The new format lowered the bar, allowing 20 of the league’s 30 teams to compete in the postseason. It introduced an added degree of randomness, setting up the possibility that a seventh seed could outplay its fellow play-in teams across the regular season and then get eliminated early with a pair of untimely losses. And the win-or-go-home games felt gimmicky at first blush, a made-for-television spectacle that seemed designed to mimic the NCAA tournament.
LeBron James famously said last year that the NBA’s play-in designer “should be fired” because the Los Angeles Lakers had to fight their way into the playoffs with a play-in win over the Golden State Warriors, while Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban expressed reservations over the added strain on players who now had to fight for seeding down the stretch. The NBA’s decision-makers held firm, arguing that the new format’s positives outweighed its negatives because it “significantly increased the competitive incentive” for teams up and down the standings. A year later, here’s a simple method for understanding why the format’s proponents have resoundingly won the debate: Imagine how much worse this season would be without a play-in.
Without an expanded field, the Western Conference’s eight-team field would be virtually settled with more than a month remaining in the regular season. The Lakers, who have slipped in the standings without an injured Anthony Davis, would need to make up five games on the Los Angeles Clippers with fewer than 20 games to play if they wanted to sneak in as the eighth seed.
Ditto for the New Orleans Pelicans, who have shaken off an atrocious 1-12 start to move into the West’s 10th seed. With no play-in, the Pelicans would have little reason to consider bringing back Zion Williamson, and they might not have rolled the dice to trade for CJ McCollum at the deadline. Their season would have been effectively over by mid-November, and their impressive run over the last two months would have been a meaningless footnote.
The new format has delivered secondary benefits higher up the West standings, where the Phoenix Suns have run away from the field. With no chance of catching the Suns, the Memphis Grizzlies, Warriors and Utah Jazz might be content to take their feet off the gas over the next month. Instead, the play-in round has enhanced the race for the No. 2 seed, as the winner will almost certainly get to avoid tougher competition like Luka Doncic’s Mavericks and Nikola Jokic’s Denver Nuggets while enjoying a rest advantage when it hosts a weaker play-in winner like the Minnesota Timberwolves or Clippers.
Similarly, the Mavericks and Nuggets must keep grinding so that they don’t slip into the play-in mix and face a more challenging road to the second round.
“I’m more pleased with the play-in today than I thought we would be when we were first adopting it,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said during All-Star Weekend last month. “When we first spoke to our television partners and our teams, we were very specifically focused on those new games that we were creating and saying there will be some additional competition. … What I wasn’t anticipating is that we would create races to ensure that teams were within the first six slots in their conference so they could avoid the play-in.”
Parity has reigned in the Eastern Conference, where the top four seeds enter Monday separated by three games in the loss column and where the No. 5 seed Boston Celtics appear poised to make a strong run at claiming home-court advantage. Even without the play-in, the battle for seeds at the top of the East would have been engrossing and unpredictable.
Without a doubt, the NBA, its television partners and its fans all benefit if Durant gets the opportunity to fight his way into the playoffs rather than going home early. The same holds true for Trae Young and the Atlanta Hawks, who have fallen back to earth after a delightful run to the 2021 Eastern Conference finals. Despite disappointing seasons for both franchises, a win-or-go-home shootout between Durant and Young would be appointment television.
Meanwhile, the NBA sounds interested in doubling down on its experimentation. While Silver said that the league won’t be instituting a long-discussed midseason tournament during the 2022-23 season, he added that “the players have been more receptive” to the idea “because the play-in has been a bit more successful” than expected.
“Our players end up being more conservative than we are when we go to them with new ideas,” Silver said. “They say, ‘That’s not the way things have been done historically.’ … Maybe we can create some new competitive opportunities, find ways to enhance competition within the season and create a new cup or trophy that players are competing for.”
Let the next round of debates begin.
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