I’ll start out by saying what I (and I’m sure plenty of other people) think: I do not care about the NBA in-season tournament. I get that there’s a financial incentive for the players to win (whether it’s significant enough for the stars to really care is another topic) and a trophy, but the only reason I’d care about my team going far in this tournament is that it would mean the regular season record is being positively impacted.
If people decide to make a huge deal about this, and I’m sure the NBA and the broadcast networks will, I’ll just completely tune it out. Once you emerge victorious you just go back to playing regular season games like nothing happened. I’m already cringing at the idea of a banner raising ceremony for an “in-season tournament champion”, or of people using it in arguments over players’ legacies, which would be like when people use “all-star game MVP” as a real accolade to point to. Who cares?
Now, as much as I don’t care, I think it’s a fantastic idea.
The reason it’s a good idea is because mid-season basketball is the worst product in major professional sports. I could also hear an argument for baseball due to the huge amount of games and slower pace, but I’ll explain my reasoning for basketball.
Basketball is carried by star-power, and this is the case in the NBA more than in any other sports league. Part of this is that the NBA does a great job marketing their stars, but it’s also that with just 5 players on the floor, a team’s star gets a ton of touches and can really control a game, more so than in any other sport. Now, when you combine “load management” (I’m all for player safety, but a lot of this can likely attributed to, pardon my French, players being enormous pussies) (that was very easy for me to say as I sit here on my bed in my underwear typing a blog behind a screen), with the fact that, plain and simply, not every team has a star, you get a boring product. Are you gonna watch that Wizards-Hornets game on a Thursday night in November? Are you going to watch the Clippers when Harden, Paul George, and Kawhi are all not playing? If you’re not a fan of these teams and have no action on these games and you said yes, find a trusted adult to talk to. I’m worried about you, man.
The in-season tournament is at least an attempt to make the drudgery of the middle of the regular season more immediately meaningful and interesting to players and fans alike. Good on the NBA. It’s an attempt to draw more intrigue and it’s innovative, because while this kind of thing may already be present in European soccer leagues (I genuinely don’t know), they are the first major American league to implement a mid-season event like this. As little as I may care about it, I respect and appreciate what they’re trying to do here.
Who knows? Maybe it’ll even catch on and be seen as a big deal. If the players buy in, it could be a fun new spectacle. If not, it’ll just be dressing up the same old regular season mediocrity, like putting lipstick on a pig. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.