Cover for The Hybrid Season

The Hybrid Season

A Scheduling Reframe for the NBA, Its Partners, and Its Fans

An independent whitepaper proposing a structural upgrade to the NBA's regular season: what if the league reshuffled teams into intra-conference groups after the All-Star break turning February into playoff qualification and eliminating meaningless games? Written from the perspective of a developer and systems thinker, this project blends schedule logic, labor integrity, and fan narrative to reimagine late-season stakes without disrupting the 82 game model.

Sports StrategyLeague DesignCompetition StructureFan Engagement
Published: May 13, 2025
Updated: December 31, 2025
DOIRead Whitepaper

The Approach

Scott Jellen is an independent researcher working at the intersection of protocol design, rights modeling, and interoperability across digital and public systems. His work includes standards-oriented specifications, reference models, and published whitepapers that examine how incentives, governance, and infrastructure can be represented clearly and designed to scale. He is the founder of the Jellen Protocol Lab, which serves as the emerging home for this research. Flagship work includes the Universal Sports Graph (USG), a protocol-based framework spanning RFC-style specifications and a versioned reference registry.

© 2026 Scott Jellen. Licensing varies by publication.