If the National Basketball Association and their associated minions really wanted us to want tonight’s and tomorrow’s play-in games, they would have found a way to either make the Los Angeles Lakers two games better or the Brooklyn Nets eight games worse. And if that seems too daunting to make either the Charlotte Hornets or the Atlanta Hawks seven games worse.
Finally, the play-in game is designed, knowingly or inadvertently, to offer new lifelines to supposedly popular teams that they think will attract more attention. You know, like the Lakers, Nets or New York Knicks. Teams you know actively instigate cataracts, but will still inspire more prose than the Hornets, Hawks, or New Orleans Pelicans.
Marketers will recognize this particular tactic from their college days as “shameless pandering,” but that’s what passes for mindset in the basketball world. Big names without games are always considered more desirable. That’s often backward thinking, but nobody’s ever been fired for repeating the same old tired tropes to their bosses who got to where they are now by repeating the same old tired tropes to their bosses.
While the Lakers created more entertainment by being a stinking pile of oily rags set alight near a paint factory, the need for LeBron content could also have been met by finishing 10th and then one last Times were humiliated by either New Orleans or San Antonio. And it’s true, the Nets managed to undermine Kevin Durant with a series of first-person moves by first-person buddies that somehow left them outside the top 6 while STILL being the Eastern’s betting favorite in some books Conference were viewed. And it’s true, the Knicks have the same chemistry problems with very few chemicals.
But the play-in games don’t really work as an Adam Silver-sanctioned concept unless they’re all-in or all-out, and the Nets are the only ones who have shown enough guts to not hit sixty percent of their losing games. They may historically be officially a new phenomenon, but Durant, Kyrie Irving and the late James Harden have made them a boring national topic of conversation, which frankly is exactly the redundancy it reads for. That speaks volumes about Durant and Irving’s unpredictable talents, but also makes it a far more despicable watch than it was a year ago. They certainly promised a lot and delivered Meh, keeping the distance in New York’s affections between them and the rebellious Knicks at chasm levels. The Nets are a true rarity, a daily national staple whose locals would rather see the New York Rangers. One suspects this speaks volumes about the intellectual bankruptcy of the national media, that the sluggish monochrome webs still count as an important narrative, but it’s not like the league covered it any differently. There are worries and worries, and they are largely driven by market size.
As such, the play-in tournament is designed as a lifeline for teams like the Lakers, who are so off-putting they may not be able to use it for the next five years, and for the Knicks, who have been this thing for almost the entire century. It will likely instead serve as a temporary showcase for young but healing teams like Minnesota, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans and yes, even San Antonio. So if you like new people doing new things on a new stage, this could be a nice little distraction. It can even cater to teams with injured stars who escaped play-in and have more time to heal them (yes, you are, Golden State).
It’s just that this is another example of the law of unintended consequences. The league has adopted a strategy over the years that relies on a few old favorites and rejecting intriguing newcomers until they’re forced to do something else. That’s known as the Warriors Conundrum, after the long-irrelevant team (one 18-year playoff appearance between 1994 and 2012) that became the most entertaining team of the last decade and helped spark a ratings and attention renaissance that has since dissipated . Nobody wants to bet on who the next Warriors might be because the odds are too long, leaving the need for old favorites high in the league office. The league hates novelty until it’s proven to generate consistent attention, and only got the Nets, a triumph of the hot-take hype without substance whose greatest moment in the post-Julius Erving era was Durant’s too-long toe.
It’s not so much that play-in is a bad idea per se, as it satisfies the league’s need for more inventory at a time when everything about it is crying out for less. It also gave you your first in-depth look at Memphis and Ja Morant, if that’s your idea of fun (and it should be). Based on what it was really designed for, which is to help old widow teams who have either fallen on hard times (LA) or defined them by their very existence (New York), it failed as a lifeline because it locked that lifeline two Teams indulged in their own cultural failings and unable to capitalize on it. And whoever used it is a team that far too many people outside of the effects-crazed talk show diaspora would rather not see because it’s a ziggurat of deformity trying to transcend Kevin Durant’s undeniable virtues.
Sounds like fun when you’re the kind of person that everyone else at the bar walks away from when you sit down.