Slowly but surely, we’re getting into the NHL Playoffs. Gelo’s hitting bets, we’re getting into the rhythm of the thing as games are played every other night, we’re beginning to internalize the bracket. In the NBA…who did the Warriors play in the first round, again? Why aren’t there games tonight?
This is all my personal preference. I get that. The NBA is a bigger league than the NHL in terms of following, revenue, TV ratings (I assume), etc., I’m aware of all of that. I’m not trying to say the NHL is outperforming the NBA across the board.
The NHL is, however, outperforming the NBA with me, at this moment. And that’s weird, because I like basketball a lot more than I like hockey.
It’s always been hard to get into the NBA regular season, just as it’s hard to get into the NHL regular season. Each is long and arduous and individual games don’t always mean that much, but the games aren’t full-on daily, like baseball, and you don’t have mapped-out pitching matchups five days in advance, robbing us of highlighted extra-significant games and the intuitive knowledge of when games are happening, period. Add to this that each competes with the high-leverage-single-game sport of football in the fall, the constant-competition madhouse that is college basketball in the winter, and the romanticism of Opening Day at the beginning of April, and it’s hard to follow the regular season, something exacerbated in the NBA by load management, which really drives home how little individual games matter, demonstrating that the difference between a win and a loss isn’t much at all in a championship chase.
Individual regular season games matter little in most sports. Basketball, baseball, hockey, and soccer all, for the most part, are sports of bulk accomplishment. The Yankees can lose to the Pirates, the Lightning can lose to the Coyotes, the Celtics can lose to the Pistons, even Manchester City can lose to Norwich and, except for in specific circumstances, it can be rinsed off rather quickly. The NFL has an element of this, and college football gets this way for the majority of teams by the time October’s turning into November. Regular seasons are naturally low-leverage in a lot of circumstances. The thing about the NBA is how low-leverage a lot of the playoffs feel.
The “best” first round playoff series this NBA postseason was, according to many in the moment who kind of ignored Pelicans/Suns, that between the Grizzlies and Timberwolves, a muddled mess of a slopfest that only went six games. It was dramatic, and it was exciting, and it meant something, but it didn’t mean that much. The Grizzlies are implied by betting markets to have only around a five percent chance of winning the title, tied one game to one in the second round and possessing home court advantage over the rest of this series. If the Grizzlies do make it past the Warriors, they’ll almost assuredly run into the Suns, and they’ll be a big underdog again. Can the upset happen? Sure. But it’s not as likely as a stunner in the comparable playoff round would be in baseball, or in the NFL, or in the NHL. It’s an unfortunate reality that the NBA Playoffs do not make sense. They have warm-up series built into them. In turn, they then make the regular season make even less sense. The Bucks could have intentionally lost in the final week of the season and had it help their championship probability. That’s how messed up this has gotten.
There’s no easy solution to this. Revenue from additional games is immense, and having one extra playoff round adds upwards of forty playoff games a year. The playoffs being as wide as they are does help discourage tanking (which could be even worse), incentivizing mediocre teams to try to be that much better and, in turn, keeping fans of said mediocre teams more immediately invested. But with Americans so mobile geographically and with basketball players so mobile through free agency, those single-team loyalties are fading, and load management only exacerbates the issue, because instead of watching teams to see stars, you have to check which stars are even playing before you consider watching them play in a game of unclear importance with a collection of role players around them that may or may not be representative of who will join them on their April-May-and-June run. The NBA is trying things out—and credit to it for that—and I’m not familiar with its finances but my impression is it’s doing fine there, but there’s a core problem with its competitive setup, and it’s one that creates a lot of exhibition games. Sometimes, again, in the playoffs themselves.
