divisions, and have each team play a full home-and-home double-round-robin against all other teams in its conference (14x4 = 56 games). In addition, play one game against every team in the other conference (15 games), alternating home games annually, except for one annual neutral-site game (more on that below). This would result in 71 games in total for each team (56 + 15), cutting the regular season down by 11 games.

Since an unbalanced home-and-away schedule creates a fairness issue, you could institute a rule requiring that each team play one of its non-conference games in a neutral site, either overseas (Mexico City, Tokyo, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Sydney, etc) or in a US/Canadian city without an NBA team (Vegas, Seattle, Montreal, Tampa, etc), resulting in 35 home games, 35 road games, and 1 neutral site game for each team annually.

I think this format change would:

1. Right-size a tedious, bloated regular-season schedule
2. Make individual regular season games a bit more meaningful
3. Reduce the need for load management, so that star players play in a higher % of games
4. Generate a more balanced strength-of-schedule, especially for conference schedules
5. Increase the NBA's international exposure
6. Give more fans in cities without an NBA franchise an opportunity to experience live NBA basketball

Thoughts?