I recently saw that Tyrese Halliburton believed the in-season tournament should guarantee the tournament winners a playoff-spot. While I do agree that the tournament could give better incentives to players to ensure a certain level of competitiveness, I disagree because the tournament winners could then ignore the rest of the season in preparation for the post-season (benching key players, etc.)
However, what if the tournament winners received better seeding? My idea is that the tournament winner receives 10/15 extra wins at the end of the season.
Last season, in the west, the Mavericks were the 11th seed, with a record of 38-44 with a win percentage of .463. Under my proposed system, assuming the Mavericks were the tournament winners (they were a top 6 seed before the Kyrie trade which would happen after the tournament time frame, and anything could happen during single-elimination, although I guess this detail doesn’t really matter, because this is a hypothetical), their new record would be 53-44, assuming we use 15 wins. Their new win percentage would be 53/97 = .546, guaranteeing them the 5th seed over the Clippers. I chose the Mavericks because they were the lowest seed in the West that would be guaranteed a playoff spot by the end of the season. Essentially, you add 15 games to the tourney champ’s record and calculate a new win percentage. You would still be able to fight for better or worse seeding, which would still encourage regular season competition after the tournament.
There are other hypotheticals as well. What would have happened if the Sixers won? They would have had to face the Heat in the first round, once given the first seed? Last season was unique (dominant Heat), but this is still a huge what-if when we consider how the Bucks or Celtics also would have been affected as a result. The West is always a dogfight, and I think that last year so many teams could’ve won and changed the playoff landscape completely. Some of the playoff lock-in caliber teams could have an easier time once they guaranteed the first or second seed, and have more time to rest players if they sweep or gentleman-sweep their opponents.
I would still want to preserve the actual win-loss record that each team received, because that would indicate how good teams were in the regular season, and the seeding tables would definitely need an extra asterisk to indicate so, for record keeping. 15 games might be a too much, so I believe that this number could easily be altered, so long as it still makes some sort of impact. I just feel like this is something that addresses this. How do you feel?
This was my first post on Reddit. I’ve been on here for a couple of months, but don’t actively post or comment. Sorry if this was long or structured weirdly, and maybe some things could’ve been explained better. Thanks for reading though.
I checked Basketball Reference and based on game score this was his best game ever, with a score of 36.7. Maybe not the perfect metric but might as well have been his goat regular season performance, all to absolutely crap and piss on the Clippers.