The NBA — or, more specifically, Adam Silver — has made it clear that some sort of change to the schedule would beneficial to the league. Silver has always made sure to speak very carefully, saying things like “we’re looking into options” and “everything is on the table” and all the stuff you expect out of people who want to do something, but can never take a super hard stance because there are stakeholders with whom they need to get everything cleared.
But while cutting down the 82-game schedule without any way to make up for it appears to be a third rail that Silver will not touch, the idea that appears to fascinate the commish the most is adding an extra tournament at one point or another. He’s mentioned a few different ideas, but in the latest edition of Marc Stein of the New York Times‘ newsletter, Silver discussed two in particular.
Silver made it clear, furthermore, that he had yet to make a formal proposal to Michele Roberts, the National Basketball Players Association’s executive director, about ushering in either of the concepts that league officials have been discussing behind the scenes for some time. One is an in-season tournament; the other is a play-in tournament at the end of the regular season to create additional pathways to the playoffs.
The idea of a play-in tournament for the postseason has been around for some time, and while it would be a fun addition to the end of the season, it’s not hard to see the drawbacks, namely if teams would compete super hard for the right to lose to the 1-seed. But the in-season tournament is a fantastic idea, one that the NBA should implement the first chance it can.
Silver pointed to soccer across the pond as his inspiration for this sort of thing, saying “It’s incumbent on me to constantly be looking at other organizations and seeing what it is we can do better and learn from them. In the case of European soccer, I think there is something we can learn from them.” He also went onto say the league is studying these sorts of things “intently,” and that while he can’t promise anything, “I think change is inevitable.”
All of this sounds fine, but it begs the question: What, exactly, would this sort of tournament look like? We got some details in the piece, with Stein floating an idea for a tournament that has its semifinals and finals during All-Star Weekend, citing a belief that the All-Star Game itself has “outlived its usefulness.” This would bring some stakes to the weekend, which you can argue is a good or a bad thing, but at the very least, it’d be different and potentially really fun.
The format that Stein mentions would be analogous to the F.A. Cup or the League Cup, a pair of tournament that run during the regular Premier League campaign. (If you want to nitpick, the F.A. Cup final is following the conclusion of the Premier League season, but please do not be that guy.) Both of those are gigantic — the former literally included 763 clubs are one point or another across all levels of English football in 2018-19, while 92 clubs participate in the latter — making this sort of win-or-go-home format hard to exactly replicate unless college basketball teams or G League squads get involved, and that probably cannot happen.
This is, however, where the NBA’s insistence on never getting rid of divisions and conferences could help. What if the league mixes the idea between domestic cups and the Champions League, with the latter providing the structure for the NBA to model? Divisions give the NBA a built-in structure to model for group play, meaning every team plays a home and an away game against one another. The top-two finishers from each division move on.
From there, we get to the knockout round. Prior to this season, Major League Soccer’s postseason was, surprisingly enough, top-6 from each conference, so we have a model for how to structure this. The three-seed is the worst division winner, the four-seed is the best division runner-up, and both get to host home games in the first round. Things re-seed after that, the top-2 seeds get home games in the second round, then the semifinals and finals take place at All-Star Weekend. And of course, once you get to the knockout round, all of this is single-elimination.
Doing something like this lets the NBA lop some games off of the regular season schedule, as teams play between eight (don’t get out of group play) and 12 (win it from the 3-6 seed) more games. A 70-game regular season is something Silver has mentioned he’s intrigued by in the past, and this gives the league a little bit of cushion to do that, even if it’s an imperfect measure because teams are still playing 78-82 games from October to April.
As for teams, they can approach this as either something to actively try to win (preferable!) or a way to test out other things to help them during the regular season, whether it’s change up rotations, try out different things in-game, or get a look at players that might not normally get extended time otherwise. Or they could just punt on it completely, a strategy that would assuredly be referred to as Popoviching after two games.
It might not be something that occurs any time soon, but it’s something that is easy to envision. At the bare minimum, it’d be a fun way to do something a little different, and if it doesn’t works, the league can scrap it or do something else. But if it works, it would legitimately add something different and bring some much-needed excitement to the grind that is the regular season while providing some stakes to the increasingly dull All-Star Weekend.
