The NBA’s newly announced Collective Bargaining Agreement with the NBPA included several fascinating new developments for the next six or seven years of league action.
Most bold among these various changes is the addition of an in-season tournament, tentatively set to begin in 2023/24. Ben Rohrbach of Yahoo Sports unpacks some new revelations about the impending tournament.
Rohrbach writes that there will be six intra-conference pools, containing five teams each, and while he doesn’t clarify exactly how they will determined, he notes that teams won’t necessarily be separated by division.
During the season’s first six weeks, teams will play against each of the other four clubs in their respective intra-conference pools as part of the regular season schedule. Each club will play two home games and two road games in these designated group matchups.
Following these first four games, two wild-card clubs will join the six pool play victors in a single-game elimination tournament. This is all so new that the NBA is still determining how to figure out tiebreakers, Rohrbach writes. A neutral site will host the tournament’s last two rounds.
The round robin, quarterfinal, and semifinal tournament games would count toward the regular season’s results, but the final (which would represent an 83rd game for the two teams involved) wouldn’t count toward the regular season, per Rohrbach.
Every player on the tournament-winning champion is set to earn a $500K bonus for their victory. Given the rate of high-end annual salaries at present, it’s not certain that such coin would incentivize the top players on a hypothetical winner, but it would be a boon for younger players whose salaries are in the low seven figures.
Sounds like a marketing event…
This will only last as long as sponsors are happy to be associated with it…
This is gonna straight up ruin the NBA. Ratings are already tanking. This will send the league back to the stone ages
Melodramatic, much?
No just facts
They aren’t adding any games to the schedule, it’ll just drum up some interest in a few regular season games.
It isn’t going to ruin the NBA. 100 years from now they’ll still be playing basketball, they’ll love basketball.
Basketball will still be your favorite sport, because you like the way they dribble up and down the court.
I don’t think you understand what facts are. You provided zero of them.
How exactly is a mid-season tournament going to make people watch less? Lol
It’s terrible
Soccerizing the league is ridiculous
this is beyond stupid. they are panicking and this is the result
This is worse than the ghost runner in baseball. Manfred silver and goodell are all ruining the 3 major sports while the owners just let it happen. Sports were so much better 20 years ago.. in nbas case the 80s before the bad boy pistons destroyed the pretty boy Jordan which led to the rule changes
Meh
Nothing “fascinating” about any of this.
The games will be somewhat more meaningful than your typical Oct-Dec games. I’m leaning towards positive interest since it reminds me of the Champions League in soccer. The NBA should create 5 pools of teams based on last seasons record (Top tier would have best 6 teams…5th tier the worst 6). Randomly draw teams into their groups. Eight finalists are also randomly drawn against each other after each round. That kind of randomness creates a lot of excitement beforehand and bitching and moaning afterwards. Good fun!
Love how people say this is a bad idea like they know better than the people who literally have a vested interest in the league’s success.
“Ratings are bad, this is so dumb.”
What’s your idea then? And if you care enough about basketball to spend your time on a website about it, why wouldn’t you be rooting for it?
Because you’re a sad, miserable, pathetic loser, that’s why. And I hope you’re ashamed of yourself.
I have an idea
There should be a tournament for teams that are not in the playoffs like the rockets, spurs, mavs, etc
The concept should be like the ncaa final 4
The team who wins would be rewarded with the 1st overall pick
I think the nba made this tournament for guys like KD, harden, and curry to beat lebrons all time scoring record