bwgood77 wrote:Your advantage to missing the tourney is an easier schedule. The Cavs had their losses in the right games if they want to avoid needlessly playing tougher teams.
For me it would be nice to see the Suns make it and win it obviously, but on the other hand, if they get in, they have to likely play teams like OKC, GS, HOU and BOS.
So if the Suns, for example, get in off a tiebreaker, they may end up playing HOU and OKC instead of maybe like UTA and POR.
In the west, the playoff seeding at the end of the year will likely come down to 1 game or tiebreakers for seeding after the first few seeds.
Of course if you can get to the championship game in the cup, it's great, even if you lose...since that loss doesn't count on your record but you'd have 2 wins against good teams to help with later tie breaker purposes maybe.
That’s right. Not only is there a lack of incentive to win this tournament it’s actually detrimental to the winner and beneficial to the loser. Consider the case of the 2 leading teams in the Eastern Conference like you mentioned. The Cavs get knocked out of the NBA cup early and as a result are then scheduled to play Washington and Brooklyn. The Celtics get eliminated and are then scheduled to play Washington and Detroit. Had either team advanced, they would have had to play Orlando, Milwaukee, New York or Atlanta. Then consider the real scenario where the home court advantage throughout the playoffs comes down to one game. Home court advantage being a significant variable in the playoffs. That is one example of the real repercussions of this NBA Cup.
Last season after the 2 finalists went all out to win this tournament, both went on long losing streaks. The Pacers lost 6 out of the next 7 after the NBA cup and the Lakers went 3-10. And so you tell me, what is the incentive to win this tournament? Cash? For multi millionaires? Pride? There is more pride in a college team winning the Maui Invitational or the Alaska Shootout than an NBA team winning this cup. Adam Silver can use the full power of the NBA to sell this tournament but the truth is in the details.
Since it’s strictly a cash game and thus more important to the reserves than the starters I had a simple idea to make this NBA cup interesting. Make it a tournament for the backups on each team. The backups play most of the game but to make it interesting, let the starters play 1 quarter. But that quarter can only be the 1st 2nd or 3rd quarter. So before the game, unbeknownst to everyone beforehand each team would inform the refs which quarter their starters will play. So the game would involve some strategy while also revealing the overall strength of each team’s roster. I’m not going to get into the minutiae of how it would work, it’s just an idea that I had that seemed interesting to me.
But yeah, this tournament gets an F from me.
