I follow both sports religiously, all be it football a lot longer. Honestly, I don't get the same excitement and the do-or-die intensity with basketball as I do with football. Few reasons I can think of:
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Football fans live and breath with the sport. It has to do with the history of the sport, the fans, the culture, etc. If you look at the Premier League, you will never see a match that has empty seats, no matter how bad the team is doing. On the other hand, some teams in the NBA stuggle to fill even half of the arena.
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Team rivalries in the NBA are boring. The problem is that team rivalries in the NBA are driven by the players, not the teams. Again take a look the Premier League. Manchester United and Leeds are a classic matchup but since Leeds have been playing in the league one tier below the Prem, they never meet each other. Last season Leeds got promoted to the Prem and when they met each other for the first time in 16 years, even though they are extremely lob-sidded, it was still like they battled it out in the old days.
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The biggest reason is that there are way too many games in the regular season right now. 82 games in a season will result in a lot of meaningless games. The "real" NBA season for me doesn't start after the All-Star break.
All of those problems will be addressed swiftly with a very simple solution: reduce the number of games in the regular season. This will result in more meaningful games, better culture since fans will have to pay attention more and just generally, make the NBA more entertaining. Screw it, have the number of games cut in half and see how many players can keep pulling the load management bullshit before it really hurts their teams. Of course load management can still happen but a very good way to counter-measure this is too have reduced games but still happening in the same time frame that it has always been. That leaves more rest in between games.
Another thing is the Playoffs. It is the best time for basketball anywhere on the planet but I think it could benefit even more with the same principal that I applied to the regular season problem. Instead of a best of 7, let's do best of 3. I was originally thinking of straight up elimination but that's kinda hard to do since OTs exist.
I do see several drawbacks with this though. Less games meaning organizations possibly have to increase ticket prices and everything else to make up for the loss revenue. Companies also will need to pay double for ads and product placements and who knows how many companies are willing to do that. That could result in a loss of money for the league and could decrease the quality. Or the league will try to squeeze in as many ads as possible, making the current ad situation even worse.
That's my take and my rant. What do you guys think?