How to fix it? There’s no easy solution, partially because you’re dealing with a mixture of NFL-style fans, loyal to their team and dedicated to winning no matter how the team shifts and changes or what management’s actual goal is for the season, and American-folks-watching-European-soccer-style fans, very “online” and into the stars and only wanting to watch the best teams and interested in the complexity of intraseason-tournaments & promotion/relegation & superleagues & etc. If you want to break those camps into old-school and new-school, one way to possibly thread that needle is to do things like reimagine the schedule into collections, in large doses, of rivalry matchups, chosen by the commissioner’s office uniquely each year to maximize interest. For 50 of the games, play home-and-homes with 25 of the other teams in the league, but for the other 32, play four eight-game sets, split into two four-game halves each played contiguously in one of the two cities. An example, for…let’s say the 2022-23 Celtics, should they play the Warriors in this year’s finals:
Opening Series, 4 games: vs. Warriors
In-between games: vs. Pacers, vs. Bulls, @ Bucks, @ Pistons, vs. Blazers, vs. Nuggets
Series #2, 4 games: @ Knicks
In-between games: @ Clippers, @ Suns, vs. Thunder, vs. Mavericks, @ Grizzlies, @ Hawks, vs. Raptors, vs. 76ers
Series #3, 4 games: vs. Lakers
In-between games: vs. Cavaliers, vs. Wizards, @ Rockets, @ Spurs, vs. Heat, vs. Magic, @ Timberwolves, @ Pelicans
Series #4, 4 games: @ Nets
In-between games: @ Kings, @ Jazz, @ Hornets, vs. Hornets, @ Pacers, @ Bulls, vs. Bucks, vs. Pistons
Series #5, 4 games: vs. Nets
In-between games: @ Blazers, @ Nuggets, vs. Clippers, vs. Suns, @ Thunder, @ Mavericks, vs. Grizzlies, vs. Hawks
Series #6, 4 games: @ Lakers
In-between games: @ Raptors, @ 76ers, @ Cavaliers, @ Wizards, vs. Rockets, vs. Spurs
Series #7, 4 games: vs. Knicks
In-between games: @ Heat, @ Magic, vs. Timberwolves, vs. Pelicans, vs. Kings, vs. Jazz
Closing Series, 4 games: @ Warriors
This is a cocktail-napkin conceptualization of the idea, and there are issues with revenue for bad teams not getting to host their subsidizing, large-market foes as often, but basically, you want some regular season storylines, and right now those are entirely off the court unless there’s an individual scoring streak or a violent foul, both things that can still happen in this lopsided schedule.
Another option is to incentivize players staying with single teams. We’ve suggested this with baseball before as well. Pay a substantial bonus, from the commissioner’s office, to players who’ve been with a franchise for five straight years. Pay a larger one when players are on a team for ten straight years. Encourage more melding of individual and team personas. Player freedom is great, and you don’t have to take that away, but it’s gotten to a point where it’s hurting some of the general interest for a lot of fans. Make the choice harder on players: Do it Giannis’s way? Or do it Kevin Durant’s way? Pull scheduling and playoff format strings to get beloved players saddled with crappy teams into the second round of the playoffs once a decade. Will you get called out? Yes. Does that matter? Not if you’re keeping awareness of the Hornets alive and rewarding the league’s 15th-best player doing everything he can to keep them out of the cellar.
With the new-school fans, you can excite them with trinkets. Adjust playoff selection to account for varying strengths of schedule (or give some spots to the best teams in the 50 round-robin games and others to the best teams in the 32 rivalry games). Add that long-discussed double-elimination tournament for draft status that could replace the lottery. Designate one day a year, when every team is playing, and say the highest-scoring player gets a million-dollar bonus, then see what happens. The breathlessness with which some slivers have greeted the play-in tournament demonstrates that gimmicks play.
I wasn’t expecting to go on this long. I didn’t expect to offer solutions. I still think the NBA is great and worth watching, and a good playoff series, three of which we hopefully have ahead of us between the Conference Finals and the Finals (Bucks/Celtics is looking good, too, credit to Bucks/Celtics), is always a blast. It’s just striking how much worse the NBA postseason is in its early rounds than that of every other major sport, including bodies like the English Premier League which don’t have a postseason at all. I may not be the NBA’s market, but the longer I stare at it the less I see what its market actually is.
Back to the NHL
Gelo is higher on the Predators than betting markets are, but we should be clear that Gelo isn’t going around saying the Predators are going to win. Rather, it thinks the Avalanche aren’t inevitable. Might be right, might be wrong, long time to see. For Nashville, we’re just pulling up the Dumb & Dumber GIF.
