I like the idea in theory, but some teams could end up playing 84 regular season games. Hard pass. All the group play games have to be part of the regular season.
So why can't the tiebreaker be as simple as: 1. Head to Head. 2. Regular Season Winning Percentage as of the end of group play.
There is probably enough flexibility in the in-conference schedules to provide for a 12-team knockout round with 4 byes (who play ordinary games on the day
prior to when the R16 games are played, let's say), subsuming matchups that would otherwise happen later in the season. The chance would exist that you'd end up having an extra in-division game (the Celtics played the Knicks 5 times last year, for example), but you'd very likely be able to avoid that in most cases.
What I don't quite get is why, last year, we ended up playing the Pacers 5 times. According to my understanding of how the schedule is supposed to be adjusted, that QF Cup matchup should have replaced one of our later-season matchups: we played them in Indy in back-to-back games later in the season, Jan 6th and 8th, so one of those should've been cancelled and replaced with a different opponent.
Basically, the NBA schedule is set up this way:
- You play in-division teams (x4) 4 times each: 2 at home, 2 away. = 16 games
- You play out-of-conference teams (x15) 2 times: 1 at home, 1 away. = 30 games
- You play in-conference, out-of-division teams (x10),
either 3 or 4 times. At least 1 home and 1 away, sometimes 2 and 2, but sometimes 1-and-2 or 2-and-1. Total 36 games, so you play 4x of those opponents 3 times, and 6x opponents 4 times.
The tournament affects it like this:
- Because they need to hold spots for prospective Cup QF and SF matches, they only schedule 80 of your 82 games, with the 2 left out being the in-conference, out-of-division type. So initially, you'd be scheduled for 3 games against 6x opponents, and 4 games against only 4x opponents
- The hope is that from among the teams making the knockouts, they would only be among the teams scheduled to play each other 3 times already, and the Cup knockout would provide a 4th, keeping everybody balanced.
- But that's only true for 6 out of 14 (43%) prospective opponents for the knockout round, who are of course all in-conference. The rest of the time, you'd already have 4 games scheduled against your knockout opponent, and the knockout game would provide a 5th. That seems to have been the case for us and Indy, and also the case for the Knicks and Milwaukee.
- Teams not making the knockouts have plenty of options for the league to choose from in order to (hastily) schedule their 81st and 82nd games, on off-days from the Cup matchdays. But teams eliminated in the QFs pretty much have to play each other, because nobody else is available on those days. That's how we ended up playing the Knicks a 5th time.
- The question of which team hosts the QF games also affects the home/road split. For example, because they hosted the QFs and also were nominally the home team for the SF game (in Vegas), the Milwaukee Bucks technically had 42 home games and 40 road games last season, as did the Lakers. The Pelicans (Cup semifinalists) had 40 home / 42 away, although somehow Indy (the other semifinalist) escaped with keeping 41 and 41 - I have no idea who else was missing a home game.
My understanding was that in the event of the Cup schedule forcing a 5th game against an opponent, they instead replace a game later in the season against that opponent with a game against another team for each of you, against whom you each only had 3 scheduled games already. But I guess either (A) that's not the case at all, I made that up and only imagined reading it, or (B) finding appropriate matchups they could shuffle around in that manner proved a lot harder than they anticipated, so they just said "F it, they can play 5 times, whatever, leave it alone".
Either way, it appears to be the case that the regular-season schedule becomes more unbalanced for the teams making the knockout rounds, both in terms of opponents and sometimes in terms of home/road split too. There are probably ways to fix that, if the league decided it was a problem, but at present it is unchanged from last year.
