Widen the court by 4 feet and make the three point line a true arc.
Four on Four.
Personal Fouls with 2 minutes or less in the game get a 15 second time runoff (from the team that is behind)
Personal Fouls with 2 minutes or less in the game, possession doesn’t change (from the team that is ahead).
If the score is tied, then both a 15 second run off and a possession doesn’t change.
Players are not allowed to have visible tattoos.
Ooh, better yet: embed color-changing LEDs in the court floor, and make shots from different regions randomly worth different point values.
Cities: Pitt, Buff, Cindy, Balt, Omaha, Vegas, Seattle, Tampa, Montreal, Vancouver, Seattle, KC, St Louis, San Diego, Anaheim, Chicago Nashville and New York
3 16 minute periods. Teams get one point for winning each period with a sudden death rule as a tiebreaker OR no tiebreakers w 3 15 minute periods but if the game finishes 1-1 or 0-0 there’s a 5 minute overtime.
Less timeouts.
Bigger court than the NBA—-today’s players are too big for the current court size.
Deliberate “hack a shack” fouls only allowed past the half court line or they become technicals
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Oh and there’s an Eastern and Western Conference: The top 7 teams from each automatically qualify; the remaining 3-4 play a single elimination tournament for the 8th spot!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Anything that makes fouling a bad thing for the entire game (instead of encouraging it towards the end – how bassackwards is that?) Perhaps the Elam ending?
Brian
Most of the responses so far are not taking the OP seriously, which is kind of disappointing, but I will.
The best thing you could do to basketball is cut down or eliminate foul shots. Foul shots slow the pace down, especially at the end of the game. It’s the #1 problem with basketball as it is currently played, in my opinion - the other problem competing for the top spot is the inconsistency of foul calls.
I rather like every idea so fart related to eliminating foul shots. Personally I would do the following, which is actually a conservative, cautious approach:
- Plus-one fouls are an automatic point, no shot taken.
- Reduce the foulout number from six to four.
- Fouls taken in the last two minutes of the half are automatically awarded, no shots taken. All personal fouls are two points, even if not shooting fouls (except shooting fouls beyond the arc, which are three.)
As to where to start our league, well, what are the biggest cities in the North American market without teams? That’s easy:
San Diego, CA
Austin, TX
Vancouver, BC
Montreal, QC
Tampa, FL
Baltimore, MD
St. Louis, MO
Pittsburgh, PA
Las Vegas, NV
Cincinnati, OH
Kansas City, MO
San Jose, CA
That’s a pretty good startup league.
Why are people suggesting Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh had the Condors and we didn’t support the team. Has the city changed?
I’m not a basketball fan, but I’d watch more if there were a height restriction. All players must be less than 5’ 8" to compete.
To be fair, the Condors folded 47 years ago, and pro basketball is a lot bigger deal now than it was then. Also, I don’t know if the fact that they left Pittsburgh for Minnesota for a year played into weak fan support once they returned.
I don’t know enough to say if the city has changed or not, but it has always seemed to me to be a good sports town, with strong support for the Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins. I think you could probably make worse choices.
Sure, football and baseball have always had great fan support. Hockey is a more recent phenomenon. When I was in my 20s, you could decide at the last minute to go to a hockey game, pay about what you’d spend to see a movie, and watch the Pens [del]get destroyed[/del] play. We’d go to games where the Pens were playing a good team just to watch the other guys. Mario turned things around.
Soccer (indoor and outdoor) has tried and failed repeatedly in Pittsburgh. I once had season tickets to the Pittsburgh Spirit (Major Indoor Soccer League). They were competitive but played to tiny crowds.
I used to go to Pitt and Duquesne basketball games (I had a source for free tickets). Regardless of the quality of the team, attendance was poor, just like it was for The Condors. Everyone I asked about this just shrugged their shoulders and said that Pittsburgh wasn’t a basketball town.
The Pittsburgh Condors folded when Richard Nixon was still President, so yeah, the city has changed. The whole of pro sports has changed; professional sports today is a vastly bigger, more profitable enterprise than it was in 1972, when even the NBA’s top franchises had attendance figures that would make you assume the team was going to move as soon as possible.
I’m not about to invest in a competitor league to the NBA, but how a sports market fared 47 years ago is not at all indicative of how it would fare today. In fact, how it fared 47 months ago might make no difference. Ownership, the stability of the franchise, has far more to do with it. You can absolutely screw up a sports franchise in any city if you are sufficiently incompetent; conversely, skilled and clever ownership has made franchises work in smaller and nontraditional markets, as evidenced by, say, the San Jose Sharks, Utah Jazz, or Oklahoma City Thunder.
It seems clear to me that he meant one series at home and one series away.
I find this intriguing and want to know more about how this might work.
I’m guessing you’re joking, but two of the most exciting, dynamic players I ever saw were Spud Webb (5’7) and Muggsy Bouges (5’3).
Muggsy was no joke as a player, holding a number of records for the Hornets (specifically for assists, steals, turnovers, and minutes played). He was a great passer and stealer, and very fast getting around on the court. I was a bit of a fan of his for a while, how could you not love a little guy in the NBA who could more than hold his own? 
Not joking. Imagine a league of short basketball players. No dunking.
The World Basketball League had a 6’ 5" (later 6’ 7") height restriction, but it only lasted a few years.
My idea stinks
Seriously, the easiest way to eliminate foul shots is to simply not have them at all, and replace them either with
- Just awarding the points automatically, or
- Assigning some other form of penalty.
I don’t think you can entirely do #2, because in some circumstances awarding points or foul shots is clearly the only appropriate thing. If a shooter is fouled with ten seconds to go making what would have been the tying bucket, it is obviously to the advantage of the fouling team to make that foul unless points are awarded. To my mind, it is a fundamental principle of the design of sport that committing a penalty or foul should never be advantageous, but basketball actually has exactly that problem at the ends of games, and foul shots break up the flow of the game in general anyway.
A foul should award the points automatically, yes, I really like that idea. 
Watching free throw shots just seems boring to me. Just have the ref blow the whistle and hold up one or two fingers to indicate the number of points, then hand off the ball to continue the game.