The way to lose an audience the fastest is to drag things out and the National Basketball Association (NBA) is doing just that.

The NBA playoffs for a total of about two months, i.e. almost half the length of the regular season. This is incredibly wrong for two reason.

The 82 regular-season games already have professional basketball players becoming increasingly tired, worn out and spent emotionally and physically. And to tack on this amount of time to the back end of the season is just making things worse.

Players like superstar LeBron James have already been advocates for a shortened regular and postseason. He, and others, see it as management just trying to squeeze every last penny out of them they can at the expense of players’ physical well being.

A result of the prolonged play period, teams in the running for a playoff position have begun resting players in order to give them enough energy to compete in the playoffs.

The fact the playoffs haven’t already been shortened grows increasingly confusing to me. I mean, Major League Baseball has even shortened the length of its postseason in accordance with player and fan complaints.

The second reason the length of the postseason should be shortened is it is only hurting the watchability of the playoffs.

I don’t know a single person who wants to witness a season game first-round series between two teams that ultimately will be eliminated in the next round. It isn’t entertaining, it isn’t doing anything positive for the NBA as a whole and it sure isn’t entertaining.

There are two ways in which the NBA could restructure their playoff system.

The first way is to shorten all series before the conference finals to a best of five system. This shortens the length of the series and also allows teams to advance to the conference finals faster, and that is the round in which many basketball fans begin paying much closer attention to the action.

The second potential way to restructure the NBA playoffs is simply allow fewer teams into the playoffs in the first place.

Currently, 16 teams make the postseason every year in the NBA. This is exactly half of the league. That number of teams is ludicrous, being that only five or six legitimately have a shot at winning the NBA title anyway.

Allowing eight teams (the top four from each conference) is a much more productive system to implement. It makes the regular season mean much more, makes competition more competitive and cuts the fat out of the playoffs and goes straight to the important rounds.

Basketball remains one the highest-energy sports in America. It is fast and players’ personalities get the ability to shine both on and off of the court.

However, the current structure of the NBA postseason is doing nothing other than stretching out the season, giving owners more opportunities to pull in revenue and shortening the career spans of many professional athletes.

If the NBA wants to compete with the ratings of other professional sports teams, it needs to address the postseason.