One of the more interesting stories floating around the NBA right now is commissioner Adam Silver's goofy idea of a mid-season tournament involving all 30 teams in some sort of round robin format that turns into a knockout tournament. The prize? $1M for each player on the winning team.
On the surface, it seems like a cool idea. I mean, who doesn't love tournaments, right? The problem with this tournament idea though, is it just doesn't make sense. How would it fit into the regular season standings as a whole? Would winning it guarantee a playoff spot? If not, why care? The NBA is all about June and winning the NBA Finals, something that this tournament doesn't seem to really fit into.
Adam Silver seems to think that having a tournament for the sake of a tournament is a good idea and I'm here to tell you that it isn't. Tournaments need to have meaning. Especially at the pro level. A cash prize isn't enough to give a tournament meaning.
Instead of adding a mid-season tournament, the NBA needs to look at tweaking the league format that they already have. For starters, eliminate conferences and give every team in the NBA a more balanced travel schedule. The Timberwolves, Thunder, Pelicans, and Grizzlies all have brutal travel schedules as the eastern most teams in the Western Conference. If you eliminate conferences, you could give those teams a travel schedule that is more fair and less imbalanced. I mean, the Timberwolves make three or four trips to Los Angeles every year and just one trip to Milwaukee. That's stupid.
As an extension of that, by eliminating conferences, that means the NBA could adopt a top-16 playoff format, making it so that the best teams in the NBA regardless of conference make the playoffs. A lot of fans have been pushing for this for a while and would totally embrace this change. It would create more playoff matchup possibilities and reward the better teams, creating a better playoff experience.
Another idea for the NBA is to do a tournament before the season starts and include teams from all across the globe. Add teams from Europe, China, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the world into one big maddening pre-season World Series of basketball kind of thing. Something like that might get eyeballs. If you're going to go creative, go creative to the max and really have some fun.
Lastly, the NBA can make the season more exciting by reducing the number of regular season games and the number of playoff games. Going back to best-of-five in the first round would be a great place to start. If each game had more meaning, that alone would make the season better.
Unless Adam Silver goes wild and adopts something like my World Series of basketball idea, he would be wise to look at more minor modifications to the season like eliminating conferences and going back to best-of-five in the first round of the playoffs. Sometimes less is more and simpler ideas are better.
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