Before we cannonball here into the argument over the value or the lack thereof of the NBA’s new In-Season Tournament, which started last week — the Jazz open their tournament play on Friday against the Memphis Grizzlies — let’s review two important points: The first, what is it? The second, why is the NBA putting this on?
Without dragging through every exhausting detail, the In-Season Tournament is an inaugural event over the next few weeks that will feature all 30 NBA teams participating soccer-style in group play, the league divided into three groups — A, B and C — in the East and in the West, five teams in each grouping. Those bunched teams play each other, and then the winner of each group, along with two wild-card teams (second-place finishers with the best records), face off in single-elimination knockout rounds straight through to a championship game to be played on Saturday, Dec. 9, in Las Vegas.
The Jazz are in the West’s Group A, along with the Grizz, the Trail Blazers, the Lakers, and the Suns. Group B in the West has the Nuggets, the Clippers, the Pelicans, the Mavs, and the Rockets. And so on and so on and so on. …
The teams will play two home games and two roadies in group play, and in the case of ties, a list of breakers is in place to determine qualifiers for the knockouts.
One other thing, an important one, is that all the games, except the championship game, will count in regular-season standings. So this is not a mere exhibition. Plus, the players, some of them anyway, will be motivated to play and play hard because it is said that the winners will get $500,000 each. Even for guys with outrageously bloated contracts, that might get their attention, playing games they’re already getting paid for, only now they can get paid more. More, more, more. Even players on teams that do not win the tournament will get a few stacks of cash.
That’s the first deal.
The second is, what possessed the league to create such a thing within a thing? A tournament inside a season?
That answer is easy: It’s a concession. The NBA is admitting here that its regular season is too long, too boring, too drab, too less-than-engaging for a whole lot of fans and certainly for casual consumers. Especially early on, when lovers of sports are all kinds of wrapped up in urgent cares about teams and standings in the NFL and rankings in college football.
The NBA season is too long. By a mile. Whoever thought up 82 games was thinking about one thing — making money, making more money. More, more, more.
For competitive purity, it should be 50 games, tops.
As is, many fans know the drill. They know that players know that teams know that coaches know that executives know that owners know that so many regular-season games don’t matter. That’s why load management had become such a prevalent maneuver. Regular-season games are Play-Doh in a world that is focused on sculpted marble. The playoffs are the marble. In most cases, whatever is formed in November and December will be forgotten, reshaped by April, May, June.
Hardcore basketball fans will take whatever they can get. They’ll watch NBA ball any night, every night, and find fascinating elements in them. But those folks are already hooked and netted. The NBA is looking for a bigger catch, doing what it can to lure in the casuals, to make anonymous games more appealing. And to eventually, at least, generate more money. More, more, more.
But is it cool? Maybe for some of those mentioned.
Not for everybody.
OK. Go ahead. Try something new, alongside the admission that the regular season is excessive, unnecessary, at least competitively, and on some nights a complete drag. There’s no way, though, the NBA would do the right thing and simply shorten its season. That is unacceptable because it would be too expensive. So, instead, this tournament is the confession and the concession.
The view here is that the team that lifts a trophy in Vegas in the first part of December might be a king, a king for a day, an extremely temporary one, and, more accurately, the King of Nothing. What does the winner of a tournament like this prove, really?
It underscores what is insignificant, what is fiddle-faddling around, what is empty, what is a mirage. It magnifies that the real champion arrives at the onset of summer, not of winter.
