The atmosphere is not that of a normal elimination tournament with a group stage. The excitement of the football/soccer tournaments is that all the games happen in rapid succession and teams have to adapt and face-off against surprising dark horse type teams.
The court design is a nice touch but the scheduling not being in a playoff-like mode of games every 2 days is robbing us from some real sports drama and excitement.
Well also in soccer you have teams in different leagues that don’t normally play each other. All of these teams already do. As a fan I don’t care about the outcome of these games, the players seem to however because of the check they’ll receive.
Scheduling is awful this season in general. The Knicks played 5 games in 7 days to start the season, and have already had two more back-to-backs after that.
Can they get to the actual elimination portion of the schedule first before judging the elimination portion of the schedule?
Maybe true. Hopefully the knockout round will be different. Also, it’s their first time trying this. I’m sure they will make some changes next year
Scheduling it that way sounds like a logistical nightmare, but not impossible. Get on it Adam silver
The biggest downfall is the ugly ass courts that players are getting injured on
Why call it the in-season tournament when it’s the beginning-season tournament? This thing started practically the day the NBA started their regular season… isn’t the idea to keep fans from losing interest mid-season? Why not have it around at least December instead?
I wonder why they didn’t do 5 groups of 6 teams.
Having even number of teams in groups would allow all teams in a group to have games on the same day. (Who cares about conferences?)
I think the downfall is that it’s dumb.
It needs to be a more focused event, like they need to dedicate a month for only IST games (if anything). Trying to squeeze it into regular season games makes it feel meaningless.
I don’t like the design of the courts. Less was more.
Agreed the new designs suck, except for the Jazz’s
The IST will be fine tuned as it continues over the years. For the most part I’m loving it, as you don’t typically get games this intense in November