The Lakers, with their marquee players Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, came through, and the Lakers-Pacers ratings have been about what you'd expect on the basis of the rest of this year's numbers: down some from last year, down a lot from two years ago and about as low as they've been in two decades.

Everybody with a pencil has a theory about why the NBA has lost its sheen -- too little scoring? Labor problems? Not enough Michael Jordan? The cyclical nature of youth fashion? -- but I come to you with solutions. All the NBA has to do to reclaim its audience is change the very nature of the way the game is played.

Here are my suggestions.

Shrink the playoffs: The NBA regular season is a joke. There are 29 teams in the league, and they play 82 games to eliminate 13 of them. Twenty games into this season, was there any doubt the Lakers, Trail Blazers, Jazz, Pacers or Heat would make the playoffs? Or that the Clippers, Warriors, Grizzlies, Bulls or Hawks wouldn't?

The whole year comes down to seeing which of the teams that win about half of their games will squeeze into the top eight of each conference. This year the Pistons and Bucks (42-40) edged the Magic (41-41) in the East, while the Kings (44-38) beat out the Mavericks (44-40) in the tougher West. Exciting.

Now the suggestion to solve this problem is usually to shorten the regular season because it's so meaningless, but the real solution is to make the regular year more important by not letting so many teams into the playoffs.

The supposed advantage of the current format, which has the best team in each conference playing the eighth best in the first round, the second against the seventh and so on, is that it supposedly gives underdog teams the chance to rise up and conquer their bettors in an exciting upset. But the thing is, it doesn't happen. Since the current playoff format began in the mid-'80s, eighth and seventh seeds have won six of 68 first-round series against first and second seeds. That's a winning percentage of .088 -- not even half as good as this year's woeful Los Angeles Clippers. A team that wins less than 9 percent of its games ought to be kicked out of the league, and the 7 and 8 seeds ought to be kicked out of the playoffs.

That leaves six teams in each conference. The top two should get a bye in the first round, giving the better teams in the league something to compete for: a week of rest at the start of the playoffs. The other four play each other (3 seed vs. 6, 4 vs. 5) in a best-of-three series.

That's right. Best of three. In the current best-of-five first-round format, a bad game here and there by a good team, or a good game by a bad team, doesn't mean that much. There's plenty of time for the favorite to overcome it and win the series. Favorites (seeds 1-4) have a first-round winning percentage of .743 in the current format. Discount the fourth seed, which has lost to the fifth seed 20 of 34 times, and the top three seeds have an .853 winning percentage. Not very competitive.

A best-of-three format in the opening round would encourage the stunning-upset factor that makes the NCAA Tournament so exciting. It also would cut about a week out of the playoffs (it really does take them two weeks to play those first five games), which isn't much, but at least a seven-week slog is better than an eight-week slog. If I really got my way, I'd say only the four division champs would make the playoffs, and we could cut straight to the semifinals. Four weeks of playoffs and it's on to summertime.

The current first round is potentially 40 games long (eight series, up to five games each). This year's lasted 34. My first round would max out at 12 games (four series, up to three games each). That would cost the league and TV networks money. But I'd argue that the increased interest in the more meaningful regular season and the streamlined playoffs would make up for it. I'd probably be wrong, but if I got my way you'd get more exciting basketball, and I'm OK with the NBA and the TV people paying a little bit for that.

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