PHILADELPHIA — The first reaction to anything new in sports is for the masses to assume they are about to be made to look foolish. Since 99 out of 99.1 times they are spot-on, it’s a generally healthy attitude to maintain, otherwise they will be expected to unconditionally embrace football in a hockey rink.
You go, sports fans.
Keep that guard up.
They are out to get you and you know it.
But every once in a while – and one of those moments would arrive Tuesday night at the Wells Fargo Center when the Sixers hosted the Indiana Pacers for a dual-purpose game – there is a gimmick-push worth considering before laughing it all away.
That Adam Silver, he’s onto something this time with the NBA in-season tournament.
Basically, the NBA has come up with a way to correct its No. 1 flaw: Regular-season games where the players compete hard in the first six minutes and the last three, but spend the rest of the night running around as if in a fitness-center pickup scrum. That’s if the most visible players compete at all or rather are load-managed, which is English for being too fan-dismissive to bother with working.
The in-season tournament – as a component of a stricter league Player Participation Policy – is an effort to blunt that trend. And considering the one individual the NBA is using to make it work, it will not only endure but grow. That individual? Get over here, George Washington. Who loves ‘ya?
Yes, the NBA has incentivized the players to play harder in the tourney games by offering $500,000 to each member of the first-place team, $200,000 to each runner-up, $100 K as show money and $50,000 – the check, in other words, for one night in a decent Miami gentleman’s steakhouse – to the other players in the Final Four. Even for close-to-billionaires, a half a million is a nice payoff for winning a tournament that will require one extra game to complete.
The genius of the event is that it is made up of regular-season games, the kind that too many players have trotted through for at least the last 30 years. The risen stakes will fuel greater motivation to participate and play hard, in some cases literally past the final horn. The other night in Detroit, Joel Embiid – hip to the fine print that point differential will be among the seeding tiebreakers – attempted a three-point shot at the horn with a 114-106 lead. Embiid said the Pistons were so furious that they tried to fight him for what had always been considered a professionally taboo rub-it-in stunt, but the league MVP was taking no chances with $500K potentially at stake. Not that violence is a sports sweetener – OK, it is, but that was just the obligatory disclaimer – but any rule-twist that would inspire anyone to pick a rumble with a seven-foot, 280-pound 29-year-old is worth marking down in permanent ink. And good for Embiid – who has never seen a pre-game injury report he couldn’t squeeze onto – for being so aware of the tournament nuances. Think he would have been so committed to his homework if 500 large hadn’t been splashed into the pot?
“I think it’s an incentive for all of the players,” Nick Nurse said before the game. “I think they talk about it. This tournament definitely has our attention. The guys are alert to it. This is an important game for us. And I think the $500,000 helps.
“It doesn’t hurt, I know that much.”
If there was any initial distaste about the tourney, it was that it could have been the kind of confusion-inducer that makes Major League Soccer so difficult for most Americans to follow. Hey, FC Cincinnati United SC is playing tonight, but does the game count? That’s not the situation with the NBA tourney because, well, the games count. And if the players can make more money in the process, that should boost the fan experience.
Technically, were it not for the pop-art floor laid down in the WFC Tuesday, ticket-buyers might not have remembered that the second visit from the Pacers in three days was part of an essential gambling event. That’s the idea, too: To sneak better intensity into the regular season when no one is really looking.
Eventually, a trophy will be awarded to the championship team, but if it is the Sixers, there will be no need to smear lard on Frankford Ave. lampposts. The satisfaction of winning something other than the Larry O’Brien will forever be insignificant. But if the NBA can show how spreading money around in new ways can boost the in-season product, then what is the problem? And if it works, it will eventually spread to the NHL, NFL and beyond.
So maybe no one asked for a game on a fire-engine red court in November. But more players trying harder in professional sports is something to embrace, not one more novelty to fear.
Contact Jack McCaffery at jmccaffery@delcotimes.com
Source: Berkshire mont
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