Cy,
I'd also like to point out that I'm not against making changes to the NBA regular season. When you're not too busy trying to implicate me as a racist, you make a very good point about NFL Thursday night games, even if it is a different sport with a million different variables in comparison to the debate we're having. Since the NFL adopted this full time Thursday night slate, we've seen nothing but utter garbage and it needs to go away fast.
Back to the NBA, I'm all for looking at ways to get rid of back-to-back and the 3 games in 4 night scenario's. I just feel like that doesn't automatically mean they can't play 82 games. It's going to take some outside of the box thinking. Example: The Utah Jazz are hard to schedule because they immediately request a black-out on any Sunday home date each and every year. This automatically takes 1 day out of the equation when the NBA is trying to make a home schedule for the Jazz and inevitably forces the NBA to make Utah play some condensed games in order to make up for that. I remember going to a Jazz-Suns regular season match-up in SLC in the late 90's on a Sunday afternoon. The game was a sellout, the fans were actually there on time and the atmosphere was awesome. Like the Jazz, every NBA teams requests black out dates for a myriad of reasons. The first thing the NBA should do is look at eliminating (or limiting) black out dates for all NBA teams. This would allow the NBA to make a schedule years in advance, do a better job of spacing out the games, and would afford teams the luxury of having a long enough lead time to schedule other revenue drawing events at their arenas. Basically instead of Utah tweaking their schedule and creating a back-to-back scenario so they could accommodate Disney on Ice when it comes to town, Utah would have a schedule made a few years in advance and Disney on Ice would have to pick a time to visit SLC based on that.
Doing something like that in conjunction with adding 2 or 3 week would allow the NBA to alleviate many of the problems that people are citing with the current schedule. The fact that these ideas exist and should at least be explored is why I'm not ready to throw my hands up in the air and call for the end of an 82 game regular season.