The Whiteboard: Forget the NBA All-Star Game, let’s do a midseason tournament

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The NBA All-Star game/weekend is pretty fun, but there seems to be a general consensus amongst fans and players and everybody else involved that it could be better, as evidenced by the NBA changing up the format in an attempt to make the game more competitive. Here’s an alternative idea: get rid of the game entirely.

Don’t worry, this isn’t some grouchy declaration that exhibition games are dumb or anything like that. All-Star is fine. But, a midseason tournament with real stakes could be way, way better if the NBA were to implement one.

A few problems arise right away. Each team playing more games could be tough on players, and teams will be about as motivated to play in a single elimination tournament with no stakes as they are an All-Star Game, if not less so. Fear not, there are solutions to these problems.

The NBA regular season is way too long anyway, so let’s knock some games off of it. Usually, owners are immediately against the season being shortened for revenue reasons, but this tournament should draw more eyes and attention than some dumb March game featuring a pair of teams trying their damnedest to lose, and thus be more profitable.

How about 72 games instead of 82, so no team ends up playing more than 82 games. The most a team could play in the tournament is five games, so there should be space to relax on either side of this like there is now with the current NBA All-Star Break.

Now, to the competitive part. This midseason tournament needs some stakes to make teams care about it. How about the assets front offices have come to cherish like no other — first round draft selections. That’s right, the top three finishers in this tourney all get an extra first-round pick.

To ensure lottery teams don’t get completely hosed by this, we’re adding three extra picks between the lotto and the playoff team selections. Whoever wins the tournament gets 15 overall in addition to their other pick(s), the loser of the championship game gets 16, and the winner of the two teams that lost in the semifinals gets the 17th pick.

There are precisely zero NBA teams that would not want an extra first-round draft pick. Even if a team was capped out and couldn’t afford to keep an extra pick, they could flip that first for a future pick or some other asset. Every team would care, and since the tournament is single elimination there is no guarantee the best team in the league would win. Anything can happen in a single game. Imagine all of the appeal of March Madness, but featuring players who are actually good at basketball and also are being paid for their work!

To make the bracket work two teams need to get byes in the first round. As we here at The Whiteboard believe in seeding teams 1-16, those two spots will go to the best two teams in the NBA as decided through their record, or the other various tiebreakers that apply to typical playoff seeding.

The games played won’t count in the standings to avoid complications with seeding later, and the statistics from games played will be in a separate category like postseason stats are now. The other real concern is the risk of injury, but injuries can happen in regular season games (which there would be less of in this scenario), the current NBA All-Star Game, or just randomly during life. It’s sad but true that the risk of injury is never entirely escapable.

Will this ever happen? Almost certainly not. But dang, it would be a whole lot of fun if it did.

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