Sports
NBA Rumors: Rule Change of In-Season Tournament Impacting Playoff Seeding Has Support – Bleacher Report
After the success of the inaugural NBA In-Season Tournament, the league is looking at ways to improve it, and a potential rule change is reportedly gaining support.
According to ESPN’s Tim Bontemps, while there are pros and cons to guaranteeing an automatic playoff bid to the tournament winner, people around the league are open to a scenario in which the winner is promised at least the seventh seed in its respective conference.
“While a top-six berth was universally seen as a bridge too far among league insiders spoken to by ESPN, one idea that had more support was guaranteeing the winner of the tournament at least the seventh spot, meaning they would get two home games to earn their way into the playoffs,” Bontemps wrote.
The main issue with that idea is that it would somewhat undermine the play-in tournament, which has helped the league curb the problem of teams tanking for better draft position.
Of course, the idea of the winner of the tournament receiving an automatic playoff bid does have its detractors.
“I wouldn’t give somebody a playoff spot based off of this,” Milwaukee Bucks star point guard Damian Lillard said. “A lot of things can change from now until playoff time.”
Indiana Pacers center Myles Turner, who played in Saturday’s NBA In-Season Tournament Championship against the Los Angeles Lakers, suggested a scenario in which the winner receives an advantage when it comes to postseason seeding.
“At the end of the season,” Turner said, “if you had a [tie] with somebody, maybe if you win this tournament, no matter what you get an automatic tiebreaker.”
The Lakers defeated the Pacers 123-109 to win the first-ever NBA Cup. This year’s tournament featured cash incentives for the teams that made it to the knockout rounds. Each Los Angeles player received a $500,000 prize for the tournament win.
Still, there is a push for other enticements in future tournaments. Bontemps noted that Lakers head coach Darvin Ham was among “several others” who suggested a draft-related incentive, while franchises have told NBA executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics Evan Wasch that the incentive should be team-based. Wasch said there’s a chance the latter will be added to the tournament as soon as next year.
“Here’s certainly a case we made that [a team-based incentive] isn’t necessary because we had this really high-quality competition where teams and players were so bought in and we didn’t have that incremental reward for teams,” Wasch said. “But there are certainly those teams that have voiced that they think there should be something incremental. Exactly what that is, you know, is up for discussion. But I imagine that’ll be on the list of things we discuss.”
