NBA Knockout Tournament: The Pros and Cons

There has been an elephant in the NBA room for quite some time now. Television viewership has been declining steadily since last season.

It’s clear some changes are needed to shake up the NBA format. However, as commissioner Adam Silver has found, those changes will be difficult to implement.

One proposal Adam Silver has made is the introduction of a mid-season, knockout cup tournament. Such domestic cup competitions are an intrinsic part of elite European soccer seasons.

However, they are alien to an American audience. With NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB, not to mention the college sports, U.S sports fans are simply spoiled for choice. An NBA knockout tournament would have to be fantastic at the very least to pique the required interest.

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Pros:

Knockout competitions provide some distraction and potential salvation for teams who are underperforming in the league. In countries like England, it becomes apparent that some teams’ seasons are over from a league perspective. Cup competitions provide another chance to win a trophy and an escape from the malaise of a poor league season.

Giant killings. In a league format, you can comfortably predict who is going to beat who, at least most of the time. However, in a one-off game, any underdog can win. Knockout matches can fire up teams in a way they simply wouldn’t be in the league, leading to some delightful David VS Goliath results.

Cons:

Coaches will hate it. With fixture pileup an issue across all elite sports, a pressurized knockout games are not always ideal. In England, where they have two domestic knockout competitions, coaches often use the lesser of the two, The League Cup, to rest their big stars and blood young players. Often this leads to strange, muddled matches, or games that never get going at all.

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Lack of history. The English FA Cup is 148 years old. The League Cup is 59 years old. Both are part of the fabric of football in England, with all the weight of history and tradition behind them. In the United States, where franchises move around the country and things change rapidly, tradition is not as important. An NBA knockout tournament would have to convince it’s audience based on its merits, and not history. 

Nonetheless, such a tournament would be interesting if nothing else. The implications it would have on roster rotation and load management would change the NBA. Sadly, that is probably exactly why it won’t happen.