Building New Traditions: The NBA’s First In-Season Tournament
Today’s guest columnist is Evan Wasch, executive vice president of Basketball Strategy & Analytics at the NBA.
One of the most special things about sports is that they are rooted in championship traditions.
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Whether it’s the NBA champion lifting the Larry O’Brien Trophy, the NCAA basketball champion cutting down the nets, or the Masters champion donning the green jacket—these moments are unlike anything else. They resonate differently with everyone, but they’re known universally, and are passed down through generations.
The only downside is that tradition sometimes impedes progress, making us hesitant to improve and innovate. But in reality, innovation is the only way new traditions can be created.
Last week, the NBA unveiled details around a new In-Season Tournament, which will tip off this season. Throughout the process of creating the tournament, discussing it with various stakeholders and ultimately instituting it as part of our new Collective Bargaining Agreement with the Players Association, we’ve consistently heard one major question—why?
And the answer is quite simple—to make NBA basketball even better.
Major U.S. professional sports have historically subscribed to a model of long regular seasons and extended playoffs, and success has often become solely equated to winning the single league championship. But nearly everywhere else we look across the global sports landscape—international soccer and basketball, college basketball, golf, tennis and racing just to name a few—we see different models where teams and athletes chase multiple championships throughout the year.
And with the NBA increasingly global—nearly one-third of the league’s players hail from outside the United States—we think the time is right to incorporate a new championship tradition, one that’s already widely embraced by sports fans around the world.
Taking no significance away from the Larry O’Brien Trophy and the excitement of the NBA Finals come June, the In-Season Tournament will provide a new opportunity for teams and players to compete in an exciting format, build their legacies, chase an early-season championship and raise the NBA Cup. It will add must-win games in the early part of our season while creating something new and different for fanbases to celebrate and rally around.
Equally important, we’ll introduce this new tradition without disrupting an old one. We’re essentially taking regular-season games and giving them even more significance by having them count toward the In-Season Tournament. Every team will still play an 82-game regular season over roughly six months. The only new game will be the tournament’s championship, which is a separate winner-take-all game for the two finalists at a neutral site—an added bonus this year for fans in Las Vegas.
The thing about traditions is that they aren’t built overnight, or even in the first year. They take time. We know and expect that. But just like the birth of the NBA Finals almost 80 years ago, traditions must start somewhere, and the In-Season Tournament is next.
At the end of the day, our goal is to continue to grow the game we all love, and we think you’ll like what you see.
Evan Wasch oversees data and strategy for all on-court activities, including game tracking, player analytics and referee performance. Wasch also focuses on strategic initiatives targeted at innovating and improving the NBA game, such as scheduling, competition issues and technological enhancements.
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