Play-in tourney meets its goal
Traditionalists grumbled loudly when the NBA expanded its playoff format before the 2020-21 season by adding a four-team playin round in each conference.
The new format lowered the bar, allowing 20 of the league’s 30 teams to compete in the postseason. It introduced an added degree of randomness, setting up the possibility that a seventh seed could outplay its fellow play-in teams across the regular season and then get eliminated early with a pair of untimely losses. And the win-or-go-home games felt gimmicky at first blush, a made-for-television spectacle that seemed designed to mimic the NCAA Tournament.
Lebron James famously said last year that the NBA’S play-in designer “should be fired” because the Los Angeles Lakers had to fight their way into the playoffs with a play-in win over the Golden State Warriors, while Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban expressed reservations over the added strain on players who now had to fight for seeding down the stretch. The NBA’S decision-makers held firm, arguing that the new format’s positives outweighed its negatives because it “significantly increased the competitive incentive” for teams up and down the standings.
A year later, here’s a simple method for understanding why the format’s proponents have resoundingly won the debate: Imagine how much worse this season would be without a play-in.
Without an expanded field, the Western Conference’s eight-team field would be virtually settled with more than a month remaining in the regular season. The Lakers, who have slipped in the standings without an injured Anthony Davis, would need to make up five games on the Los Angeles Clippers with fewer than 20 games to play if they wanted to sneak in as the eighth seed.
Ditto for the New Orleans Pelicans, who have shaken off an atrocious 1-12 start to move into the West’s 10th seed. With no play-in, the Pelicans would have little reason to consider bringing back Zion Williamson, and they might not have rolled the dice to trade for CJ Mccollum at the deadline. Their season would have been effectively over by mid-november, and their impressive run over the last two months would have been a meaningless footnote.
Just like last year, when the play-in round gave Stephen Curry and the Warriors something to play for down the stretch, the Lakers have greater motivation to keep playing James rather than shutting it down. If Davis and Williamson both find their way back to the court, the West’s play-in has the potential to thrill, just like the memorable showdown between the Lakers and Warriors last May.
The new format has delivered secondary benefits higher up the West standings, where the Phoenix Suns have run away from the field. With no chance of catching the Suns, the Memphis Grizzlies, Warriors and Utah Jazz might be content to take their feet off the gas over the next month.
Instead, the play-in round has enhanced the race for the No. 2 seed, as the winner will almost certainly get to avoid tougher competition like Luka Doncic’s Mavericks and Nikola Jokic’s Denver Nuggets while enjoying a rest advantage when it hosts a weaker play-in winner such as the Minnesota Timberwolves or Clippers.
Similarly, the Mavericks and Nuggets must keep grinding so that they don’t slip into the play-in mix and face a more challenging road to the second round.
“I’m more pleased with the play-in today than I thought we would be when we were first adopting it,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said during All-star Weekend last month. “When we first spoke to our television partners and our teams, we were very specifically focused on those new games that we were creating and saying there will be some additional competition. … What I wasn’t anticipating is that we would create races to ensure that teams were within the first six slots in their conference so they could avoid the play-in.”
Parity has reigned in the Eastern Conference, where the top four seeds enter Monday separated by three games in the loss column and where the No. 5 seed Boston Celtics appear poised to make a strong run at claiming home-court advantage. Even without the play-in, the battle for seeds at the top of the East would have been engrossing and unpredictable.
Let the next round of debates begin.