belief that tanking doesn’t necessarily yield better results than doing it their way.

“We're trying to say with Larry Sanders -- one of the top defenders in the league -- with Ersan [Ilyasova], with veterans like Zaza [Pachulia], Luke [Ridnour], Carlos [Delfino], with young players like O.J. [Mayo], Brandon [Knight], John [Henson], Gary [Neal], Ekpe [Udoh], and Giannis [Antetokounmpo], I know we may not win a world championship today, but I do think we can be competitive and continue to build with draft picks and cap space” Hammond said.

Critics (present company included) raised eyebrows at extending Mayo a contract of $8 million per season over three years, but the Bucks answer that they acquired one of the best talents among the free agents they could realistically target. If they overpaid by 10-15 percent, that’s just one of those variables that Milwaukee can’t control in play. Besides, it’s not as if giving a $6 million player $8 million is going to decimate their fairly roomy cap situation.

“We're not unique,” Hammond said. “Cleveland has to do the same thing. Indiana has to do the same thing. Sacramento has to do the same thing. It's also true in major league baseball. Sometimes you have to overpay for talent.”

Morway was one of the architects of Indiana’s build-on-the-go strategy. Now in Milwaukee, Morway has considered the Pacers’ success and has come to feel deeply that, even with the league’s weird incentive structure, tanking isn’t necessarily a better strategy.

“There isn’t one way to build a franchise,” Morway said. “You can build a team [by pursuing high draft picks], but there’s a lot that goes on between the concept and the execution.”

For every Oklahoma City, there’s a Charlotte and Sacramento. There’s cause for optimism in Minnesota, Cleveland and Washington, but those teams are still trying to make good on multiple high picks, and none of them have seen the postseason during their current era. The Bucks can cite their own history -- the center they chose at No. 15 in the draft (Sanders, in 2010) will likely contribute more when it’s all over than the center they drafted No. 1 (Andrew Bogut, in 2005). There was undoubtedly some bad luck involved but, for the Bucks, that’s the whole point -- there’s no certainty hitting the lottery jackpot will actually pay out in real life.

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Then there’s the case against tanking that can’t be quantified on the floor but which most small-market teams feel a need to abide by. Like Pacers owner Herb Simon, Kohl is one of his city's last great patricians. The son of Jewish immigrants, Kohl built his fortune in Milwaukee, where he was born, raised and has resided in his entire life except for a couple of years earning his MBA at Harvard. With that accumulated wealth and a dutiful sense of noblesse oblige, Kohl has been one of Milwaukee’s leading philanthropists for decades. And as a member of the United States Senate for 24 years, he literally represented Wisconsinites for a generation.

A sports owner like Kohl (and similarly Simon) who lives in an older city that has struggled to join the growth economies of the sun belt or tech corridors often sees his franchise as a public trust. The team has an accountability to the city. And part of that is delivering a competitive product, to let those making the trip to an aging arena that there’s a better than 50 percent chance they’ll see a win for the home team. Unlike so many of the newer owners who live out of town and have only a passing relationship with the cities of their teams, Kohl sees Milwaukeeans as neighbors. When you invite your neighbors over to your place, you owe them your hospitality.

“Why should I come to the games if you’re telling me you’re not trying to win?” Morway asks rhetorically.

For Kohl, playing to win every night is a common courtesy to fans, the majority of whom have elected him to the Senate on four occasions, the last time with two-thirds of the overall vote. Public trusts have to perform -- especially if they’re asking for popular support. The Pacers are, again, an appropriate case study. In Forbes’ team valuations published in January, they ranked 24th, while the Bucks were dead last. The Pacers asked from the public and received $33.5 million to address their shortfall in operating income at their home arena. Coupled with a negative public image, the fallout from the Palace brawl, the Pacers felt they couldn’t afford to tank. That’s a privilege reserved for organizations in healthy markets and/or those who have accumulated equity and good will.

The Bucks will soon need to make a hard sell to the residents of Milwaukee that they can’t survive without a new home. They play in arguably the worst facility in the league. Unlike some of the concrete palaces in Sacramento or Salt Lake City, there’s no intimate charm or deafening noise in the Bradley Center. It’s just tired. While a team can’t control the climate, economy or general mood of its city, it can offer a nice work space. The Bucks can’t do that until they build a new facility in Milwaukee, and that’s an easier sell when there’s electricity in town, the Bucks are on the verge of a series upset and Bango the Buck’s antics make him a cult hero.

