One of the talking points of the first week of the NBA season has been about whether the league is good enough as an entertainment product, with much of the focus being on the Boston Celtics and the style of play they’ve adopted and popularized that sees them take an outrageous number of three-pointers.
That’s led to people wondering if the league needs to make rule changes, from pushing back the three-point line, eliminating corner threes, or changing the point values from 2s and 3s to 3s and 4s in order to make the math advantage less. The argument is, the NBA is an entertainment business first and foremost, with most of their revenue coming from TV money. If the product that yields the best results (which is what the teams are focused on) isn’t fun to watch, they need to adapt the rules.
Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla has apparently heard that argument, and has some different ideas on what rule changes the league should look into. On a recent appearance on Zolak & Bertrand on 98.5 The Sports Hub in Boston, Mazzulla made an impassioned plea for the NBA to “bring back fighting.”
Joe Mazzulla has a few interesting rule change ideas for the NBA… he wants the league to add a power play, and to bring back fighting
@ZoandBertrand pic.twitter.com/6czizVLe33
— Celtics on NBC Sports Boston (@NBCSCeltics) October 29, 2024
“The biggest thing that we rob people of from an entertainment standpoint is we can’t fight anymore,” Mazzulla said. “We should just bring back fighting. You want to talk about robbing the league of entertainment, what’s more entertaining than a scuffle? How come in baseball they’re allowed to clear the benches? How come in hockey they’re allowed to — I just don’t get why some sports are allowed to clear the benches. They have bats and weapons, we don’t, we just have a ball. The other sport has like one of the hardest surfaces and playing instruments in a puck and sticks, and we’re not allowed to throw down a little bit.”
For one, I’m not surprised that the guy with a black belt in jiu-jitsu wants to let the boys rumble a bit more. I think Mazzulla is probably making this point a bit tongue-in-cheek to try and highlight how silly the conversation has gotten, but I also think he does truly believe this and has clearly thought about this a decent bit while watching scrums happen in hockey and baseball. There’s no world where the NBA suddenly allows guys to drop the proverbial gloves and go at it like in hockey, but I can confirm as someone in the ol’ content industry that there are few things people love watching more than when a fight happens in a game.