It has been official since March 31, the NBA will set up a mid-season tournament inspired by the European Football Cups. Group matches will be added to the schedule in November, before an eight-team knockout tournament in December, and a Final Four that will likely be played in Las Vegas.
Yahoo! Sports reveals new details about this unprecedented competition in the history of the NBA, and it is rather a puzzle! Thus, we learn that the preliminary tournament matches will count as regular season matches, as previously announced.
The teams will be divided into six pools of five teams each, without these pools necessarily being modeled on the current divisions. These five teams will play each other once (each team will therefore play twice at home and twice away).
Then, the six teams that will win each group, plus two teams drafted, will advance to the knockout stage of the tournament. For the moment, the NBA has not defined the rules for deciding between tied teams…
The tournament final will not count towards the final scoreboard
After these quarter-finals, the four teams that qualify for the semi-finals will compete in a Final Four-type configuration at a neutral site, which should therefore be Las Vegas. Then, in the same place, a final.
With the introduction of this tournament, teams will start the season with an 80-match schedule. The eight teams that will play the final phase of the tournament will play 82 matches, and the finalists will even reach 83 matches. Except that this 83rd match will not count in the balance sheet of the regular season… The twenty-two franchises which are not qualified for this tournament will see themselves adding two more matches!
Sporting interest? None. The winner or the runner-up will not have any free pass for the rest of the season, or additional draft picks. On the other hand, each player will receive a bonus of 500,000 dollars in the event of victory in this tournament.