Gelo has been right twice on the Hurricanes, so it’s possible it’s seeing something there. Game 3 in that series has some tense, violent overtones, heading over to Boston. Exciting stuff.
The Lightning and Leafs are scoring goals (well, not the Lightning on Tuesday, I guess) and have gone back-and-forth over the first two. Blues/Wild is compelling as well, and the crowd in Edmonton was rapturous there at the end as they closed out the blowout and evened back up that series.
Penguins/Rangers feels so old-school on paper. Not quite the original six, but two of the teams you think of quickest when you think ‘NHL’ as a casual outside fan. Great hockey uniforms. Hockey that feels like hockey, which is one weakness of the otherwise-great atmospheres in places like Raleigh.
The Capitals have a sense of knowing veteranhood around them which makes them feel more a threat than, say, the Stars, even if the Stars have better odds tonight. Helps that the Caps won one, though the Stars were competitive on Tuesday, even if they hardly managed any shots.
The Cubs Sure Were Frustrating
I think last night’s was the first game of the season that got me to yell a full-bodied, “FUCK.” It was after the Ian Happ strikeout. Terrible game by a lot of people, but I’m going to focus my frustration on David Ross, who chose last night as a time to try to let Kyle Hendricks get his groove back when he clearly didn’t have his groove and the bullpen, though taxed on Tuesday, had a lot of arms available. Martin should have been available. Wick, Givens, and Robertson were all available. Newcomb and Norris and Gsellman should have been available. If they weren’t, use that IL. Try to win a game.
Had Keegan Thompson been available, I hope we would have seen him to open the fourth. But I don’t think we would have. Because of concerns about Kyle Hendricks’s confidence? His pride? Those things aren’t meaningless in the long run, but go ahead and challenge a guy, especially when he’s been right around replacement-level for such a long time now. The Cubs have, to date, had one of the best bullpens in baseball, and it took until what turned into the winning run (and we knew it might be the winning run, because the offense is unreliable) was on third in the sixth for Ross to use it.
I’m not sure Cubs people realize just how bad Kyle Hendricks is these days. Last night didn’t feel like a bad start, but two home runs in 24 batters? That’s a lot, especially when a guy gave up three over 22 batters five days prior. He’s never been a strikeout pitcher, but there’s a difference between striking out five batters a start and striking out four batters a start, and it’s kind of big, especially when your walk numbers are doubling. Only one walk last night, but—two home runs! Only two strikeouts! That’s bad!
Hendricks has had two good starts this year in six attempts (only one quality start, to use a statistic), and they both came against offenses in the bottom third of the league. By all means, the Cubs should keep pitching him, but in a game it would mean something to win? Don’t treat it like an exhibition.
This is, notably, probably my first big real frustration with David Ross. Maybe I’m just getting impatient too early in this process. Or maybe the Cubs have no intention of trying to win this year and are already just playing out the string, focused on 2024, trying to get Hendricks good again by then.
Gabe Kalscheur’s Returning to Ames
This was assumed, but it’s now official. The Cyclones will have Gabe Kalscheur back next season. The safe assumption is that he will remain an offensive liability, but the defense should be great and there’s at least upside on the offensive side, though hopefully he doesn’t try to do too much and become both inefficient and highly used.
LSU: Surviving
KJ Williams, a top-ten transfer on EvanMiya, is following Matt McMahon from Murray State to LSU. LSU’s still running a large transfer deficit, but they’re closing the gap.
***
Viewing schedule tonight (italics denotes second screen):
- 7:00 PM EDT: Penguins @ Rangers (TNT)
- 7:30 PM EDT: Capitals @ Panthers (TBS)
- 9:30 PM EDT: Predators @ Avalanche (TNT)
- 10:00 PM EDT: Stars @ Flames (TBS)
The pitching matchups tonight are just underwhelming enough and the Cubs were just bad enough last night to make it an evening off from baseball. Plenty of that coming up over the weekend (also, Shohei Ohtani just swirlied the Red Sox in a day game at Fenway, and it might mean something in the AL West).
