"Stern: 82-game season no longer possible"
How do I put in a link?
The key is still the playoffs, but there are problems there too; records determine seeding. And what if an old, but still clearly a playoff team, shits the bed early? In a 50-game season with back-to-back-to-backs, you can't recover from that. The smaller the sample size in the regular season, the less accurate regular-season records become.