Basketball reasons.

I'm sure tonight's ticket prices will be adjusted accordingly %

The joke here is that the NBA has an arbitrary rule (guideline?) that is arbitrarily enforced. Whatever the case, a league that asks its best players to play nearly 100 games a year is just going to wink-wink away tonight's nonsense and hope that as many dupes as possible pay full price or don't steal a feed. The NBA bubble has been inflated with too many games and instead of doing something about that unhealthy source of cable cash, the league will expect (better yet: hope) that fans simply clap harder while continuing to pay for increasingly restrictive and expensive cable/League Pass packages and maybe fine teams that acknowledge the absurdity a little too frontally. Oh, also remember that NBA players don't use PEDs...cough...

82 games!!!

FWIW, he's a bully and a dick, but Pop gets folk hero status for at least tipping his cap to the absurdity that each and every fan of a second tier squad knows to be true: Too many games. Too many stinkers. Not enough good minutes to fill the gap. The modern NBA is like a two-hour double album by the Ramones. Yeah, there will be 2 minute stretches of awesomeness here and there, but...oi, two hours of THAT?

Here's something better with which to fill the void