There have been some big named critics of the NBA’s play-in tournament with the biggest one being the most powerful person in the league in LeBron James.
But it has a pretty powerful supporter, too.
Adam Silver publicly voiced his support for the play-in tournament despite some dissonance from key figures around the league. He spoke on ESPN Radio Friday ahead of the start of the NBA playoffs about how he wanted to see the tournament around long-term.
Silver said he still has to convince some teams and some players that the tournament is worth keeping around, but that it has also mostly gotten support from the key figures it needed to.
“I haven’t made any secret that I want it to be [around long term]…I have two constituencies I need to convince of that. One is the 30 teams, and I think for the most part they’ve supported it. Again, I understand the sentiment if I were a team — a 7-seed in particular — the notion [that] after a long season, you could potentially play out of the playoffs. I understand those feelings. I think at the same time, the teams recognize the amount of additional interest we’ve created over the last month of the season plus those play-in games make it worth it.”
Silver is absolutely spot on here. The NBA absolutely needs to make this a thing.
The play-in tournament should be considered nothing but a success this season. For the last month, at the end of the regular season, we’ve been watching games with consequence.
We’ve also saw two absolutely spectacular performances on consecutive nights Tuesday and Wednesday. First, it was Jayson Tatum’s 50-point game against the Wizards. Then, it was Stephen Curry’s brilliant 37-point performance being foiled by LeBron James’ game-winner.
And people watched. The Lakers and Warriors drew an average audience of 5.6 million for their game.
That number will obviously be an outlier — those are two of the most popular teams in the league with arguably the league’s two biggest stars. But it just goes to show the potential that the play-in tournament has.
This is essentially a wild card game. It’s a single-elimination winner take all moment and fans absolutely love that. You give it to them and they’ll watch it.
Does it need tweaks? Certainly. These games shouldn’t be played so late at night on the East Coast. And maybe there’s a way to give some sort of a better advantage to the 7 and 8 seeds.
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But there’s something here — that’s obvious to anyone. And the NBA would be silly to let go of that so quickly. [mm-video type=video id=01f65n6900j42g7zsqqe playlist_id=01f09kz5ecxq9bp57b player_id=none image=https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/video/thumbnail/mmplus/01f65n6900j42g7zsqqe/01f65n6900j42g7zsqqe-37e39a75d36cbcfeda6d51b90f3d4e94.jpg]