NBA GM’s were recently proposed a “World Cup-style” 20-team playoff. Would these changes help or hurt the Brooklyn Nets’s postseason chances?
It’s anyone’s guess as to what the rest of the NBA and Brooklyn Nets season will look like.
From Disney World to 30 team playoffs to certain star players saying “see ya next year,” the NBA Board of Governors is far from an exact consensus.
One proposal sent out in a survey to all GM’s last Friday was a “World Cup” playoff format, spelled out by The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor:
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/1265323739912089601
The Nets make up one of four in the fourth tier, joining the Dallas Mavericks, Memphis Grizzlies, and Orlando Magic.
For anyone familiar with the drawing process in European football tournaments, this concept should be easy to wrap your head around. Considering the NBA mooted adding in Cup competitions to the league recently, it’s clear that the Commissioner’s Office has been looking overseas for new marketing ploys.
Thus, the big fish (the Milwaukee Bucks, Los Angeles Lakers, Toronto Raptors, and Los Angeles Clippers in O’Connors’s scenario) will not be drawn against each other to ensure fairness, and the random element of the draw leaves for the opportunity of tasty matchups.
Some rigid traditionalists will have a hard time bucking the tried and true NBA playoff schedule, emphasizing that further change to the season will only enlarge the size of the asterisk attached to the eventual Champion.
On the Lowe Post podcast featuring ESPN’s Zach Lowe and Adrian Wojnarowski, Lowe pretty much said a fat “so what?” to this opinion. Don’t you want to see basketball in the most commercially palatable format? After the novelty of seeing NBA basketball for the first time in months wears off, are casual fans going to tune in to see Milwaukee sweep Orlando?
(Homer alert: thank goodness the Nets are not in the eight seed)
So, would this scenario favor the Nets (assuming no Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant)?