We’ve talked a lot over the years about the various playoff formats of different sports. Our opinion can be quickly summarized as follows:
- Virtually all playoff formats are perfectly fine. If everyone is playing under the same rules, the system is fair. Leagues should prioritize what they want.
- If the priority is pure competition, there should be no playoffs and each team should play as balanced of a schedule as possible. (Think: English Premier League or most high school football regular seasons.)
- If the priority is excitement, the answer is less clear. A massive single-elimination bracket can provide a lot of chaos, but it can eliminate a lot of good teams. (Think: college basketball.) A bracket of long series can prove epic at times, but it can also get tedious. (Think: NBA.) A large playoff field eliminates complaints—reasonable or otherwise—that good teams were left out, but it lowers the stakes of the regular season. (Think: college football on the first part, NBA on the second.) A small playoff field increases the stakes of the regular season, but it eliminates more teams earlier in the year. (Think: MLB in the years before the Wild Card Game.)
For the NBA, the current priority seems to be to get every star player into the postseason in some fashion. That’s a fine priority for a league to have. By increasing the quantity of high-stakes games involving a star player, the league increases total interest in the Play-In Tournament and the Playoffs. However. This approach risks devaluing the regular season, something which then decreases interest in the regular season. Long term effects of too many playoff teams upon league interest are still hypothetical, and the NBA playoffs are less random than the MLB or NHL playoffs, which helps the format’s legitimacy. But I can tell you this: We would care the same amount about the Conference Semifinals, the Conference Finals, and the NBA Finals in a world in which only four teams from each conference made the postseason. We would care more about the regular season.
Is the first round worth it? Evidently. It exists, doesn’t it? The ratings must be good enough. But as of right now, going off of betting markets, only one first round series features two teams with better than a 10% chance of reaching the NBA Finals. Clippers vs. Mavericks. That’s the only one. No other first round series has much in the way of championship ramifications.
There will be good, high-profile first round series. Maybe as many as five of them will move the needle. But how many good, high-profile regular season games were there this year? The biggest things that broke through the Masters* yesterday, at least from my vantage point, were that the Knicks didn’t throw a game it would have been advisable to throw and that Boban Marjanović missed a free throw on purpose late in the fourth quarter of a single-digit game in order to win the opposing team’s crowd free chicken sandwiches. There were seedings at stake. Some teams were playing to avoid the Play-In Tournament. The results were so expected that the biggest news of the day became one team trying to win and one player not trying to win. There were stakes, and they didn’t matter.
The Playoffs will be great.
I know the NBA knows it has a problem and is working to solve it.
I just don’t know how many gimmicks can make up for a situation in which the league has painted itself into this TV money corner.
*Masters analysis: Scottie Scheffler is good, and the Masters continues to be a magical sporting event.
Mark Pope Was a Terrible Hire and a Great One. It Depends When You Asked.
Kentucky reintroduced Mark Pope to its fanbase yesterday, and what a scene it was. Inside Rupp Arena, which was filled to something like capacity, the team bus pulled out onto the floor to deposit members of the 1996 national championship team, a group that included Reed Sheppard’s dad, Jeff, and culminated with Pope himself carrying the national championship trophy. It was theatrical. Especially for an event that was officially a “press conference.”
From there, it only got better for Big Blue Nation. Pope—personable and energetic and enthusiastic—winked and nodded at John Calipari’s disdain for the SEC Tournament, Reed Sheppard’s pending NBA decision, and fan frustrations that individual player brands have overshadowed the name “Kentucky” over recent years. The crowd cheered and chanted. Hugs were numerous. Kentucky fans were on cloud nine.
We came a long way from Thursday night’s public flogging of athletic director Mitch Barnhart.
What happened? There are three things at play here:
First, a lot of college basketball fans and media were unfamiliar with Mark Pope. Some, including me, were too young to personally remember Rick Pitino’s heyday at Kentucky, one which heavily featured Pope and Sheppard. We didn’t understand how much that team still means to Kentucky, or what Pope means having been a part of it. Others didn’t realize how good Pope’s BYU teams have been, ignorant to the 2019–20 team’s success and so fixated on first round games in the NCAA Tournament that they didn’t understand what it means that BYU posted a winning Big 12 record in its first year as a basketball high-major. BYU exists below the national spotlight in college hoops. A lot of fans and media do not delve into their depths. This is fine—we don’t want an award for knowing who Aly Khalifa is—but it led to a lot of people being wrong about Pope’s track record.