The Bucks maintain that putting together a run like that without cohesiveness and that there are psychic costs when a team accepts losing as part of the program.

“To build a winning culture ... you can’t turn it on and off,” Morway says. “Players see that.”

Oklahoma City managed it, but by pulling off a rare trick. It built a unique relationship with Kevin Durant, who understood that for a few years, the organization would define success on its own terms. Building that kind of trust requires the rare player in a near-perfect situation. For most young players -- even some who project as future All-Stars -- losing can quickly become a bad habit, and that’s not a risk most teams can assume.

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At one point or another, most executives at least float the idea to their owner of starting from scratch. But for reasons ranging from civic responsibility to anecdotal evidence, Kohl and Bucks management decided some time ago that they couldn’t seriously entertain a tanking strategy. Instead, they’ll strive for respectability year in and year out. Since dynamic scorers tend to look past Milwaukee in free agency, the Bucks will focus first on building a top defense, then look to add durable perimeter scorers who can nudge their offense above the league average mark.

Some of the criticism targeting the Bucks is aimed squarely at questionable deals like trading Tobias Harris for two bumpy months with J.J. Redick and a 3-year, $15.6 million contract for reserve big man Zaza Pachulia. But the overriding sentiment is that the Bucks are foolish to do anything to compromise their future in service of winning more games in the present. Truth be told -- they might be. Unless Antetokounmpo, Henson and Knight explode, and Mayo makes a quantum leap (he’s still only 25), it’s difficult to see the path to the conference finals, and history tell us that’s even more likely if they continue to pick in the mid-first round.

Teams like Bucks who direct their management to assemble this year’s model with the highest-performing engine they can design are regarded as quixotic at best and, more times than not, myopic. Chasing the eighth seed is the ultimate act of madness because respectability is worth far less in the current structure than 60-65 losses. Does this kind of arrangement, one where NBA teams who put the best product on the floor might compromise their future, make the league stronger?

It's a wonderful time for the NBA, with young stars all over the league, an impressive collection of contenders and fascinating storylines from coast to coast. The one real downer, however, is that the game-changing talent of the 2014 draft is expected to inspire any number of teams to lose as many games as possible this season, in the name of the best possible draft pick. In this Tank Week series, ESPN.com's HoopIdea explores tanking and its effect on the NBA.

At its heart, tanking in the NBA is an issue of messed up incentives -- the league wants success but rewards failure.

Lose 65 games and you have the inside track to the best young talent at the cheapest prices. Scrap your way to 40 wins when conventional wisdom picked you in the basement and your consolation prize is a middling first-round pick.

Maddening though these contradictions may be to fans, they are especially galling to those who study incentives for a living: economists. It's almost impossible to find one who likes the NBA's current system, which was built in the name of competitive balance but has hardly been shown to deliver anything like it in any sports league in the world.

The idea is that high picks make bad teams better, but as economist Brad Humphreys explains, there’s a body of research that has found, despite popular perception, that “drafts, salary caps and revenue sharing do not have any appreciable impact on competitive balance.”

HoopIdea's motto: "Basketball is the best game ever. Now let’s make it better." In that spirit, we asked a collection of economists to tell us how things could be better. Over the rest of this week we'll be rolling out proposals to fix tanking from the likes of Joe Price, David Berri, Humphreys, Justin Trogdon, Brian Soebbing, Arup Sen and Timothy Bond.

None defends the current system, which research shows absolutely does lead to tanking. Their proposals are fascinating:

• The NBA has tweaked its lottery in the past, which may have been a mistake -- a careful study shows it once had a lottery system that evidently did not lead to tanking.
• You have heard Bill Simmons' idea for a tournament in which teams that miss the playoffs play for draft position. Some economists say that could work.
• There is a clever idea to reward bad teams but without giving them a reason to rack up late-season losses.
• What if instead of winning a better draft position with losses, you won credits you could use to bid on draft picks? There are some cool things about this, including elimination of the ugly shenanigans the Warriors used a few years ago to lose a lot with a decent team apparently to keep the pick that became Harrison Barnes.
• Teams tank because high picks are so valuable. Part of the reason they're so valuable is because the best rookies are underpaid, thanks to the rookie scale. If rookies could be paid more, however, there'd be a little less reason to tank.
• Lots of economists suggest eliminating the draft entirely. (If it's not, in fact, making bad teams good, what's the point?) Berri has a clever idea, though, about how to do that in a way that will keep hope alive in 30 markets.
• And then there's this idea: Miss the playoffs three years in a row and your GM loses his job.

