Silver’s NBA In-Season Tournament Vision Not Exactly A Gold Standard
We are living in a professional sports era where any event, no matter how contrived, that can be conceived and packaged to viewers will be sold. Think match golf rounds, slam dunk contests, and Monday night’s Major League Baseball Home Run Derby.
They’re not all without some charm, just as I’m sure there will be many fans who will tune in to see who will win the latest incarnation, the NBA Cup In-Season Tournament, come November and December.
Such a bonanza has been NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s dream for many years, and he finally got it included in the new Collective Bargaining Agreement with the NBA Players Association that was signed two weeks ago. Silver seems to be enamored with soccer, which often interrupts league play to participate in extra tournaments.
Except pro basketball isn’t soccer, where the world’s best players are scattered across the globe. I’m sure there are plenty of international standouts performing overseas who could earn NBA roster spots should they so choose, but by and large, the cream of the crop resides on teams within the United States plus Toronto. You can’t have something like soccer’s UEFA Champions League in basketball—the reigning champion Denver Nuggets, whose top two players (Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray) aren’t American, would wipe the floor with the competition.
The games will probably be more evenly matched in next month’s World Cup, just as they have been in recent Olympics, because the talent is a little more spread out. Of the five individuals selected for the 2023 All-NBA First Team, only Boston’s Jayson Tatum is a Team USA member. Serbian native Jokic was a Second Team honoree while Sacramento’s Domantas Sabonis of Lithuania made the Third Team. Anyone of that caliber toiling for a European club would have been persuaded to migrate over the NBA, making a world-wide club tournament a non-event.
So Silver reached for something similar to England’s FA Cup, with a couple of exceptions. First, his tournament is only open to NBA teams, not the G-League or other minor leagues, whereas lower-level English soccer clubs are eligible for the FA Cup.
The big one is that almost all of the games—those prior to the Championship—will count towards the NBA’s regular season standings. The statistics from those contests will also be included in the season totals. FA Cup games do not count for anything other than advancement in the tournament.
For the NBA’s Group Play, which consists of a round robin within the six pools of five teams apiece, it’s not a big deal. A team like the Nets, for instance, was always going to have to face the Celtics, Raptors, Bulls, and Magic on their slate, so counting them as extra group play games won’t affect the regular season. I’m sure the league’s schedule makers will factor in the venues as well when looking at the big picture so as to not advantage/disadvantage anyone.
That won’t be the case in the first two Knockout Rounds. Though every team will end up with 82 games for Conference seeding purposes, the home/road compositions will be skewed amongst the presumably better teams. The Semifinals (which count) and Championship Game (which doesn’t) will be played at a neutral site (Las Vegas, of course).
Since there’s no way of knowing which teams will advance out of Group Play, the initial schedule releases will only include 80 games per team. The additional games for the nonqualifiers will be determined after Group Play and scheduled to coincide with Knockout Round contests. On top of that, the Quarterfinal losers will face off to get to their full allotment of 82 games.
We’ll have to see how the whole schedule is constructed to determine whether there will be further imbalances in terms of rest, travel and deviations from the expected opponent strength. Still, this seems like an unnecessary distraction from the already arduous task of getting through the season to the real playoff tournament. English Premier League teams typically play once or twice per week. They don’t have to deal with the density that creates burdens like back-to-backs and three games in four nights, sometimes with cross-country flights mixed in. Now the NBA is going to put things in flux for a made-up event?
And all this for what? Besides $$$, of course (a rising scale of prize money will be distributed to players on every team that qualifies for the Knockout Rounds, with up to $500,000 to each player on the Championship team) Why should anyone care otherwise? Will the NBA Cup winners get rings? Will banners be hoisted? Heaven forbid--a parade?
Like with the NCAA basketball tournaments, the winner won’t necessarily be the best team, but the one that got hot and stayed healthy at that particular moment. It will have no further meaning, certainly not as a predictive measure for what will transpire five and six months down the road.
Silver’s initiative will bring in more gold, but nothing more.
This tournament seems highly unnecessary and takes away from the end of the season tourney. Whereas March Madness has a large pool many of whom no one has seen before and can really elevate a player or program.