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.
It’s really poorly put together. Having regular season games double as tournament games is just fucking dumb. Easy fix. Split the season into 2 40 game halves. Tournament will be all single elimination and seeding is based on your record after the 1st 40 games. In addition to prize money winner gets an extra few home games and teams knocked in round 1 lose a home game. The groups are just stupid since the league has 32 permanent teams imo. It works in soccer cause you really never know who you will play and you get cool once in a lifetime match ups
I like the idea of using last season’s record to qualify. This prevents teams from tanking, theoretically.