It's not as if the NBA is a stranger to gay tunes. Fans across the league go nuts when arenas blare "Y.M.C.A." by the Village People. They contort themselves into the title letters, oblivious to the song's place in the pantheon of gay anthems.

On Sunday night at MTV's Video Music Awards, out gay NBA center Jason Collins will introduce yet another gay anthem at an NBA arena when Macklemore & Ryan Lewis perform their big, earnest summer single "Same Love" at Brooklyn's Barclays Center.

Collins disclosed his identity as a gay man on Apr. 29 in an article in Sports Illustrated two weeks after he concluded the season with the Washington Wizards. The 12-year NBA veteran has had a busy summer in Los Angeles working out in preparation for the upcoming season and as an ambassador for the gay community at various public events.

For years, many anticipated that the first openly gay athlete in a professional team sport would have significant crossover cultural appeal. Back in February 2007, Mark Cuban predicted that the first out gay player would have a bevy of endorsement and marketing opportunities. Collins, a Nike athlete, has been tapped by the sportswear giant for their #BeTrue campaign targeting gays and lesbians. In June, he marched in Boston's Pride parade wearing a #BeTrue t-shirt two days after throwing out the first pitch at Fenway Park to a nice reception.

Will Collins, who reportedly met with the Detroit Pistons a few weeks ago, receive a contract offer for the 2013-14 season? An informal survey of league executives at Las Vegas Summer League suggests that Collins, who remains a free agent, stands a good chance to be in uniform on opening night this fall as teams flesh out their rosters with 12th, 13th and 14th men in the weeks leading up to training camp.

"He's a September player," one front office exec said. "He's a positive locker room influence and still plays big. The league likes him."

 

• Premiering Friday in Chicago: "Lockout: The Musical," by Ben Fort and Ballerball's Jason Gallagher.
• Chris Hansen, the hedge-fund manager whose bid to bring the Kings to Seattle, contributed $100,000 to a PAC aimed at torpedoing a plan to build a new arena in Sacramento. Hansen says he regrets the decision. James Ham of Cowbell Kingdom: "Once a white knight for Seattle, Hansen now comes across as vindictive, smug and bitter. He is still holding tightly to a 'binding agreement' that was never really binding. By taking the next step and attempting to spoil Sacramento’s arena deal, he comes across as petty and small."
• The sad mystery of former Pacer and Israeli Basketball Super League legend Kenny Williams, who was deported from Israel to the United States, where he's now confronting a new series of legal problems.
• Seerat Sohi at Hardwood Paroxysm: "You learn that the whole of life is just a gigantic struggle between deciding when to be selfish and when to be unselfish. When to shoot and when to pass. When to drive the lane with reckless abandon and when to set the offense. You learn that these things are as simple as they are impossible. It takes experience, it takes a cerebral, Chris Paul-esque sense of everything that’s happening around you."
• Never seen "Space Jam" on the big screen? The E Street Cinema in Washington, just four blocks or so from the Verizon Center, has you covered on Aug. 30.
• When Jarrett Jack clowns J.R. Smith about spending $450,000 on an armored truck, Smith tweets back with, "Man stop it u spend that on clothes!"
• Interesting stuff from Ian Levy at Hickory High about the rote perceptions surrounding pot and pro basketball players.
• Roy Hibbert send thanks to the Spurs for letting him use their facility to work out.
• Metta World Peace will be playing a twin-bill comedy show on Aug. 31 at the Hollywood Improv.
• Finally getting around to reading "Nixonland," a fun, narrative, pulpy political history of the mid-60's through mid-70's. When Richard Nixon gets serious about targeting political enemies with instruments of power like the IRS and FBI, one of his early targets is longtime Democratic operative Larry O'Brien, who would later become NBA Commissioner.
• If the Warriors win big this season, could a healthy Stephen Curry emerge as an MVP threat?
• If we're in the Wireless Age, then why are we still plugging so many things in? Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is part of a group of investors funding an endeavor by Meredith Perry that wants to solve that problem with piezoelectrical technology.

