NBA Commissioner Possibly Adding Mid-Season Tournament


In the NBA, the ultimate team goal is to win the Larry O’Brien trophy at the end of the season. However, NBA commissioner Adam Silver is thinking about implementing a mid-season tournament to give NBA teams something else to strive for, at least before the actual NBA post-season begins in April.

The NBA commissioner has been pondering the idea of adding a mid-season tournament since this past August, and while the details of how exactly it would go down are still a bit uncertain, there is a general idea of how it would be executed.

Ideally, according to Silver, the tournament would be played continuously over 10 straight days, it may or may not include teams like Real Madrid or Maccabi Tel Aviv, the tournament would be single-elimination and would take place around all-star weekend in February.

The reward for winning the mid-season tournament could be any number of things, some of which could include a guaranteed spot in the NBA playoffs, guaranteed home-court advantage in the first round of the NBA playoffs, or a financial reward for the winning team and its players.

Silver gave more details on his idea of a mid-season tournament in a video interview with Bleacher Report. Some of Silver’s quotes from the interview are transcribed below.

“I and others at the league office have spent a lot of time studying the Champions League for European soccer and other types of cups and mid-season tournaments. Now there there’s a long tradition, but maybe there’s the opportunity to create a new tradition. And to create more competitions. Right now everything is about the Larry O’Brien trophy but soccer operates a little differently, they have different cups, which may not be as important as the championship but in their own right are highly significant.

“Those are not the kinds of changes that are going to happen in a year, or maybe even in two or three years, but they are the kinds of development for the league that needs to be studied over time.

“Conceivably what a mid-season tournament could look like is you have some number of teams — it could begin with all the teams and have a single-elimination type tournament — and this is a case where by floating the idea I got some good suggestions back over the transom, so to speak. It may be a chance to bring in some international clubs.”

There is a complaint that the current length of the NBA regular season (82 games) is much too long. However, the length of the NBA’s regular season likely will not be reduced due to the amount of revenue the owners accumulate from the season being as long as it is.

While a mid-season NBA tournament would make the NBA season a lot longer and more grueling, if it’s done right, the NBA owners would benefit greatly financially from it.

[Image via Fox News]

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