Bulls '22-'23 Season Thread

[We Got The Whole 9]

13 minutes ago, Derwood said:

What does this mean??

 

 

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/38192234/what-nba-season-tournament-format-schedule-groups

 

$$$$

[UMFan83]

1 minute ago, Derwood said:

Yes

6 groups of 5, 3 in the east 3 in the west.  Groups are decided by previous year's record, but pulled randomly (the top 3 teams in the east each in a own group, then the 4-6 teams in the easy randomly put into those groups and so on down the line).

Everyone plays the 4 other teams in their group once.  These count as both regular season games and in-season tournament games.  The 6 group winners advance as well as 1 wild card from each conference.  Then there are QF, SF and Finals to crown a champion.  I believe every game except the championship is a regular season game.  The teams that don't advance will have regular season games added to their schedule so that ultimately everyone plays the same number of games except the 2 finalists. 

[Derwood]

So basically a "the season is too long so we need to make part of it artificially more exciting" type of thing?

[UMFan83]

6 minutes ago, Derwood said:

So basically a "the season is too long so we need to make part of it artificially more exciting" type of thing?

Trying to copy European soccer I guess, except in European soccer the in season tournaments are separate from their domestic league seasons.

[Old Style]

This thing is dumb.

[Tryptamine]

12 minutes ago, Old Style said:

This thing is dumb.

I'm in total agreement. This feels like the WBC, only it actually effects the regular season. 

[UMFan83]

12 minutes ago, Old Style said:

This thing is dumb.

It is kind of dumb but I don't mind it.  For 28 of the 30 teams it really doesn't change anything at all.  If you don't care about it, think of them as regular season games because they are.  The Bulls aren't going to play extra games against the Celtics because of this, they're just going to have 2 of their allotted Celtics games be considered part of the tournament. If youre looking for a reason to assign extra meaning to games during the slog of the regular season, this will help a little bit. 

It's a bit gimmicky and remains to be seen if this will do anything at all for fans, but it's not really anything at all unless you advance to the championship and have to play an 83rd game on a neutral court.

It could be kind of cool if the stakes were higher though, like the winner gets a guaranteed playoff spot or gets an extra lottery slot with 1% odds or something.

Edited August 15, 2023 by UMFan83

[17 Seconds]

5 minutes ago, Tryptamine said:

I'm in total agreement. This feels like the WBC, only it actually effects the regular season. 

the last wbc was a smashing success 

[Derwood]

Are teams going to fly “In-Season Tournament Champions” banners in their arena?

[UMFan83]

7 minutes ago, Derwood said:

Are teams going to fly “In-Season Tournament Champions” banners in their arena?

Maybe?

[Proven Veteran]

I like it. 

[Irrelevant Dude]

This is dumb, but I don't really care.

[Tryptamine]

18 hours ago, 17 Seconds said:

the last wbc was a smashing success 

Yes, I enjoyed the WBC, but I don't want it to have anything to do with the regular season. 

[UMFan83]

1 hour ago, Tryptamine said:

Yes, I enjoyed the WBC, but I don't want it to have anything to do with the regular season. 

For this though what does it matter?  The teams don’t have to put extra emphasis on these games if they don’t want to. Absolutely nothing changes. Same rosters, same rules, same games that would already be played with the same effect on the standings. They’re broadcast on your normal local cable channels. It will feel exactly like any other regular season game when you watch because it basically is. 

[Transmogrified Tiger]

Doesn't feel like this first version has all the dials tuned quite right, but multiple competitions is exactly what American sports need more of so I'm excited to see it happen.

[UMFan83]

52 minutes ago, Transmogrified Tiger said:

Doesn't feel like this first version has all the dials tuned quite right, but multiple competitions is exactly what American sports need more of so I'm excited to see it happen.

Its probably hard to grasp the concept of it if you aren't a soccer fan because its so foreign to the other American sports.  This NBA thing is basically just dipping their toes in the water to allow for the least amount of disruption as possible.

That said, in England for instance each of the different competitions have different meaning.  The FA Cup includes teams from every level of the pyramid, the Carabao Cup includes teams from top 4 leagues in England, then there are the Champions League and Europa league that include teams from all over Europe.  This NBA tournament is just the same 30 teams that are already competing for a championship, so I can understand why the general NBA fan is wondering why we even need this.

It would be really cool if at some point there could be a tournament between NBA teams and Euroleague teams.  Though my guess is that logistics would make it difficult and the talent disparity between the 2 leagues may make it pointless (though I could be wrong!)

[Transmogrified Tiger]

32 minutes ago, UMFan83 said:

That said, in England for instance each of the different competitions have different meaning.  The FA Cup includes teams from every level of the pyramid, the Carabao Cup includes teams from top 4 leagues in England, then there are the Champions League and Europa league that include teams from all over Europe.  This NBA tournament is just the same 30 teams that are already competing for a championship, so I can understand why the general NBA fan is wondering why we even need this.

I agree that playing teams outside the normal league is a compelling reason for those competitions, but I think the biggest potential benefits aren't tied to *who* you play, it's mixing up competitive stakes and motivations.  One of the things that plagues American sports is that by having a singular point of success at the end it creates sometimes perverse incentives when combined with the other rules and realities of the league.  Tanking in MLB(though improved over a decade ago) and load management in the NBA are prime examples.  

One of the ways you can address that is to mix up competitive stakes, tie that end goal to other competitions, or provide some other type of reward to give the competition meaning.  This first edition for the NBA doesn't do a lot of that, though I understand their desire to trojan horse it a bit by making some games dual-purpose and draw corollaries to divisional standings in terms of adding meaning.  But off the top of my head, what if the Eastern and Western conference teams played separate  march madness-style brackets at a neutral site for a guaranteed playoff spot?  What if those winners played for a cash prize and a lottery pick?  Or to take a different tact, what if you had a chunk of games(15-25?) that were designated as part of a different competition, Champions League style, with the best record(s) getting a playoff spot the next year(or a bye if they made it on merit) and the worst record(s) being ineligible for next year's playoffs regardless of record?  

The point is not the specific nuances of those ideas(though without dwelling on it that first one sounds pretty fun), but that once you recognize the idea that all the competition specifics we currently have are a combination of arbitrary and optimized for entertainment, that you can make something that's even better and fixes some current problems by embracing more complexity and separation in those competitions.

[CubinNY]

It's an experiment that is not likely to last more than one season.