The NBA In-Season Tournament Was A Genius Idea
The Lakers won the first IST and LeBron James is the first IST MVP at the ripe age of 38.
The NBA implemented something new this season that had many people, including myself, skeptical. The in-season tournament might go down as one of the best ideas Commissioner Adam Silver has ever made. The skepticism for good reason. There are a lot of obstacles that come into play when you want to implement an in-season tournament in a league that plays 82 games in the regular season. However, there seemed to not be many complaints about it except how the tournament worked.
It's pretty simple. There are 6 divisions total: three for each conference. Though the teams are split randomly within the conference, each division has five teams. The IST games are played every weekend, and you play every team in your division. After that, the leader for each division moves on plus two wild card teams, and it becomes knock-out rounds. The winning team in the end earns 500K for every player on the team.
Now let's go through some of the reasons that made this tournament so successful. The first and most obvious one is that the games felt a lot more competitive. It’s no secret NBA players don’t like going through an 82-game gauntlet of a season. This has been a known thing for a long time and there are always old-school players who like to chime in and say that the new generation is just soft, and they can’t handle it. Nonetheless, this has made a lot of players take games off to rest during a regular season game. Before you question it, I have seen injury updates before games say “rest” for the reason a player is out. So, this tournament gives players a reason to play hard and not sit out for rest purposes. I can’t tell you how many games I watched in the regular season last year that just didn’t have the juice and the energy level was low. A lot of the older players understandably would like to rest as much as possible before the playoffs because they know it’s a long season and they just don’t take all 82 games seriously.
At the end of the day, the NBA is a business first, so they care most about revenue and making money. With that comes the viewership. Last season the regular season games averaged 1.59 million viewers per game. The IST championship got 4.6 million viewers which is more than double the viewers for last year's average regular season games. This goes back to the consumers or basketball fans enjoying watching the IST games with something on the line. It also doesn’t hurt that every player for the winning team gets 500K and the championship game is played in Las Vegas. Obviously, for the highest-paid players like Lebron James and Anthony Davis who both make well over 100 million, the 500K isn’t life-changing for them. However, for every other player on the team, especially the younger guys who haven’t earned a contract extension yet or are undrafted, this money can go a long way to helping them and their families out. While the average NBA contract is 10.8 million dollars, that number is inflated with 100 players with a contract of at least 68 million and 64 players making well over 100 million.
The two teams in the championship were the Los Angeles Lakers and the Indiana Pacers, which leads me to my next point. The Lakers were just in the Western Finals this past season, so no one is surprised that they were in the IST championship. However, no one outside of maybe Pacers fans thought they’d be in that game. They beat two of the top teams to get to the championship: the Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks. In a seven-game series, they're not beating either of those teams. So lesser teams have a better shot of advancing in these types of tournaments because they only have to be the better team for one game. With that being said, there are great players on those inferior teams as well. For the Pacers, it’s PG Tyrese Haliburton who is having an incredible season averaging 26 PPG and a league-high 12.3 APG. Now he’s having his skills be shown on a national stage instead of just local because Indiana isn’t a big market like Miami, New York, or LA. This has the potential to get all the smaller market teams more revenue and maybe even attract bigger stars to those teams as well.
We can’t talk about the IST without talking more about the winners. The Lakers became the first team to win the IST. Lebron James wins the IST MVP. How fitting for a team like the Lakers and a player like James to be the first to win something. With Anthony Davis being relatively healthy so far this season and dominating, and James defying father time, it doesn’t surprise me that they won it all. You have to tip your hat to Commissioner Adam Silver for making such a fantastic idea come to fruition and making the first one a success. Trying something new for such a successful league can most times come with a lot of obstacles and blunders. However, this tournament couldn’t have gone better and who knows, maybe next year’s tournament will have a higher prize pool for the winning team.