NBA play-in tournament has accomplished its goal
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Traditionalists grumbled when the NBA expanded its playoff format before the 2020-21 season by adding a four-team play-in round in each conference.
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 No. 7 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.
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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. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban expressed reservations about 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 season. The Lakers, who have slipped in the standings without injured Anthony Davis, would need to make up five games on the Los Angeles Clippers with fewer than 20 games to play to sneak in as the eighth seed.
Ditto for the New Orleans Pelicans, who have shaken off a 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 past two months would have been a meaningless footnote.
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Like last season, when the play-in round gave Stephen Curry and the Warriors something to play for down the stretch, this season it has given the Lakers greater motivation to keep playing James rather than shutting him down. If Davis and Williamson find their way back to the court, the West’s play-in has the potential to thrill, just like the memorable showdown between the Lakers and Warriors in May.
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 such as Luka Doncic’s Mavericks and Nikola Jokic’s Denver Nuggets while enjoying a rest advantage when it hosts a weaker play-in winner such as the Minnesota Timberwolves or Clippers.
Similarly, the Mavericks and Nuggets must keep grinding so they don’t slip into the play-in mix and face a more challenging road to the second round.
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“I’m more pleased with the play-in today than I thought we would be when we were first adopting it,” 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.
But the play-in could function as a safety net for the Brooklyn Nets, who fell to 32-33 with a loss to the Celtics on Sunday. The beleaguered preseason title favorites — knocked off course by Kyrie Irving’s vaccination standoff, a knee injury to Kevin Durant and the questionable decision to trade James Harden — would be the ninth seed if the playoffs started Monday.
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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 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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