Those watching the waning seconds of Tottenham vs. Chelsea on May 2 – from those across the world, watching the match off of their television screens, to the 41,545 fans at London’s Stamford Bridge – are waiting for the referee to blow his whistle to signify the end of the match.

After 36 grueling, memorable, and valiantly fought games, Leicester City, unthinkably, is in a position to win the Barclays Premier League after given preseason odds as low as 5000-1 to do so.

Spectators anticipate – some anxiously, some begrudgingly – each successive second to be the one to officially end the game.

The whistle blows.

Leicester is crowned the champion of the Premier League after second-place Tottenham, which needed to beat Chelsea to prolong their season, tied instead.

Leicester City players congregated at star Jamie Vardy’s house to watch the game on television in the hopes that just the outcome that they had wished for – just the moment that they had dreamt of their entire lives – came into fruition.

Fate did not allow Leicester City to clinch the championship on the pitch, and they were relegated to watching a seemingly peripheral match that decided their season's culmination on a television screen, but they didn't care – they were champions.

Over those 36 games, and over the final 38 game season, Leicester City was clearly the best team in the Premier League. Leicester came away with a championship-caliber 54 of 84 possible points (64.3 percent) in games decided by one goal or less; committed only 10 defensive errors all season, allowing only one goal from those mistakes; notched a goal differential of 32; averaged 22.9 tackles and 21.6 interceptions per game, both atop of the Premier League; and, most importantly, finished atop the EPL table with 81 points – 10 points higher than second-place Tottenham.

The Premier League plays a round-robin style tournament over the course of a season, in which a team plays once at home and once on the road against each of the other 19 teams in the League to determine the champion.

By that same token, the NBA plays 82 games, though not as straightforwardly round-robin as the English system – teams play 4 games against divisional rivals and six other teams from their conference, 3 games against the other four teams in their conference, and 2 games against teams in their adversarial conference – that determine the best teams in the regular season.

Except, to American sports fans, the best regular season team doesn’t matter much come playoff time. Though in every American sports league, the higher caliber team is awarded home-field advantage in the playoffs – one extra game at home, each round, for their regular season efforts* – more than anything, what seed a squad earns in the regular season is simply a stamp, a brand, on one’s side that determines a team’s expected progression through the playoffs.

Note*: the NFL simply has the higher seeded team host the playoff game – a one-game playoff. In addition, the top two teams in each conference are given First Round byes in the NFL postseason. 

A 1-seed should expect a Conference Finals visit at the very least, a 7- or 8-seed is lucky to advance out of the first round, etc.

A team’s regular season seed is not necessarily a barometer of success, but rather an indication of a team’s performance in what seems like a different life – a team’s regular season seed is a method of ranking that is subject to change.

The regular season is effectively a stepping stone. Teams willingly lose regular season games – perhaps even allowing the losses to negatively affect their eventual seed – to rest players, keeping them fresh in anticipation of the playoffs.

But why do about 90 playoff games take so much more precedence over 2,460 regular season games?

Is it because the quality of teams are better in – and teams inherently more geared towards – the playoffs?

A fair point, but if we wanted to determine what athletic competition wants us to determine – the best team at the end of a season – shouldn’t we do so under the context of an entire 82-game season?

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Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

Teams in the playoffs only compete with each other’s conference until the Finals. In the regular season, a given team will play 10 out of the other 14 teams in their conference four times – the other four teams will only play that given team three times intra-conference.

Wouldn’t a team’s overall conference record, theoretically, aptly determine – accounting for the slight discrepancy in the amount of times the teams play intra-conference throughout the season – the representative for the Western Conference in this hypothetical playoff?

Why do we often implicitly only care about a team’s playoff result?

The answer: it’s a ploy, by “Big Playoff,” to generate fan interest. To put it more bluntly: it’s a scheme, by “Big Playoff,” to generate TV and ticket revenue. I’ll get to “Big Playoff” in a second.

According to AdWeek, in 2012, the NBA playoffs generated $536.9 million in revenue, March Madness generated over $1 billion in ad revenue, and $976.3 million was earned in the NFL Playoffs and Super Bowl. These figures give a much more concrete reason as to why American sports leagues emphasize and stress the postseason tournament as much as they do.

TV companies and advertisers fall over themselves for broadcasting rights and commercial slots in order to profit off of exactly what “Big Playoff” wants us consumers to believe – that these games are the most important.

ESPN’s Pablo Torre begins his monologue on the suitably named concept of “Big Playoff” saying: “You’re being conned by an industry [Big Playoff] bigger than Big Oil, and Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco in supremacy over the American mind.”

“Big Playoff,” as Torre says, “wants you to believe that the winner of a sports postseason tournament is always the most impressive.”

“Big Playoff” tries to deceive you into believing that a seven-game sample size trumps an 82-game sample size. The playoffs are what really matters, they want you to believe. Everything that occurred before this series is meaningless, they say.

American sports leagues have done a fantastic job at stressing the playoffs as most important; the playoffs as the beacon of light that teams, players, and fans strive for at the end of a long season. Every game, every possession, and every bad call seems to matter in the postseason — not the case in the regular season. The true merit of a team is almost solely decided by their progression in the playoffs.

And it works. I love the playoffs. I often yearn for their arrival in the sporting lull that we call February (post-Super Bowl). The playoffs generate buzz, forced buzz, that could hardly be replicated in the pre-scheduled regular season.


Back to Leicester City – there are no playoffs in league play for European football, only separate tournaments. There was no “championship game” that determined if Leicester City was the champion of England. Rather, the fanfare surrounding their accomplishment was based entirely off of another game, 102 miles away from where Leicester players would gather to watch the game on television, because that’s how the schedule was laid out.

