- NBA.Think of Disney
In a competition that has a regular league of 82 games and four Playoff rounds for the best of seven games, trying to summarize a season in a few weeks seems complicated. And almost unfair.
The NBA stopped in early March following a positive for coronavirus from Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert . There was one month of regular league left in which the franchises still had to play approximately 20 games, before starting the Playoffs, which last two months.
It is a totally different situation from the few days pending in European football, only comparable to the Euroleague , which, given the impossibility of finishing, has decided to cancel the season.
The NBA, with money from televisions on the table, cannot afford to end the matter, so it is working against the current to try to solve a situation that has gotten out of hand socially, with more than 100,000 deaths from coronavirus. in the country.
Although it is behind closed doors, traveling and playing matches in the natural headquarters of each franchise is not feasible, so for weeks the league has been in negotiations with Disney World to make Orlando host the end of the season.
But what will that end be like? How to summarize three months, one of the regular league and two of the Playoffs in just a few weeks and in one venue? How to be fair to all the teams that are fighting for a position? The greatest example we have in the fight for eighth place in the Western Conference . According to the analyzes, the Grizzlies have the most complicated schedule, and maintained a three-game lead over the Blazers and Pelicans, who had recovered Zion Williamson. Hence the peculiarities when choosing a way to end or another. Right now, two options appear on the table: the 'World Cup' model and the 'Play-in'.
The ' World Cup ' model is easy to understand. According to ESPN, the NBA would choose a number of teams (which is still undetermined, between 16 and 30) and divide them into various groups with seeded teams . These teams would face each other a number of times (which is also undetermined) and the top eight would advance to the quarterfinals.
This format, despite the novelty, is not very popular with franchises that had already made a place for themselves in the 'real' Playoffs, because they could be left out if they lose in the group stage against teams that were lower in the classification.
This seems to be the option that franchises like the most , and according to the latest surveys it would have the support of more than 60% of the owners of the league. It is about playing a previous Playoff to determine the teams that will play the final Playoff. That is, the teams that fight for the last places that would give access to the Playoff would play a mini-tournament to determine the final classification . "That would be perfect," admits Damian Lillard, Blazers star. "We haven't done well enough to be in the top eight just like that," he admits.
At the moment, it is not clear which teams would compete in this mini-tournament , although the NBA has even considered that this 'Play-in' also includes the worst teams in the league, such as Chicago or New York, large markets that would ensure spectators to the another side of the screen, something vital for the league, needed to justify its television megacontract. And they would give a reason to play franchises that theoretically had no objective in these 20 games that remained in the regular league.
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