NBA In-Season Tournament

[Split T]

A lot of people in here that just can’t seem to handle change…

I thought the IST was great…probably too small for my taste. Make it bigger, put 12 or 16 teams in the knockout. Play everyone twice in your group. Maybe you guys won’t freak out about an all-tournament team then or hanging a banner. If you don’t like it, just ignore it.

[Superbone]

A lot of people in here that just can’t seem to handle change…

I thought the IST was great…probably too small for my taste. Make it bigger, put 12 or 16 teams in the knockout. Play everyone twice in your group. Maybe you guys won’t freak out about an all-tournament team then or hanging a banner. If you don’t like it, just ignore it.

Or, we could just ignore you. I kid, I kid!!!

[TOO]

6 win winter banner is fucking stupid. NBA is making them hang that, guarantee it. NBA will do anything to legitimize it's still tournament.

Wasn't it 7 wins?

Does it really matter?

[iLLmatic]

A lot of people in here that just can’t seem to handle change…

I thought the IST was great…probably too small for my taste. Make it bigger, put 12 or 16 teams in the knockout. Play everyone twice in your group. Maybe you guys won’t freak out about an all-tournament team then or hanging a banner. If you don’t like it, just ignore it.

Make it matter. Winner gets home court throughout the playoffs or something similar. We just had to deal with ugly courts and teams running up the score.

[Wally_West]

I think it’s okay for people to enjoy the IST, while also understanding why someone might think putting up a banner for winning is silly. It’s just too new of a thing right now, maybe in a few years it’ll change to far more positive response.

I think a lot of the eye rolling and the cringe from the Lakers putting up the banner for it is because it’s pretty clear that Adam Silver is making them do it lol

[Split T]

Seems like it mostly worked

[Cap]

A lot of people in here that just can’t seem to handle change…

I thought the IST was great…probably too small for my taste. Make it bigger, put 12 or 16 teams in the knockout. Play everyone twice in your group. Maybe you guys won’t freak out about an all-tournament team then or hanging a banner. If you don’t like it, just ignore it.

Make it matter. Winner gets home court throughout the playoffs or something similar. We just had to deal with ugly courts and teams running up the score.

Won’t help. No matter what tweaks they make to the stakes, there will always be some people who think it “matters” more than others, and therein lies the source of the anger.

[Split T]

Here’s my out of the box idea that will never happen…

Get rid of all-star teams and start making All-Division 1st and 2nd teams. Those 10 guys make up a Division team that will actually play games together. 6 Divisions, play the all-division team from each division twice over the course of the season. I’d play roughly every other week, but just set it up so they’ve played all 10 games before the all-star break. Instead of the all-star game you now have a 4 team single elimination tournament.

[TOO]

A lot of people in here that just can’t seem to handle change…

I thought the IST was great…probably too small for my taste. Make it bigger, put 12 or 16 teams in the knockout. Play everyone twice in your group. Maybe you guys won’t freak out about an all-tournament team then or hanging a banner. If you don’t like it, just ignore it.

Make it matter. Winner gets home court throughout the playoffs or something similar. We just had to deal with ugly courts and teams running up the score.

Give a team that won 7 games in December home court over a team with a better record at the end of the season just screams even more that the regular season doesn't matter.

[Split T]

A lot of people in here that just can’t seem to handle change…

I thought the IST was great…probably too small for my taste. Make it bigger, put 12 or 16 teams in the knockout. Play everyone twice in your group. Maybe you guys won’t freak out about an all-tournament team then or hanging a banner. If you don’t like it, just ignore it.

Make it matter. Winner gets home court throughout the playoffs or something similar. We just had to deal with ugly courts and teams running up the score.

Give a team that won 7 games in December home court over a team with a better record at the end of the season just screams even more that the regular season doesn't matter.

Regular season not mattering will forever be a problem as long as we play 82 games. The point of the IST is to make some of the regular season games matter more…yes that would have to come at the cost of making the other regular season games matter a little less..

Here’s my thought…what if you just made the IST games count for 2 wins. So no guaranteed anything for winning, but instead of the 7-0 record the Lakers got from IST games, they’d actually be 14-0 from those games…or only count the knockout games for 2 wins…but you’d have to find a way to make the games even for teams that don’t make the knockout round.

Other thought…knockout games don’t count as far as losses go, but you add a win for every game you win…so we’d be 0-0 from the IST, but Lakers would get to add 3 wins. Change to a points system like hockey has for standings.

Another thought, winning the IST gives you an automatic tie breaker over any team, regardless of other tiebreaker outcomes. Perhaps make it the first or second tiebreaker for all teams…if you made it further in the tourney you get the tiebreaker…though I can see leaving h2h the first tie breaker.

[TOO]

Better yet, get rid of the tournament and stop messing with what works.

[Split T]

Better yet, get rid of the tournament and stop messing with what works.

Well that’s the problem…the regular season doesn’t work. Fans and players increasingly don’t care about regular season games.

[Kryptonic]

Better yet, get rid of the tournament and stop messing with what works.

Well that’s the problem…the regular season doesn’t work. Fans and players increasingly don’t care about regular season games.

It's clear the answer is reducing the season to less games is the best option, but we know it'll never happen. What's the ideal number for a season if you had to reduce it to something more manageable? I'd say reduce the season to 60 games so each team plays each other twice and tiebreakers can be by point differential. I'd probably keep the season the same number of months to allow for built in load management

[Split T]

Depends on what you mean by ideal…I agree something like 60 makes a lot of sense from a competitive standpoint, but that’s gonna cost a lot of money…meaning the nba and players are giving up a lot of tv games. You could try to compensate by having more on national tv, but not sure when you’d pull that off.

76 seems like an easy flip to make that can eliminate b2b’s at the very least and not drop the number of overall games much.

Side note, if you go to 32 teams with four 8 team divisions, you can play everyone in your division 4 times(28 games) and everyone else 2 times(48 games). That conveniently adds up to 76.

[SunsRIt]

My only question about the IST is why was it so early in the season? Wouldn’t it make more sense to put it in the dog days of the season after Christmas?

[BKinSJC]

My only question about the IST is why was it so early in the season? Wouldn’t it make more sense to put it in the dog days of the season after Christmas?

Dog days in late November/early December seem just as good to me. Casual fans are tuning out after the first ten games or so already.

[JeremyG]

I'd say reduce the season to 60 games so each team plays each other twice and tiebreakers can be by point differential.

Point differential? But then we might have even more of a problem with running up the score.

Btw, it would be 58 not 60.

[Kryptonic]

I'd say reduce the season to 60 games so each team plays each other twice and tiebreakers can be by point differential.

Point differential? But then we might have even more of a problem with running up the score.

Btw, it would be 58 not 60.

Good catch

[Split T]

My only question about the IST is why was it so early in the season? Wouldn’t it make more sense to put it in the dog days of the season after Christmas?

They’ve got all-star game stuff during that time…wanted something for the first part of the schedule. I think this is when they have the least amount of viewers.

[iLLmatic]

A lot of people in here that just can’t seem to handle change…

I thought the IST was great…probably too small for my taste. Make it bigger, put 12 or 16 teams in the knockout. Play everyone twice in your group. Maybe you guys won’t freak out about an all-tournament team then or hanging a banner. If you don’t like it, just ignore it.

Make it matter. Winner gets home court throughout the playoffs or something similar. We just had to deal with ugly courts and teams running up the score.

Give a team that won 7 games in December home court over a team with a better record at the end of the season just screams even more that the regular season doesn't matter.

Didn’t need to be that exactly, just give the tourney purpose.