The Inside The NBA folks seem to have no idea how a tournament works and it’s difficult to listen to them talk about this tournament.
Why is point differential such a difficult concept for them to understand?
Candace Parker’s idea is to ignore the group and just advance the top teams with the best records, out of all the groups. Then what’s the point of the groups? It’s a tournament. I don’t think she realizes that point differential would still come into play.
Chuck wants the 2 top teams in the West to advance because they have the best regular season records. Let’s ignore the fact that they couldn’t play well in the tournament.
This tournament has a lot of potential as we saw in that Kings/Warriors game. Most of those plays in the 4th quarter would’ve never occurred if this was just a regular season game.
I do believe that these games need to be independent of regular season games though.
If you’re still struggling to understand how tournaments with groups work, play some FIFA or watch any sport outside of America. It’s a really fun system.
They want teams to run up the score. It makes for more exciting games at the end of the 4th.
For instance, Warriors came into tonight’s game not only needing a win, but a win by 12 points, hence all those messy turnovers in the final seconds.
Flip side of that is the Celtics needed to win by 23+ and were hack-a-shaq'ing Andre Drummond while up 32 points and like 10m on the clock.
It made a blow out drag on.
*They probably would have pushed it to 40 if they didn't hack him. Sure they were still scoring but the pace and momentum died watching him brick FTs. They were draining 3s left and right while running.
That definitely made for an electric game. The problem is the half a dozen blow outs we saw before that.
Although that may have made up for it. That was some Game 7 shit.
And I am sure the ratings were huge.