Solving the NBA's stakes problem

The in-season tournament, like the play-in, is trying to make fans AND teams have a reason to care about regular season games.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Before the Race, Edgar Degas, 1882-84

The Athletic’s Shams Charania has some additional news on the in-season tournament proposed for the 2023-24 NBA season. ($)

The basics remain the same as previously understood. Qualification for the tournament will come from regular season games in October and November designated as qualifiers, a la the WNBA’s Commissioner’s Cup. The top eight teams from that subset of games will play in the single-elimination tournament in December. The teams in the title game of the tournament will end up playing 83 games on the season. It’s unclear whether that final game would count in the standings.

With an 8-team tournament, you’ll have four teams play a single game, two teams play two games and two teams play three games. It’ll be interesting to see how the NBA designs flexibility into the schedule. Say the Mavericks and Grizzlies meet in the semifinals of the tournament. Does that game replace a Mavericks-Grizzlies game later in the season? Or is there a chance that the teams play five times in the regular season and the Mavericks get only one game against, say, the Heat? This is a logistic issue there are multiple ways to address; it’ll be interesting to see which way the NBA goes knowing that selling tickets to games is a big priority, and having schedules known in advance is amenable to that.

What continues to strike me about the NBA’s in-season tournament idea is that the NBA has a significant problem with stakes in the regular season, and now has multiple efforts to solve that problem.