In theory, a professional sports league is an enterprise that allows the average person to watch some of the world’s best athletes play a competitive game. The modern NBA has made it easy to forget that.

Perhaps time will be kinder to the league’s 2025-26 season than we’re about to be, but Friday might have been the clearest possible window into just how miserable professional basketball has become with the playoffs a couple weeks away.

In one day, we saw:

• Nine games played with scoring margins of 21, 12, 40, 34, 32, 34, 32, 11 and 4 points, working out to an average margin of 24.4 points. The game that prevented a double-digit sweep: a clash between the 25-52 New Orleans Pelicans and 20-57 Sacramento Kings.

• Los Angeles Lakers star Luka Dončić getting ruled out for the remainder of the regular season, which will make him ineligible for All-NBA honors unless he can successfully use the birth of his daughter as an extenuating circumstance.

• Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo insisting to reporters he is healthy, after his team tried to quietly shut him down for the season.

Does that sound like stuff that happens in a league where the incentives are in alignment? Even the bright spot of the day, Cooper Flagg’s 50-point game, came with a tinge of wrongness considering he got there because an ejected coach’s replacement put him back in a decided game and let it rip.

As the regular season comes to a close, the NBA conversation has been dominated by breathtaking levels of tanking and the league’s “better in theory than in practice” eligibility rules for end-of-season awards. We already know Dončić, Cade Cunningham, Anthony Edwards, LeBron James and several more won’t be making the All-NBA teams, with Nikola Jokić and Victor Wembanyama a sprained finger from joining them.

Those are the stars staring down the 65-game limit. Another type of star in the NBA right now is the one not playing while his team looks at the 2026 NBA Draft class the way a cartoon dog looks at a ham.

A list of examples: Anthony Davis, Trae Young, Michael Porter Jr., Tyrese Haliburton, Ivica Zubac, Domantas Sabonis, Zach LaVine, Jaren Jackson Jr., Lauri Markkanen, Kyrie Irving and Ja Morant. Plus Antetokounmpo, apparently against his will.

We’re not saying none of those injuries are legit, but it seems undeniable a full third of the league has opted against playing competitive basketball right now. And that’s how you get eight blowouts in nine games on a Friday, with the lone competitive game between two of the worst teams in the league.

Here’s something to consider: Per Justin Kubatko of Statitudes, the month of March saw 24 games decided by at least 30 points, an all-time high. In three days of April, we have already seen six, and an Atlanta Hawks-Orlando Magic game on Wednesday was one point away from making it seven.

Maybe the playoffs will save us all (the Oklahoma City Thunder are nearly odds-on favorites to win it all at +130 at BetMGM), but the league’s structural issues are evident enough that change is clearly needed.

A change that would not help those issues is adding another two teams to the league, as the NBA appears poised to do soon.