The NBA's In-Season Tournament is working
High stakes and tough players are making December basketball electric.
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Folks, I am writing to you today with a declaration of love. I am 10000% obsessed with the NBA’s in-season tournament. I love everything about it. I love the high stakes, I love how hard the players are playing, I love how the arenas’ atmospheres feel like the playoffs. I love the chaos of the knock-out rounds. Even though I was skeptical of the special court designs (because, let’s be honest, it looks like the players are on giant green screens), I have even come to love those.
I love it all. And I will miss it when it ends.
Some of you might be thinking — really? Aren’t you a Celtics fans? Didn’t they choke in the quarterfinals on Monday night? Thank you for asking — yes and yes.
But before I am a Celtics fan, I am a basketball fan, and before I am a basketball fan, I am someone who talks about basketball everyday for a living. My fandom and my job exist in two separate parts of my brain, if that makes sense. I want the best for the In-Season Tournament, and I actually think it was in the league’s best interest for the Pacers to advance over the Celtics.
Sure, you could argue that the numbers Boston might have drawn for the final game on Saturday in Vegas would be higher than whatever the Pacers or Knicks or Bucks will bring in. The Celtics are one of — if not the — best teams in the NBA. People would watch.
But, as I’ve said on Oddball and The Dan Le Batard Show, the league actually needs a team like the Pacers or the Knicks to win the entire thing.
Hear me out: In order for commissioner Adam Silver’s experiment to be successful, a team with a desperate fan base must win. And I mean desperate in the sense of “we never even come close to winning anything,” not desperate in the sense of “I’m a Celtics fan and I’m going to tear my hair out because I have watched this team choke away games in the playoffs (including the Finals!) since 2015.”
Silver needs to reward a fanbase that hasn’t gotten close to the Finals in a long time. That would, without hesitation, demand their team hang a banner if they won the first-ever NBA Cup. They need a fanbase to take this thing and run with it, talk about it with pride, and, when it rolls around next year, pray for a repeat.
The league also needs this tournament to be a stage for dramatic narrative arcs.
And on Monday, it was.
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