Depending on who you ask, the NBA’s new in-season tournament is either the worst thing ever conceived or a stroke of genius by commissioner Adam Silver.
If your name is Phil Mushnick and you’re the definition of curmudgeon, then the former applies to his latest screed in the New York Post. The longtime columnist, who has never shied from telling you how much he dislikes just about everything in sports, picked at the commissioner for the league’s push to giving more importance to early regular-season games:
“It’s a con, an artificial additive designed to stimulate TV ratings (future cable TV and streaming revenues) while featuring senselessly diminished basketball played by the same openly unhappy multimillionaire players who gripe that they’d rather be anywhere else, including sitting out entire games in order to rest, and are indulged by pandering coaches who pretend that we can’t see or know better,” Mushnick wrote. “While Adam Silver & Co. are focused on reinventing the flat tire, the NBA game as an all-in, two-way, X’s and O’s spectacle has been lost to diminished appeal, boardwalk games — gimmickry.”
The tournament incentivizes teams to go all-in during the early frame of the regular season, a time when the league supposedly waves the white flag as it competes with the NFL, college football and Major League Baseball’s World Series (should the Fall Classic extend itself into early November). With these specific games designated to be played on Tuesdays and Fridays, there’s a bit of truth to those concerns. Those are nights when all is generally quiet on the gridiron until the weekend.
That said, the players themselves have largely accepted and welcomed the chance to win the inaugural NBA Cup, with a business trip to a city not traditionally in the league’s travel plans, Las Vegas – a city that’s been flirting with the league for potential expansion.
On Friday, several teams will take part in their respective first games of this competition, including a leading title contender in the Boston Celtics. Kristaps Porzingis, one of the team’s buzziest acquisitions in the offseason, offered praise for the new tournament ahead of Boston’s first go-round. The Latvian-born center told NBC Sports Boston that the in-season tournament is reminiscent of competitions he grew up watching and playing in:
“I love it,” said Celtics center Kristaps Porzingis. “In Europe, we always have some sort of tournament, preseason or during the year. So when I was growing up, I always enjoyed those kinds of tournaments. Kind of more spotlight, something that’s midseason. So I think it’s been presented really well here in the NBA. We’ll see, we’ll see when it happens, but I believe it’s going to be a great success. I know a lot of people are a little bit skeptical; I think it’s going to be a huge success and I look forward to hopefully winning it.”
Maybe if the special courts weren’t so divisive, the games themselves wouldn’t have drawn such intense hatred in some circles. Yet some people like Mushnick, who has a lengthy list of contrarian and arguably bigoted gripes with the NBA, are going to hate anything that brings more attention to the game in the middle of fall.
