NBA's In-Season Tournament Will not Cure the NBA's Load Management, Tanking, and Flopping Problems
Next season, the NBA will have an in-season tournament, with the winner being awarded the NBA Cup (which could be renamed if/when corporate sponsors provide funding). The NBA issued an official press release explaining the in-season tournament's format and rules but the short explanation is that no extra games will be added to the regular season, a prize pool will be distributed after the NBA Cup concludes, and an MVP and All-Tournament Team will be selected. Each player from the championship team will receive $500,000, while each player from the runner-up team will receive $200,000; players whose teams lose in the semifinals will receive $100,000 each, and players whose teams lose in the quarterfinals will receive $50,000 each. The tournament games will be part of the regular season schedule except for the championship game, which will be an extra game for which the statistics will not be counted as either regular season statistics or playoff statistics (much like the statistics from all of the Play-In Tournament games are not officially counted as regular season statistics or playoff statistics). This neither fish nor fowl treatment of game statistics for a game that is supposed to be important is ridiculous. At the very least, the NBA should create a separate category if it does not want the championship game numbers counted as part of the regular season or the postseason.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has advocated for an in-season tournament for over a decade, and there is little doubt that his fans--who adore every move he makes while also belittling the style and policies of his great predecessor David Stern--will waste no time declaring that the in-season tournament is a brilliant innovation. The reality is that the in-season tournament is not innovative at all; it is derivative, because the concept has already been applied in soccer and other sports. If anything, adding an in-season tournament to the NBA's calendar after the league thrived for several decades without such a tournament seems more like a gimmicky, desperation move than a creative act. Of course, the bottom line here is about money, not creativity. The NBA cares more about profits than anything else, so the success of the NBA Cup will be measured quite simply in dollars and cents: if the fans show up and tune in, if the advertisers and sponsors buy the concept (literally and figuratively), and if the TV networks enthusiastically broadcast and promote these games then the NBA could not care less about any criticism.
It will be very interesting to see how seriously the teams, coaches, and players treat the in-season tournament. If we see the load managing and tanking that are all too common throughout the regular season--and keep in mind that all of the tournament games except the championship game count in the regular season standings--then the NBA Cup will not gain much traction.
I would prefer that the NBA focused on minimizing load managing, tanking, and flopping as opposed to adding an in-season tournament that will never have the same historical prestige or importance as the NBA championship. Hopefully, the NBA's new anti-flopping rule will rein in at least the most egregious and habitual offenders. Flopping is not a new problem--Dave Cowens railed against it in the 1970s, correctly calling it cheating--but it is more prevalent than it used to be, and it is rewarded far too often by referees who get duped more often than Elmer Fudd does when pursuing Bugs Bunny.
While flopping taints individual plays and games, load managing and tanking devalue seasonal player statistics and team records. Playing all 82 games used to be a badge of honor for NBA players before load management and tanking became accepted practices, and because everybody played hard the players' statistics meant something. Now, players can rack up big numbers against teams that are trying to lose, and good teams can pad their win totals by stacking up victories against teams that are trying to lose. The evidence shows that in general tanking does not work, and the Philadelphia 76ers--contrary to the ridiculous assertion of one book title--have not "tanked to the top," but even though "stat gurus" claim to make data driven decisions many "stat gurus" continue to follow this demonstrably unfavorable path.
The NBA's Play-In Tournament was supposed to mitigate load managing and tanking by providing an incentive for teams to keep playing hard until the end of the season, but the reality is that the last games of the regular season often resemble preseason games in terms of quality and star player participation. I watch the NBA's Play-In Tournament because I watch great NBA basketball, good NBA basketball, and bad NBA basketball, not because I think that the Play-In Tournament is a great concept or because the Play-In Tournament games are particularly intriguing.
If the NBA is going to model itself after other sports leagues, then the NBA should get rid of the Play-In Tournament, scrap the nascent NBA Cup event, and solve many of its current problems with one big change: introduction of relegation. Relegation refers to sending teams that finish at the bottom of the standings to a lower, less prestigious league. The NBA already has a lower, less prestigious league now (the NBA G League), so that part of the infrastructure is already in place. The prospect of relegation--which would translate directly into teams having lower earnings, less prestige, and consequently lower market value--would likely put an immediate end to both tanking and load management, because the costs of those strategies would be way too high and the negative impact would be obvious even to "stat gurus" with questionable number crunching skills.
Further, the NBA should not only relegate the worst teams but it should also either not let those teams participate in the NBA Draft at all or at a minimum it should bar those teams from participating in the NBA Draft Lottery.
To be clear, I understand that it is extremely unlikely that the owners or the players will ever agree to put a relegation system in place--but if the owners and players were serious about making the game better in the long run as opposed to grabbing every available dollar in the short run then they would embrace the relegation system.
Labels: load management, NBA Cup, tanking
posted by David Friedman @ 1:38 AM