Second, Pope’s announcement came from a coaching cycle focused on Dan Hurley, Scott Drew, and Billy Donovan. The expectation on Wednesday was that Kentucky would give Drew a blank check and Drew would probably accept. The expectation on Thursday morning, after Drew declined, was that Kentucky would give Hurley a blank check and Hurley would probably decline, but that Kentucky would simply wait nine days and give the blank check to Billy Donovan after his Chicago Bulls infection had run its annual course. Even if Donovan said no, Pope’s hiring would have been surprising. There were safer names on the list. Was it the right move? Yes. Drew and Hurley illustrate that if you don’t get the best college basketball coaches before they’re the best, they’re pretty likely these days to stay in their own castles. Kentucky is in a position to take home run swings, and Barnhart took a home run swing, trying to pick the next Scott Drew and make Kentucky his Camelot. But Barnhart took that swing it in a different way than he’d swung earlier in the week, and in a different way than people expected. It was surprising, and Pope stood in tough contrast, being measured not against John Calipari (a tough comparison as well), but against three of the last four NCAA Tournament championships.
Third, the Kentucky fans who roared their approval yesterday afternoon were mostly not those who lamented the hire on Thursday night. Some came around, but for the most part, Thursday night complainers were people who spend a high degree of their time on the internet. College basketball’s core fans are not an especially online people. Kentucky’s core fans are especially not an especially online people. The hire looked bad to 31-year-olds scrolling Twitter. They wanted whichever coach ranked highest in the present-day “best coaches” rankings. The hire looked great to empty-nesters who want Kentucky basketball to mean something again beyond being an NBA factory. Twitter has a lot of uses, but gauging public sentiment is not one of them. The reaction was not as negative as a lot of media believed. Media should not take cues from the online hordes.
In the end, I personally find myself more sympathetic to Kentucky than ever. How can you not like Mark Pope? Sure, perhaps he’ll become unlikable, but for right now, yesterday was a great moment in the college basketball world. Even Calipari seems happier, enjoying a fresh start. Good for everybody.
(I will say, as I have said elsewhere by now: Pope is going to have way too high of expectations entering November, especially if Sheppard doesn’t come back. He’ll probably have a top-25 team, but there’ll be top-10 expectations, and if the team pops out of the rankings now and then, there will be plenty of overreactions. He should do great by Year Two, though.)
The Rest
MLB:
- If you missed it, Andrew McCutchen hit his 300th home run. Always great when he gets a moment.
The NHL:
- ESPN and a few others are reporting with confidence that the Coyotes are moving to Salt Lake City next year, and that the franchise is being sold, meaning it’s permanent. The deal will reportedly come with a provision allowing Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo the option to buy an expansion team and name it the Coyotes should he successfully get an arena built in Phoenix, but I don’t know that the NHL would be pushing this sale if they believed that arena was going to exist. The sale and move still seems liable to fall through, but it appears likelier than not that Utah is getting an NHL team.
Chicago, and Iowa State:
- Fresh out of Michigan, Frank Nazar made his Blackhawks debut yesterday and scored on his first career shot. I think the college-to-NHL transition is weirder to me than college-to-MLB or college-to-WNBA, among the three where athletes can play a full season collegiately and enter the pros in the same year. By “weirder” I don’t mean it’s bad. It just breaks my brain more. The Frozen Four was this weekend!
- If you’re looking for an angle through which to allow yourself some excitement about the Bulls, let me say this: They’re favored over the Hawks. They’re actually not a terrible bet to pull off a one-game upset of the Heat or the Sixers. After that, I’ve got nothing, but they could at least get to a series against the Celtics. The nice thing about this team is that it looks enough like a good team to play everybody close. Maybe every single one of those games will break the Bulls’ way.
- It was a great weekend for the Cubs. Great to win that series. Fun ending, too, with the Adbert Alzolay pickoff. I don’t know that I have anything unique to say about Michael Busch. Three home runs on the series, plus two walks and two more hits. The guy is raking so far. The exact thing you want from first base.
- If I had to guess, I’d guess the signed–last–night Julio Teheran is merely insurance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Craig Counsell spoke highly of him to the front office after working with him last season in Milwaukee. Counsell said yesterday morning that Jameson Taillon should be back this week.
- We’re working on more specific Iowa State coverage (aiming for Friday on that), but the short version of the Cyclone offseason so far is that the net transfer movement is positive but that the team’s still not going to be elite in the paint, barring a big surprise. Graduating all those big men is tough, even if there should be a lot of other improvement.
NASCAR:
- It was a weird weekend at Texas, but it wasn’t a dud. Chase Elliott getting back into victory lane is a big deal in that he’s into the playoffs and has some points once there (plus winning any race matters in its own right), but I don’t know what it says about the No. 9 team just yet. Hendrick is a place where you can stumble into checkered flags.