Back in March, during the height of the 2013 playoff chase, the Los Angeles Clippers and Memphis Grizzlies were jockeying for the No. 3 seed in the West. The two teams already loathed one another, their feelings dating to their seven-game series in spring 2012. Things often can get stale in an NBA arena by mid-March, but when the Clippers and Grizzlies hooked up at Staples Center, the buzz was electric.

For the first quarter that night, the NBA was the product at its fullest. The appeal of the game was noted by the Clippers’ broadcast team, along press row and across Twitter. High-grade professional basketball.

The Clippers and Grizzlies are two of the league’s better teams, but neither play in a well-choreographed system that lends itself to hoops ballet. Yet in the first quarter that night, every player on the floor moved with purpose, and crisp decisions were made instantaneously. The ball popped around the floor and the game flowed freely. Oddly, there were no lead changes and the teams combined for only two fast-break possessions. Each team shot greater than 60 percent from the field, but that's not altogether unusual for a single quarter. It was something else:

Zero free throws attempted.

Time of quarter: 20 minutes.

There were no long red lights where the game came to a stop so we could watch nine guys stand around as one player goes through a rote skills challenge of hitting a standing set shot from a predetermined spot on the floor.

The mandatory timeout following the first stoppage after the 6-minute mark came inside of five minutes. The Clippers took an additional timeout a few minutes later to shuffle the deck after a string of sloppy possessions, but apart from that, the quarter zipped along. Blake Griffin was the best version of Blake Griffin, the big man who can beat you with both refined skills and brute force. Tayshaun Prince hopped into a time machine and beat the Clippers with his handle and down in the post. And after an exhilarating 20 minutes, the game was tied 24-24.
 

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An average NBA game features in the neighborhood of 43 free throw attempts -- 43 buzzkills that send our attention away from one of the greatest stages in the world toward our mobile devices, remote controls, refrigerators and toilets.

Why?

From "Cages to Jump Shots: Pro Basketball’s Early Years" by Robert W. Peterson:
 

… At first field goals counted one point and there were no foul shots; offenders were penalized by temporary removal from the game. Then free throws were introduced as penalties for fouling, including such violations as running with the ball or kicking it. Free throws were shot from 20 feet until 1894-95 when the distance was reduced to 15 feet. The rule-makers tinkered with scoring too, setting the value of a field goal at three points and penalizing fouls by awarding a point to the opponents. Finally, for the 1895-96 season, they settled on two points for a field goal, one for a successful foul shot.

Just to clarify, we stop the action more than 20 times per game because the forefathers of basketball, nearly nine decades before the birth of LeBron James, decided that free throws were a good idea during the infancy of the game, a period during which basketball was far more a recreational endeavor than a spectator event. Entertainment value was the last thing on the minds of these men as they sought to codify basketball's legal system.

More than a century later, the free throw is still central to the game. But apart from timeouts, when the game is essentially suspended for other business, is there a moment during 2 1/2 hours that generates less drama (Ollie be damned), where players demonstrate less of what separates them from us, where the formulaic casts a darker shadow over the spontaneous?

Men like James Naismith and his successor, Luther Gulick, were unquestionably smart and innovative. Basketball wouldn’t have flourished globally if not for their vision and craftsmanship of the game. They realized early on that without a proper disincentive, players would hack each other with impunity. As Peterson documented, rule-makers experimented with awarding a point to a fouled team. If a player was fouled, points were awarded directly and we moved on.

There was no "earning it at the line,” because what did the recipient’s ability to hit a set shot have to do with the intent and consequence of the foul he received? As a general principle, “earning it at the line” is not a force of good in basketball. Earning it at the line results in potentially spectacular plays disintegrating into a flying collision, some of which result in injury rather than pyrotechnics. Earning it at the line is the equivalent of intentionally pulling the plugs on the speakers just as the party is getting good.

Since basketball’s formative years, leagues have continued to dabble in new ideas surrounding the free throw. In 1950, the NBA instituted a jump ball following free throws to provide a further deterrent to fouling, an idea that was short-lived. Three-to-make-two was introduced in 1954, then eliminated in 1981.

