Everyone Has Been Convinced That The NBA In-Season Tournament Is Real
Yesterday, after reading this Howard Beck piece about the NBA’s Inaugural In-Season Tournament, I was killing time on Instagram and saw a couple people I knew in college post about Penn State’s upcoming bowl game against Ole Miss. That game is of course completely meaningless, the cap of another 10–2 or 9–3 season where the team lost to the teams on the elite tier they can never seem to reach and beat the teams on their own secondary tier or lower ones. There’s no reason at all to care about whether they win the (Googling as I write this) Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl, except that it’s another game to watch and it’s advertised as mattering more than a regular season game against Michigan State even though it objectively matters significantly — SIGNIFICANTLY — less. Still, people I once associated with care.
That was about the time I accepted that the NBA In-Season Tournament was here to stay. If you consider yourself someone who Knows Ball and Loves Hoop, you probably don’t regularly talk to anyone who’s excited about the prospect of their team one day competing for the In-Season Tournament Trophy. But much like the Big Bang Theory or Imagine Dragons, it seems like everyone you don’t talk to is absolutely loving it.
I’m not even going to say “this may seem snobbish.” This is absolutely snobbish (Tom Ziller makes a perfectly correct and nice case here that the In-Season Tournament is simply not for people who consider themselves Ball Knowers and Hoop Lovers, and is instead meant to intrigue casual fans; absolutely no shade to Tom, who is awesome and knows ball and loves hoop more than I do by a long shot, but that doesn’t sway me towards thinking the whole thing is any less grating). I find the In-Season Tournament to be an affront to NBA fans’ intelligence. It’s NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s bid to put his stamp on the game. He’s been trying to make it happen for years, looking to European football’s domestic cups as inspiration. Never mind that an enormous part of what makes those cups interesting — matchups across that could not otherwise happen due to the tiered structure of those associations — is fundamentally impossible in American sports that use minor leagues as developmental tools and don’t relegate or promote teams between them. Also never mind another thing that makes those cups compelling — that they’ve been happening for more than a century rather than for a month. Silver was always going to make this happen, and now he has, and worst of all, it’s working.
By now we all know the reasons the In-Season Tournament might have failed: it’s stupid bullshit that was made up two seconds ago and so carries no historical weight, lacks the potential for unique fixtures of European domestic cups, means nothing, and carries no prestige, because it’s stupid bullshit that was made up two seconds ago. In Beck’s piece, he quotes the Grizzlies Marcus Smart as saying: “Being completely honest, nobody cares about [the In-Season Tournament Trophy].” In another Ringer piece about the Sacramento Kings path to contention, Seerat Sohi notes:
In every city where the Kings played a qualifying game for the in-season tournament, the coaching staff incentivized them with pictures of what they could buy with the tourney’s overall cash prize of $500,000 a player. In San Antonio, they showed them acres of land. In Oklahoma, it was a house. In Minnesota, the 2,500 families they could feed during Christmas. In a nod to real estate prices in the Bay Area, the coaching staff dredged up pictures of tech fleece.
For players, the tournament is explicitly and exclusively about money. For the league, too, the tournament is explicitly and exclusively about money. By adding in a new thing that draws greater ratings and an extra game (the tournament final does not count as a regular season game) that can be hyped up and sold when it comes time to re-up the league’s broadcasting rights deal after the 2024–25 season, they increase their leverage in those negotiations. Yet a couple nights ago, as Tyrese Haliburton led the Indiana Pacers on a mid-game run to go up 11 on the championship-favorite Boston Celtics, the crowd sounded like a playoff crowd. Whether they cared about the game for the same reason the players did, the results in the crowd, on the floor, and on the broadcast synced up. The game felt like it mattered.
I do enjoy being a hater for the sake of it. Last night, I was rooting for the awful, demonic Celtics over the fast, cool-as-hell Pacers specifically because I know that a Pacers run in the tournament might provide proof of concept for the tournament as a launching ground for young, cool teams that have otherwise flown under-the-radar of the casual fan, while the Celtics winning the trophy would leave everyone with a sour taste in their mouths. I want the tournament to be an embarrassing failure that we all laugh about someday and throw in Silver’s face when he’s in the media crying poor for the owners in a labor dispute. Love of being a hater isn't the main reason I want the tournament to crash and burn, though. My reasoning is much more head-up-my-own-ass.
