Why is the NBA regular season 82 games long?

The NBA season is a long one all right, lasting through the long cold winter months. In other countries, sports is generally a monolithic concept, with a seemingly never-ending run of perpetual soccer. But not in America. On our shores, the sports universe is a beautiful and harmonious symphony, with football, basketball, and baseball folding seamlessly into one another. Just as one ends, the other gets going. Sure, there are a few weeks of overlap, but in general, one sport bridges the gap left by the other two.

In recent decades, as both the NFL and MLB extend their seasons on both ends, with longer pre-and post-season periods, they have encroached on the NBA. Generally, they have left their regular seasons at the same lengths, but neither seems to be wedded to their total number of Games in the same way that the NBA is. For the NBA, 82 regular season Games is the magic number.

The problem with that number, however, is that mathematically speaking, it makes no sense.

The NBA is made up of 30 teams. There is no way to get to 82 from there. The closest you get is if each team played each team twice and their own conference twice more, but that comes to 86 games. There is no way to make it fit.

One theory is that it is a holdover from a time when the league had only 12 teams. By playing each conference rival eight times, and each inter-conference team seven times, you wound up with 82 games. The league hit upon this number in 1967-68 and has used it ever since.

There have been proposals to both raise and lower the number of games over the years, from as many as 96 games to as few as 44 games. But those numbers are simply arbitrary. And so, it seems is 82.

One school of thought is that with 82 Games you have enough of a sample size to say with some authority which teams are best, which ones “belong” so to speak in the playoffs. Fewer Games would not be as indicative, while more Games give you no real return for the wear on the players bodies.

In the end, it seems like someone, somewhere decided that 82 was the right number of games and no matter how much the league expands, that number remains the same. Tradition holds sway over math, and that seems fine.