Talking Sports: Long term, the NBA could benefit from a shortened season

Two future first ballot NBA hall-of-famers – Dirk Nowitzki and LeBron James – are both in favor of a shortened regular season.

The NBA has played an 82-game season since 1967, when the San Diego Rockets and Seattle Supersonics joined the league as the 11th and 12th teams. Since then, the regular-season format has never changed.

Now Nowitzki and James, among other players, are all for reducing the season to an amount of games in the mid-60s range – a slash of about 20 percent of the current slate.

Let’s be up front though: as appealing as this might sound, the league would never make this chang...