Whenever I see any mention of the In-Season Tournament, all I can think of is that the league believes it can literally trick fans into thinking this (I’ll say it forever) made-up bullshit is a real thing. They think this with such assuredness that they gave it all of 0 minutes of thought, decided it didn’t matter and fans would tune in no matter what, and named the in-season tournament the NBA In-Season Tournament. They could have named it the You Idiots Are Going To Make Us More Money By Caring About This Shit, You Absolute Morons, Ha Ha Ha Tournament and it would have been as accurate a name and at least have taken a minute to come up with.
The thing it reminds me of most is NFTs. Suddenly, there’s a whole industry telling you that there’s value in this new thing and that you should care about it, while you can see with your own eyes it’s just a slight variation of the same cartoon ape or the regular season with a different court, as the case may have it. The reason the people are telling you this is that if they can convince you that the line of code on the blockchain is as unique and meritorious as a painting, physically made by a painter, that you can hold in your hands, or that this regular season basketball game in Las Vegas is basically a playoff game, those people stand to gain financially. You are a mark, you are being played for a fool by people whose entire plan hinges on you being a mark and being played for a fool.
As a result, you have announcers talking in serious tones about tiebreakers and point differentials and their impact on the new made-up bullshit, to convince you that it’s serious. You have glitzy commercials starring prestige TV actors turned heroes of Online to convince you that this thing being advertised to you is worth the league spending money on a big glitzy commercial. Sites like the Athletic and the Ringer are posting stories about the success of the tournament — whether you think this is because the atmosphere and quality of play have made the writers buy in or because if there’s more content to write about that readers can be convinced is important to read about it benefits those sites depends on how cynical you are. The below headline, also from Ziller, is probably a good litmus test.
I trust that he is not cynically trying to sell me on this because it would drive clicks, but if someone were trying to cynically sell me on this because it would drive clicks it would probably take the form of that extremely bombastic headline (I don’t want to pick on Ziller, he just happens to be on the kindhearted, optimistic side of this issue and I just happened to get that email five minutes before I finished writing this).
This is why I hate that the In-Season Tournament is working. It’s not really that I’m beholden to tradition — I was one of the few proponents of the long-sleeved jerseys in the middle of the 2010s (I even like that that the Cleveland Cavaliers completed their 3–1 comeback against the 73–9 Golden State Warriors while wearing them, it gives those highlights a specific sense of the time it happened), I like some of the courts for the In-Season Tournament, I like the Elam Ending in the All-Star Game and the 14 second shot clock on offensive rebounds.
What I don’t like is feeling like I’m watching consent being incredibly overtly manufactured around me for some made-up bullshit. I don’t like the idea that Adam Silver can decide something like this is going to be his legacy (and make no mistake, the In-Season Tournament trophy will be called the Adam Silver Trophy someday) and, with the right amount of persistence and advertising, make it a reality. If a new tradition can be created out of thin air and ad dollars like this, it throws into starker relief how silly sports are in general since obviously the other traditions are were also, at one time, new made-up bullshit. Playoffs are constantly being restructured; the NFL and MLB each added more teams to the playoffs in the last few years, the College Football Playoff was also invented in the last decade, is expanding next year, and is currently the subject of great controversy because of its high level of subjectivity in what it meant to determine an objective champion. But at least those things are all meant to culminate in something everyone agrees on: an end-of-the-season champion won by a team in its final form after weathering a full season.
Of course, the differences between the NBA and its partners convincing people that the In-Season Tournament is a real thing they should care about and NFTs or manufactured consent around, for example, support for the war in Iraq are enormous. Fans who think it would be cool if their team won the tournament are not being scammed out of money under the assumption their faith will be rewarded with a lifetime of financial freedom, and proponents of the tournament are not trying to kill the haters en masse. The fact that the tournament makes a bunch of games more annoying because announcers are pretending made-up bullshit is a real thing is solved by simply giving in and allowing that the made-up bullshit is, in fact, just harmless fun.
Why is it a problem that a gambit to make fans more excited and to make players play a little harder is working? It’s just sports, isn’t the whole point of sports for the guys to try hard and for the fans to care and get excited? Yes, obviously. I think I’ve done a better job here laying out why the In-Season Tournament is actually just fine than laying out good reasons to want it to fail. But if you accept the premise that sports carry some weight, that they are a refuge of objective reality in a world of bespoke realities, that it’s not purely childish and silly to care about sports, it just feels… unmooring to be confronted with the plain fact of the matter that you’re wrong to feel that way. If Adam Silver wants people to remember him for something besides looking like a freak, he can make it happen, and people will go nuts for it, and fight it all you like, you’ll end up getting sucked in, too.
