How about this NBA in season tournament? It’s an idea borrowed from soccer and grafted on to a North American basketball league. It's a new and unprecedented idea in basketball <does some research> Oh, the WNBA has already done it three times? Well, I'm just going to blame their lack of Canadian teams for that, rather than examine my own latent sexism.
Anyway, I would have thought hockey was the sport where an extra tournament makes the most sense. As many have pointed out, hockey playoffs are infinitely more intense than any regular season game. So artificially creating even more playoff hockey would sound like a good idea. I mean, except for the whole hockey culture-hates-change thing.
But I actually like this idea of the NBA in-season tournament, and the biggest reason is that it gives some intrigue to the NBA's neglected middle. So many teams get trapped in that Catch-22 of not good enough to contend for a title, not bad enough to draft the superstar they need to contend for a title. So the only intrigue for fans of those teams is whether they'll just miss the playoffs, or get in and get smoked in the first round.
This tournament will offer them a bit of hope, and thus, more reason to pay attention. Yes, the favourites for the in season tourney will be the same as the favourites for NBA champion. But as a single-elimination tournament (after the brief round-robin) there's some randomness thrown in. With one game to decide who goes on, there's more chance of an upset, and those good-but-not-great teams can dream of riding a hot streak to glory.
It also addresses one of the big, but rarely-mentioned aspects of modern team sports: there are a lot of teams, but not much glory to go around. If your league has thirty or so teams, you’re going to be waiting a while for a championship. Unfortunately, our ideas of what to expect from team success were set in an era when there were half as many teams. We expect to win lots of championships, when really, we can expect to see just two to three in an average lifetime. Having more titles available is one way to make it more tolerable as you wait that couple of generations between championships.
I know, lots of pundits will complain that it’s not a real title. There will be plenty of hot takes the first time a team raises an in-season tournament banner — especially if it goes to a team that’s never won a championship. There have been plenty of complaints when a team commits the sin of celebrating a win in the play-in games to get the final playoff seeds. But I don’t think there’s any danger of watering-down the importance of the overall championship — just look to European soccer to see that. And the in-season tournament will be worth something — I know those hot takes are even now looking for a way to compare it to a participation trophy, but it will be a difficult thing to win. You could make the argument that a single-game-elimination tournament has too much randomness to be a good test of merit, but that argument would invalidate March Madness, so I don’t think we’ll hear it too often. And having special courts with wild colours for the tournament, thus distracting all the hot takes, was a stroke of genius.
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