Madness-like tournament would be an NBA win-win
It hasn’t been the greatest (or maddest) March ever, but the opening rounds of the NCAA tournament have reminded us of a necessary truth. While competitive basketball is a lot of fun, basketball in a sudden-death format is fun magnified.
All of which makes it somewhat odd that the NBA, the pinnacle of the sport, almost never takes place in circumstances where everything boils down to one decisive contest that offers zero forgiveness for failure.
America has an appetite for brackets and a thirst for single-elimination drama. The NBA needs a tournament of its own, and it needs it now.
Game sevens of playoff series are the sole instances where the thrill of having no margin for error takes hold at the pro level, but it takes a heck of a slog to get there. And by the time you do, the teams are so familiar with each other that it feels like the continuation of a marathon rather than a winner-take-all epic.
It is time for the NBA to revisit an outstanding idea that Commissioner Adam Silver first proposed in 2014 and spoke about again this month at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
Conceding that the “All-Star Game didn’t work” and was “an afterthought,” Silver discussed replacing it with either a midseason or preseason tournament. Let’s do it, Mr. Commissioner.
There is a reason March Madness grasps the nation in a way that the NBA can only dream of for its playoffs. It has nothing to do with the quality of play and everything to do with the nature of the respective formats.
The NBA playoffs are spread over two months and drag on. They are a worthy and appropriate way to crown a champion, comprehensive enough to ensure that, with few exceptions, the best team is going to end up on top.
The NCAAs are rapid fire and filled with unexpected thrills, Cinderella stories and tear-jerker near-misses. There were 12 upsets in the first two days, yet so spoiled have we become that this rendition is seen as somewhat tame.
The NBA can do its fan base a solid by tapping into the excitement. Not by tweaking the playoffs, which provide the right quantity of games to ensure huge broadcast contracts and rewards excellence over a sustained period.
What is needed is something that would be a mix of the NCAA tournament and Cup competitions popular in European soccer and basketball that run concurrently with the regular season.
For example, four or more games could be trimmed from the regular season and the Cup fitted into a nine-day spell. Some, including Silver it seems, wouldn’t mind if it replaced All-Star Weekend altogether. It could also be held in the two-week NFL-free zone just before the Super Bowl, or even just after a condensed All-Star period.
To make a bracket-friendly number of 32, two foreign national teams could be added. For a point of reference, the NBA Summer League this year is doing that by introducing Croatia and China.
Make the bracket an open draw, with no seeding or preferential treatment given to stronger teams. In fact, to encourage parity, let the team with the weaker record host in each of the first two rounds. The national teams would, of course, play at the site of whoever they were drawn against and would be reallocated if they drew each other.
The opening games could be held, like the NCAAs, on a Thursday through Sunday. Start the first (of eight) games on both Thursday and Friday at 4 ET and begin a new one each hour, so TV viewers can have something else to flick over to if a contest gets too one-sided.
Give a couple of days rest before all four quarterfinals are held on the following Wednesday, again at the site of the lower-ranked team.
From there, all four remaining clubs would head to New York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas or wherever for a Final Four-style showdown, two semifinals on a Saturday afternoon, and the championship game on Sunday night.
What’s it all for? The prize would have to be something tangible to make it interesting. How about a guaranteed spot in the playoffs, or even a guaranteed top-four seed to ensure homecourt advantage in the first round? How about a supplemental draft pick? A million bucks per man to the winning team? Make it matter.
For much of the country, it would be a chance to bust out the brackets a month early and actually feel like you know a bit about the selections you are making.
The Warriors lost to the Suns last week, which meant nothing in the context of the regular season but would mean a lot in this kind of scenario.
You won’t get tears from outgoing college seniors who might never lace them up again, but you won’t have to wait three weeks before someone hoists a trophy. You’ll get to see an NBA game before April that means more thant one more number in a win or loss column.
Despite Silver’s talk, there doesn’t seem to be much of a surge to rush this through. Goodness knows why not. In a league that has become top heavy, not everyone can win a championship, and for the vast majority it isn’t even a piein-the-sky aspiration. But every team can imagine a week during which everything goes right and it ends up a winner, based off five inspired performances helped by a smattering of luck.
The NBA would be the biggest winner of all.