The Inside The NBA folks seem to have no idea how a tournament works and it’s difficult to listen to them talk about this tournament.
Why is point differential such a difficult concept for them to understand?
Candace Parker’s idea is to ignore the group and just advance the top teams with the best records, out of all the groups. Then what’s the point of the groups? It’s a tournament. I don’t think she realizes that point differential would still come into play.
Chuck wants the 2 top teams in the West to advance because they have the best regular season records. Let’s ignore the fact that they couldn’t play well in the tournament.
This tournament has a lot of potential as we saw in that Kings/Warriors game. Most of those plays in the 4th quarter would’ve never occurred if this was just a regular season game.
I do believe that these games need to be independent of regular season games though.
If you’re still struggling to understand how tournaments with groups work, play some FIFA or watch any sport outside of America. It’s a really fun system.
I disagree with this. To begin, you’re either adding games to an NBA player’s season or to keep games the same, you’re shortening the NBA season.
The other thing is that what makes in-season tournaments in soccer fascinating is that teams sometimes have to make tough choices: play full out in a tournament game or save those tournament games (at risk of losing them) for the sake of being at 100% in regular season games. It seems to me that the Dubs absolutely played this game differently at the end than they would have if they weren’t worried about advancing in the tournament by winning by 12. But that’s a choice! They could have played for the win by running out the clock, but they wanted to preserve their tournament chances. Which is what makes it interesting.