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The NBA could be neutralizing the Nuggets' inherent homecourt advantage
The Denver Nuggets have historically been a very good home team, usually playing a fast pace that leaves teams exhausted at the high altitudes of the city and Pepsi Center. For that matter, Denver is one of only two NBA teams in the Mountain time zone, which can cause many complications for teams traveling from both the west and east. This has simply been part of playing the Nuggets for years — coaches and players must plan for it as they would with any part of the scouting report.
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New evidence suggests that the league may be attempting to neutralize Denver's inherent advantage with some creative scheduling. Chris Dempsey of the Denver Post has more:
A typical travel sequence can look like this: Team X plays at the Los Angeles Lakers on a Friday night. That game, a 7 p.m. local start, ends between 9:15 and 9:30. Showers. Interviews. Bus to plane. All of that takes two more hours.
So, if you're lucky, that plane takes off around midnight or soon thereafter. Then it's two hours, 15 minutes to Denver. You lose an hour. So it's after 3 a.m. when you land at Denver's airport. Another 40 minutes to get the bus to the downtown hotel, and players' heads are hitting pillows around 4 a.m. [...]
"We'll see how this new scheduling works out," [Milwaukee Bucks coach Jason] Kidd said. "But they are trying. They are attempting." [...]
Of course, it's impossible to completely eliminate those types of trips, but even a significant reduction is a big blow just the same. And this shift is taking place as the Nuggets are trying to reclaim their home mojo, trying to make Denver the house of horrors to opponents that it once was.
To be clear, Dempsey does not have incontrovertible evidence that the league is taking steps to curtail these games for Denver. Dan Feldman of ProBasketballTalk looked at the numbers and found that the Nuggets host 11 games against teams on the second game of a back-to-back this season, which is tied for sixth-fewest in the NBA but right between the poles of the most (the Hawks, Pelicans, and Bucks with 16) and the least (the Raptors with six). Nine of those 11 opponents fly in from the west, too, so it's possible that the league is only ensuring that teams don't come into Denver after especially long flights.
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We may not be able to prove that the league is changing the schedule to take away Denver's advantage. So, instead, let's carry out a thought experiment and decide if they should.
Common conceptions of fair competition say that a team should not have this advantage just because of its location. Proper homecourt advantages come from player comfort levels or the atmosphere created by fans — the idea is that they must be earned through practice and effort.
Yet a few seconds of reflection yields plenty of examples of teams that benefit from their locations in ways that have nothing to do with these factors. Think of big-market teams like the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers, which have a much better chance than others of nabbing top-tier free agents despite terrible records simply because they play in major media centers. Taking full advantage of that location requires skill (e.g. Pat Riley's maneuvering in Miami), but the same can be said of the Nuggets and the many coaches who have employed fast-paced systems to wear out opponents. Why shouldn't the Nuggets get to keep that advantage?
The easiest counterargument is that big-market teams often have to protect their own interests, too, especially during lockouts that find lesser billionaire owners making complaints over profit disparities. Money and time zones are two very different issues, but they both arise from issues of geographical location nonetheless. If the league listens to one complaint — and some outcomes of the 2011 lockout suggest that it does — then it needs to listen to the other.
The question, then, is not just if the NBA should change the schedule to take away the Nuggets' advantage. It's whether the league has any ability to ignore complaints given the precedent it's already set.
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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at efreeman_ysports@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!