The new NBA In-Season Tournament begins this Friday, bringing colorful courts but also confusion as to its importance and purpose. Whether you perceive the event as an exciting new development for the sport or a gimmick which you hope passes quickly may depend, unusually, on whether you happen to be a soccer fan.
Those who exclusively follow the four major American sports won't be used to the notion of teams competing for multiple trophies in the same season, but it's actually quite a common setup worldwide, most famously in European soccer. The NBA In-Season Tournament has the potential to establish itself as the equal to England's FA Cup, Spain's Copa del Rey, Italy's Coppa Italia or Germany's DFB-Pokal, provided it can ride out the inevitable initial skepticism and establish a place for itself in the crowded sports landscape.
The tournament should be able fulfill the main goal of those cup competitions, which is to give fans of teams outside the league's inner circle something to root for even if an NBA Championship seems unattainable. In order to truly deliver the excitement which cup competitions bring to the world of soccer, however, the NBA's tournament needs to undergo a few evolutions after the proof of concept is laid down this year.
Go Fully Single-Elimination
The inaugural NBA In-Season tournament is set up like the UEFA Champions League or FIFA World Cup. Teams first compete in a round-robin group stage, with the winners of each pool (plus one wild card from each conference) advancing to an eight-team knockout stage. A group-stage setup is better at determining the best team than a knockout tournament is, and it eliminates the risk for the NBA and its advertisers that one of the league's most marketable teams has an off night and gets knocked out by an early-round upset.
But the goal of the In-Season Tournament shouldn't be to determine the best team in the NBA. We already have the playoffs for that, and its seven-game series do quite a good job of ensuring the cream rises to the top. The In-Season Tournament needs to find its own niche, and that niche should be one of unpredictability and excitement. Why not borrow from European soccer's cup tournaments, which are almost exclusively single-elimination from the start?
There's proof that American basketball fans won't just tolerate but would embrace such a tournament: look no further than March Madness, where the fact that a top seed could go home after just one game if it posts a dud against UMBC or Fairleigh Dickinson is a core part of what makes the event so unique and so widely-followed. I doubt your co-workers are scrambling to fill out In-Season Tournament brackets this year, but they might if the competition were reformatted.
Don't Double-Count Games
Perhaps the weirdest part of the NBA's experiment with cup competitions is that the league decided that games in the In-Season Tournament would also count as regular-season games. Presumably, this was to force teams to take the event seriously and not treat the tournament as a series of glorified exhibition games. While that might be necessary for the first iteration, it may also confuse viewers and make the tournament feel less special.
If the tournament is to have a place in the NBA's future, it will need to stand on its own, with games counting for the tournament and only for the tournament. If that leads to some teams taking the competition less seriously, so be it. That only creates more opportunities for mid-tier teams to make a run, which seems ideal given that the purpose of the tournament should be to give fans of more teams something attainable to root for each season.
Spread Out the Schedule
Currently, the tournament is set to take place over the span of just over a month, with group-stage games taking place throughout November and the quarterfinals, semi-finals and finals all taking place from Dec. 4 to Dec. 9. The idea is seemingly to take advantage of a relative dead zone in the NBA schedule, when the excitement of a new season has worn off but the playoffs (and even the trade deadline) are still months away.
In European soccer cup competitions, on the other hand, games are spread out throughout the course of the season, with the final typically held right at the end of the year. Crucially, this gives fans of the teams who remain in the tournament something to look forward to, keeping them invested deeper into the season. Fans of bad NBA teams who have little hope of making the playoffs might remain more engaged with the sport if their team pulled off a couple early upsets in the In-Season Tournament and remains alive in the quarterfinals. It would be in the NBA's interests for that engagement to last until February or March, rather than merely early December.
Invite More Teams
This is the big one, and easily the hardest to pull off, so I wouldn't expect any movement in this direction in the near future. But what makes soccer's cup competitions so exciting is that they involve not just one league but several levels of professional teams within the country, and often semi-professional and amateur teams as well. In addition to adding intrigue to the competition and creating the potential for upsets which will be remembered for decades when a team from lower down the pyramid unseats one of the giants, it also makes good logical sense.
We already hold the NBA Finals to determine who the best team in the NBA is, so what does winning the In-Season Tournament even signify? Right now, it means the team played best over a confusingly-selected subset of games in November and December. Is that something a fanbase will really take much pride in? We'll find out soon enough, but I'm skeptical.
Why not expand the tournament so that the winner can call itself the best team in the entire country? For comparison, here is how many teams (many of them amateur or semi-pro) compete in the premier cup competition in the four strongest European soccer leagues:
| Tournament | Teams | Total Rounds | Top Tier Enters in Round ___ | Max Games for Top-Tier Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FA Cup (England) | 732 | 14 | 9 | 6 |
| Copa del Rey (Spain) | 120 | 8 | 2 | 7 |
| DFB-Pokal (Germany) | 64 | 6 | 1 | 6 |
| Coppa Italia (Italy) | 44 | 7 | 2 | 6 |
The above table doesn't even include the Coupe de France, which includes a whopping 8,506 teams from France as well as its overseas territories, including 85 teams from the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean and a combined 110 teams from the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. (If my math is right, roughly one in every 300 Mayotte residents is in the starting lineup for a Coupe de France game each year.)
I'm not suggesting the NBA needs to expand its tournament to thousands of teams or start inviting teams from opposite corners of the globe. The point is that the scope of possibilities is far wider than you might imagine, as soccer leagues around the world have proved that hosting a massive, single-elimination knockout tournament featuring teams of varying skill levels is not only logistically viable but incredibly exciting.
Conclusion
The NBA should be praised for taking a bold first step beyond the familiar structures of major American sports and looking to mimic the excitement of European soccer's cup competitions. But if this is to turn out to be anything more than a one-year experiment derided by fans for being pointless and confusing, the league should go all-in. No more half measures, with regular-season games also counting for the In-Season Tournament. No more group stage. Give fans the excitement of single-elimination basketball, and if that means the finals are less likely to pit the two best teams against each other, so be it. We have the playoffs for that.
Make the In-Season Tournament matter for its own sake, and if you're really feeling bold, Mr. Silver, borrow a trick from your European soccer counterparts and expand the tournament to feature teams from multiple leagues. Inviting, say, the entire G-League and the Final Four participants from the most recent March Madness tournament would get us up to 64 teams, mimicking Germany's DFB-Pokal, but the more the merrier.
Inviting teams from the country's various semi-pro leagues and eventually expanding to a structure with hundreds of teams (and several preliminary rounds) should be the NBA's ultimate goal. That would be a true spectacle, a tournament truly worthy of standing next to the NBA Championship as a second trophy worth competing for each year. I'm not sure we can say the same of the league's initial effort.
