With the NBA set to make an announcement soon on which format it intends to implement once the season resumes, team general managers were recently surveyed to help the NBA make the best decision possible. The results of the said survey have been released, and according to Kevin O’Connor of The Ringer, 75 percent of GMs prefer a play-in tournament format.
The report explains the premise of the NBA survey and presented the results of the same:
General managers were surveyed about a “playoffs-plus” format—either a play-in tournament between the bubble teams to determine the final seeds in the playoffs, or a World Cup–style group stage, which would replace the end of the regular season and the first round of the playoffs with a round-robin format. About 75 percent of (NBA) teams voted in favor of a play-in tournament, sources said, while 25 percent of teams voted in favor of the group stage.
To be clear, the basic concept of an NBA play-in tournament will require a certain number of teams to battle it out for the final one or two playoff spots in each conference. Some outlets have suggested that the seventh to tenth seeds will battle it out in a single-elimination tournament to determine which two teams will proceed to the postseason as the seventh and eighth seeds.
This format will obviously be to the advantage of the other top seeds that will not be required to participate in the NBA play-in tournament. This is in contrast to doing a group stage type of format wherein each team in the group will have an equal chance of advancing (and getting eliminated) to the next stage.
We will need to take the results of this survey with a grain of salt. NBA general managers would have almost certainly voted for the best-fit scenario for their own team. After all, why wouldn’t they?
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