Simply put, Leicester City mathematically beat out Tottenham for the Premier League trophy after the Spurs tied Chelsea – the maximum amount of points that Tottenham could amass for the remainder of their season could not equate or surpass the amount of points that Leicester had amassed through May 2nd.

I’d imagine that NBA fans would be hard-pressed to enjoy a championship series that was determined A.) with math involved and B.) with the same thrill as waiting on the result of another game to see if your team won the Western Conference’s Pacific Division crown (i.e. not much of a thrill).

But, despite the lack of pomp and grandeur, the Premier League’s system is one of the most foolproof methods to decide a league champion. Each team plays each other twice, home and away, so there is not the same scheduling dissatisfaction NBA fans may have felt during this year’s Spurs vs. Thunder Conference Semifinals matchup or last year’s Spurs vs. Clippers First Round matchup.

A given team is not playing another team 11 times and a different team 2 times en route to the championship, as is possible in the NBA. In the Premier League, every match during the “regular” season actually matters.


The Golden State Warriors, a team which has set NBA records for the most wins in a season (73); the most threes made in a season (1,077); the most road wins (34); the best start to the season (24-0); and the longest home winning streak between seasons (54 games from 2014-15 to 2015-16), will have their accomplishments drastically diminished if they drop Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Note: there are also many, many other minor records that I have neglected to add for brevity’s sake.

In spite of the unprecedented amount of accolades that Golden State has accumulated, if the Warriors lose in Game 7 – or, potentially, the Finals – this season will be reduced to a what-if, a has-been team that never was.

But the Warriors were the best team this season, perhaps even in the history of the sport, and nothing can change that. A loss in a 7-game playoff series can’t change that; the denigration of any of their individual or team accomplishments can't change that; and even if Steve Kerr is discovered to have a love for punching babies in his free time, nothing can change the fact that the Warriors won 73 games and set a preposterous number of NBA records.

Stephen Curry, Russell Westbrook
Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

We deify teams for their playoff triumphs and scorn teams that are unable to produce in the postseason despite regular season dominance, and seldom do we consider the teams who have won championships to be any less than the best team to have emerged from the trenches.

The Warriors, if they drop a Game 7 that they are expected to win, are not suddenly any worse of a team if they are outmatched, out-intensified, and outclassed by a talented Thunder team – as they were in the first five games of the Western Conference Finals – in a 7-game sample size.

They remain, by virtue of their regular season body of work over an 82-game sample size, one of the best teams of all-time. FiveThirtyEight’s Elo rankings ranks the Warriors as the 2nd best team of all-time, behind only the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls.

Besides their statistical achievements, the team has played an unparalleled, aesthetically pleasing brand of basketball that is the quintessential representative of the beauty of team sports.

As much as readers may refuse to acknowledge, a 7-game sample size, even if it is framed under the umbrella of the “Playoffs,” does not take precedence over an entire season’s sample size.


The dangers of diminishing – of forgetting – the accomplishments and the legacy of a team that broke a wins record many thought no squad would ever break, but was also a team that ultimately did not emerge as champions, has two clear-cut archetypes – the 2007 New England Patriots and the 2001 Seattle Mariners.

The Patriots posted NFL records for most points in a season (589); highest point differential (+315); most first downs (391); most touchdowns scored (75); and most wins in a season (18).

Meanwhile, the Mariners led the majors in almost every important statistical category: hits, runs, on-base percentage, shutouts, fielding percentage, batting average against, and team ERA, while also setting an AL record, tying the MLB record set by the 1906 Chicago Cubs, in wins, with 116.

Those two teams are not remembered as champions, only as after-thoughts – could-have-beens.

The Mariners are seldom mentioned in the same sentence as the ’39 or ’98 Yankees or the ’42 or ’44 St. Louis Cardinals as the best baseball team ever. By all accounts, this was one of the most productive ball clubs to play the sport; their legacy undermined only because the Yankees won four games against them in the 2001 ALCS before the Mariners could accomplish the same.

The Patriots dynasty as a whole is routinely compared to the ‘70s Steelers dynasty, the ‘80s 49ers dynasty, or the ‘90s Cowboys dynasty, but the ’07 season is considered an addendum to their four Super Bowl winning teams’ novels.

With the help of measures like FiveThirtyEight’s recent Elo ratings of the best NFL teams ever, which ranked the ’07 Patriots as the best team of all time, public perception of the team as incapable finishers may transition slightly, but that pervading notion will continue regardless because of the team’s inability to close out the 10-6 Giants in Super Bowl XLII.

Both the ’01 Mariners and the ’07 Patriots should be remembered for their nonpareil successes in the regular season, but because both teams ultimately failed to win the postseason tournaments that “Big Playoff” deems you must in order to be crowned top dog, their feats are scarcely celebrated.


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Reuters

When teams do not differentiate themselves much in the regular season, the playoffs are often a fair way to determine which team is the highest-quality. In fact, often times the playoffs do indeed determine the best team.

But, clearly, there are better alternatives to the system. Most European football leagues’ round-robin system leaves little doubt as to the merit of the champion. The best team does not always surface to the sport’s apex when “Big Playoff” is the intermediary.

This season, it is clear which team was the best in the NBA – the best over their entire 98-game sample size, and the best as evidenced by their statistical dominance over other great teams in the current league and in history – the Golden State Warriors.

The Warriors may lose in the playoffs, as many great teams of the past have done – that much is true. But, if they do, we must not forget the legacy, the illustriousness, and the significance of a team that was arguably the greatest NBA team ever assembled for the first 92 games of their season.

The playoffs will never be abandoned. But, in order to truly ascertain which teams, for each season and in history, are the cream of the crop, one must better understand the very nature of playoffs that we often neglect to examine.

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Statistics Courtesy to Forbes, MLB.com, FiveThirtyEight, and pro-football-reference.com.