Chill Mode: The Solution to the NBA's Boring Regular Season

Last week, LeBron James used a term that rankled some people.

After Orlando Magic forward Tobias Harris accused him of flopping—conveniently enough, by yelling "Stop flopping!" at him—after a flurry of airy elbows that King James pretended were concrete elbows, LeBron went off. He scored 15 fourth-quarter points after the exchange, and held Harris to just one, as James's Cavs won 98-89 on the road.

"It wasn't the shoulder or the elbow, it was the words that he said that got me going," James said after the game. "I was actually in chill mode tonight, but chill mode was deactivated after that."

James later downplayed his statement, assuring the world that he was not at any point holding back or otherwise giving less than a complete effort. But anyone with eyes and a brain could deduce that James was, prior to that moment, virtuosically coasting. He'd been doing so for most of the season to that point, and his Cavs squad had seemingly followed suit. Currently winners of 13 of their last 14, Cleveland appears to be the epitome of teams with an on/off switch.

LeBron's words came to peeve people not because they were revelatory, but rather because they confirmed a long and widely-held belief about the NBA: effort level is subject to great variance. To recognize this truth, however, does not necessarily mean to pat on the back all the windy talk-show cranks who make it their jobs to scrutinize the moral integrity of physically gifted multi-millionaires.

In other words, in this instance, hating the player would be much less productive than hating the game. Chill mode is not some millionaire paid for playing a game being lazy so much as it is a reaction to a flawed system. NBA players strategically manage their effort because the league's 82-game season, in combination with the conference system and the limits of the human body, makes for a terribly long, mostly meaningless year of basketball. Chill mode, in other words, makes sense.

Think about it like this: 53 percent of the NBA makes the playoffs and most of that percentile is identified by mid-December. Knowing all that, and with the near-nightly reminder that even the most meaningless regular season game is its own exquisite punishment, motivation can be hard to find in a league that sees multiple surgeries occur every week. No salary is outrageous enough to entice players to appease on a nightly basis the demands of their bloodthirsty audience in a career that's evaluated, inordinately, by bottom lines forged in April, May, and June. Of course every NBA player wants to win. But the NBA is built to remind everyone involved both how impossible and how impractical that wish truly is.

Because of this, the shrewd NBA fan knows better than to tune into random games on random nights. The season is peppered with occasional statement games, in which perfect circumstantial storms create an emotional or mathematical context that gives both teams the unquestionable desire to win. Just being on TNT isn't enough.

My favorite game of the year, for instance, featured a beleaguered Chicago Bulls squad—beset by the various ailments of Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah's and the pain of playing for the extremely unchill Tom Thibodeau—taking on the darling Golden State Warriors on a Tuesday night in January.

The Bulls had been bad to watch for much of the month, but their tone against a team who'd been stealing their media love—with Steph Curry enjoying the kind of unimpeachable success that Rose did in his 2010-11 MVP run—clearly motivated them. Fuck the Warriors, the Bulls' bodies said from the outset, as they put one of the most efficient teams in the league on tilt with pure bravado and rugged hustle. The matchup became a spectacle of ugly, thrilling sport, with Chicago grabbing a 113-111 upset on the road when Rose hit a game-winner in overtime.

Announcers and fans call a game like this one "playoff basketball," which is another way of saying that both teams cared as much as they do in the most sentimental fan-dreams. The rest of the season is a valley of attrition and boring submission, between these staggering peaks; it cannot, practically speaking, be anything but that. Case in point: the Bulls lost to the dismal Lakers the very next day.

The brilliant highlights populating Twitter timelines and SportsCenter reruns are bursts of joy amidst the chill-mode malaise. But for the most part, the regular season is one of foregone conclusions and rote execution. For lovers of pure basketball, the long, long season is a treat. But for those of us who turn to sport for a view of the transcendent, a lean pro basketball diet is advised until springtime. After all, the honeymoon arrives at the same time every year. So until then, it's okay to stay in chill mode. They call it the regular season for a reason.