Sixers

The NBA In-Season Tournament Would be Intriguing if it Actually Functioned like the FA Cup or Champions League

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Nov 3rd, 2023 · 11:43 AM EDT

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The NBA’s first-ever “in-season tournament” begins Friday night with a seven-game slate.

If you have no idea what this is, the brief explanation is that it’s a “side competition” that runs from November 3rd to December 9th, featuring all 30 teams and using a group stage and knockout round format to award a trophy to the winner and $500k to each player. It’s another opportunity to win a piece of hardware and the concept is similar to foreign competitions like England’s FA Cup.

I put “side competition” in quotation marks, because they’re essentially just doubling up on the results of regular season games (via the NBA’s FAQ) –

How does the In-Season Tournament affect the regular season?

Every team will still play an 82-game regular season. All In-Season Tournament games will count toward the regular-season standings except the Championship, which will sit outside the regular season.

Got it? These are basically regular season games that will count towards the regular standings and the tournament group/bracket at the same time.

The problem with the NBA’s competition is that it only features NBA teams. What makes true side competitions like the FA Cup and Champions League exciting is that the pool of teams is expanded to lower division and foreign teams. The FA Cup, for instance, features all levels of the English pyramid, so Saturday you’ve got a match between fourth division Crewe Alexandra and third division Derby County. Eventually the Premier League teams come into play, so you have unique underdog stories where perhaps a small club goes on a run and gets a crack at Manchester City.

In the Champions League, you get the best of best on each continent, so while Arsenal might play Newcastle and Brighton in England, they’ll cross Europe to play teams from everywhere else, like France, Germany, and Italy. It’s similar to the Philadelphia Union going down to Mexico and El Salvador earlier this season.

The NBA’s tournament is that it provides none of this. There are no games against Real Madrid or Fenerbahce, nor can the G League teams be included, because they’re all NBA affiliate clubs that would likely get run off the floor. We don’t have a basketball pyramid over here that facilitates interesting lower division/upper division matchups. Plus, if the Blue Coats somehow won a game or two, what happens when they have to play their parent club, the Philadelphia 76ers? Can’t do it.

So we’re stuck with a “side competition” featuring the same teams we’re already watching every night, like the Orlando Magic and Detroit Pistons. How much intrigue can there be when you carve out a “separate” tournament with the same squads? It would be like the Premier League saying “we’re gonna do a tournament!” and then the 20 participants are already playing each other in the domestic campaign.

It doesn’t make a ton of sense.

The main purpose of this thing, presumably, is to make the regular season more exciting and less of a slog, and maybe that will still be the case. Consider, perhaps, that a rebuilding team like the Spurs, who won’t win four playoff series, instead go on a mini-run with Wemby and do something exciting. That’s a fun possibility. Or, the best teams end up squaring off in the in-season tournament final, which serves a preview of a possible 7-game NBA Finals series. That’s another thing that might make this worth it. Higher stakes in November and December with a second trophy on the line.

It does beg the question though – if the regular season is so meaningless and lame, then why not just fix the regular season? Oh yeah, because of money. Can’t lose money. So instead of truncating and easing the burden of back-to-backs, the NBA just decided to take a portion of the early calendar and have it count for both the regular season standings and a new tournament at the same time. Again, that’s why it’s hard to even consider this a separate competition, because outside of the semifinals and final taking place in Vegas, this is just a doubling up of regular season games at NBA arenas.

The best-case scenario here is that teams try a little harder in the early going because there’s something else to play for. Maybe stars that would have been load managed actually appear more in November and December. That carries us into the Christmas slate, then you’ve got 6 weeks until the All Star break and trade deadline. It’s a more staggered and regimented NBA calendar, with more to look forward to, incrementally.

But still, it’s hard to get excited for a glorified spin-off that features the same teams playing each other.