New NBA setup offers charms, temptations

With one welcome blast of overdue affirmation Thursday, the NBA’s governors effectively will bring back two of the most alluring charms of basketball.

First, the league will approve a just-add-water regular-season playoff race, replacing what went missing when play was suspended March 11. When that ends, the league will bracket eight teams in each conference for a neutral-site playoff, re-creating some of the appeal of the never-to-be-played 2020 NCAA Tournament.

Even if that version of what is about to happen is overly abridged, and realizing that the NBA playoffs long have been tournament-style and will continue to be without single-elimination stress, the rapid-fire way that the remainder of the season will play out does intrigue.

The plan, as leaked Wednesday to ESPN, is for the owners to drag 22 teams to Orlando to play eight games apiece to complete the regular season. The 16 teams currently in playoff position, including the 76ers, would participate, as would any team within four games of that distinction. Once that miniseason yields the final standings, the eighth and ninth teams in each conference will engage in a playin round with the eight-seed beginning the best-of-three series with a 1-0 lead. An eighth-place team can avoid that annoyance by finishing with a lead of four or more games over the ninth-place outfit.

Convoluted as it might sound, the system would be instantly captivating to the many who missed Selection Sunday. Not that there will be much more than one surprise team worming into the field, but the sprint to the finish will be critical to seeding and bracketing, always a fixation of college basketball fans.

More than anything, the NBA’s plan will provide live, meaningful basketball for the first time since sports fans were asked to flatten a virus curve. And it will have some impact on the Sixers, who at 3926 sit with the sixth-best record in the East. Since Brett Brown’s team has an 8.5-game lead over seventhseeded Brooklyn and leads No., 8 Orlando by 14.5 games, it will be in the postseason and is guaranteed to avoid the play-in round. So the truncated end to the regular season technically offers the Sixers the potential for benefits but not for penalties.

The leading reason the Sixers would normally be in a panic to bump as high as they can in the standings would be to earn as many home-court postseason opportunities as possible. Why not? They are an NBA-best 29-2 at home but a disturbing 10-24 on the road.

“We get that we needed to get better on the road,” Brown said. “We were dominant at home.”

The mystery of that was overstudied all season, yet never with much of a reasonable answer beyond the Wells Fargo Center always being filled to capacity with roaring, championship-starved fans. But for health concerns, fans will not be permitted to attend the Orlando

games. So there will be no home-court advantages or road troubles. Finally, the Sixers’ true abilities will be revealed without those prisms.

Just as significant, the system will at some point provide motivation for the Sixers to tank. Yes, that again. While not even in the most humiliating days of the Sam Hinkie era did the coaches and players intentionally lose, the new arrangement could provide a temptation to manipulate the order of finish and achieve a more manageable first-round matchup.

As in any tournament, matchups rule. The Sixers are 3-1 against the Celtics, whom they would play if the current form holds. But they are 1-3 against the Heat, which presents issues, including one named Jimmy Butler. So there could be a point late in the eight-game-palooza where a well-timed loss could ensure the more favorable first-round opponent without the risk of any lost homecourt edge.

Whatever happens in the eightgame ramp-up, believe this: As the seedings grow clear toward its end, there will be league-wide chatter about teams tanking for matchups, something the NBA might not have considered when it formed the plan. Then again, Adam Silver is just savvy enough to have realized that such unexpected intrigue could have its own value before he prepared it for distribution to the owners.

Basically, it comes down to, pardon the vulgarity, trusting the process.

The most significant effect the likely July 31 resumption of the season will have on the 76ers will be that it will deliver a verdict on Brown. Without exactly saying it, Elton Brand and Josh Harris both have hinted strongly in the past two years that it is time for the Sixers to make postseason penetration beyond the second round. Brown, too, has insisted all season that he has a team built for the playoffs and capable of playing in the finals.

Had the season not resumed, the Sixers basically would have been obligated to bring back Brown for an eighth season. As it will happen, he will have the opportunity to earn that. Judgment day, he has called it. “I’ve been with you in this city for seven years,” Brown recently said. “We’ve been through naviculars and pandemics and five general managers and 100-whatever players. “And here we are.” There they are. The owners will vote Thursday. The players are expected to agree shortly after. And that means the NBA is just a couple of votes from returning, from teams scrambling for seeding and from a play-in round.

That means basketball is close, at last, to recovering many of its charms.