Tradition has played a prominent role in the evolution of the game, but it hasn’t been sacrosanct. That’s a good thing, because tradition shouldn’t act as the sole source of authority, especially for a game whose innovation in rules, style, schemes, form and presentation has propelled its popularity. The 3-point shot was first introduced as an experiment during preseason games in 1978. It’s been an essential ingredient in the league’s renaissance in the past three decades -- from non-existent to arguably the most exciting regular outcome of an NBA possession.

The scourge of the free throw is a far easier problem to diagnose than to treat because there are no simple antidotes. Could we just automatically award two points to a player when he gets fouled in the act of shooting or while his team is in the penalty? One or the other? Maybe two points for a shooting foul, but only one point and possession for a non-shooting foul in the bonus?

We could, as D-League president Dan Reed recently suggested on TrueHoop TV, make every shooting foul one-and-one. That would eliminate first attempts that produce dead balls and another 30 seconds of stasis, though it might also encourage more hacking because there would be an even better chance for opponents to get the ball back at no expense.

And if we did eliminate the free throw altogether, what could we provide in its place that would give trailing teams the opportunity to close the gap during the final few minutes of a game? We could eliminate consecutive timeouts, consequently forcing the leading team to get the ball in bounds on the first attempt. If they can’t -- and we see this all the time -- that would create a change of possession in five riveting seconds as the crowd explodes over a gritty defensive stand (or goes into shock as their team turns the ball over with no time expiring on the clock, all because they couldn’t get it in!).

Free throws are an entrenched feature of the game, so it’s difficult to imagine basketball without them -- but we do have reference points like those 20 minutes in March when the ball was live 60 percent of the time, and like any great piece of visual storytelling, you couldn't take your eyes off the action because you might miss something.
 

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JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Would basketball be better with fewer (or zero) free throws? You can give us your ideas and talk with us and other fans in the following places:

• Facebook: Go to our NBA on ESPN page and talk it over
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• TrueHoop: Read our HoopIdea posts here and contribute on the conversation page
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And for the truly ambitious: Shoot a short video of yourself explaining your HoopIdea, upload it to YouTube and share the link with us on Twitter or Google+.

Thanks to Curtis Harris for his help on the historical material in the post.

Our panel of voters says LeBron will win MVP again. Tom Haberstroh thinks it might go a little differently this time.

When the Golden State Warriors closed out the Denver Nuggets in Game 6 of the first round of the playoffs this spring, the team’s post-game celebration was a testimony to its togetherness. Mark Jackson delivered one of his signature benedictions to teamwork, then gave forward Draymond Green the cue to initiate the group prayer as the team huddled tightly, arms raised like a campfire stack.

Green led the prayer with great command. His invocation thanked “father lord” for the blessings bestowed upon the team and asked that the lord continue to bless the Warriors, watch over them and allow them to bond together. Green then concluded the prayer with, “In Jesus’ name, I pray.”

Broadcasted live on national television, the unbridled expression of faith in a specific god was jarring. For anyone who's ever found himself in such a circle but who doesn't believe in that particular god -- or any god -- the experience can be uncomfortable.

Do you participate out of deference to the majority? Stay silent and meditate about something else until it's over? Quietly excuse yourself from the circle? Do you bring your uneasiness to the attention of a coach, supervisor, camp counselor but risk disrupting the cohesion the team, staff or cabin has established?

These are tough questions, especially when there's a sense these rituals are positive, team-building exercises for most. But there are also good reasons we reserve faith for private moments in a civil society. Plurality comes with a price, even if it feels right to praise a higher power at a moment of collective celebration. That's not a statement of political correctness, but a commitment to the idea that great teamwork is about inclusiveness above all else, that units function best when everyone feels like they have a stake in the mission.

Could Green make this accommodation if he was asked? I'd been wanting to find out since May.

Meeting Green in person is an altogether pleasant encounter. He's inordinately grateful for the opportunities he's enjoyed in basketball. Where there's often a chip on a second-rounder's shoulder, Green carries a humble confidence. He loves his job, loves his teammates, his coaches and even loves the chance to share those impressions with strangers and sincerely wants those strangers to feel comfortable.

Green graciously agreed to sit down and discuss the importance of vocalizing his faith in the locker room, and the implications of those declarations.