I was looking at the In season tournament standings and to me it looks like there could be a lot of tie breaking needed(especially for the wildcard teams). Head to head is the first tiebreaker, but it looks like this is not going to work everywhere (for example all of west group c teams could easily finish 3-1 with wins against each other).
The way I understand the wildcard is that the the top 2 teams that don’t win their groups will be chosen, but there will be like 4 of those with tied records as well, so they will go to point differential. So we are basically choosing the teams based on who ran up the score against the wizards, spurs and grizzlies the most? Doesn’t encouraging running up the score seem kinda dumb? Sorry if I misunderstood the format I’m just trying to figure it out.
You also mitigate your differential by not losing big to the other teams. In any case, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to split the teams and when players understand how fine the margins can be, the end of games will always have something to continue to compete for rather than letting it play out.
Outside of wanting to progress, it encourages another layer of intensity that wouldn’t exist in a normal regular season game. Should make you fight harder to win your group too rather than leave it to fate.
It’s just as dumb to use h2h as the primary tiebreak. No round robin should run like that. All games are supposed to have equal value.
Take the World Cup for instance, if Ireland beats Turkey but the two end up tied in points, it doesn’t default to their h2h, because the other games mattered just as much.
I think the NBA loves the point differential tie breaker. They are trying to make less games boring during the regular season since there is a lot of opinions that theres too many games and games are meaniless. That opinion grows stronger during blow outs and both teams stop trying and running actual plays and it just more of a sloppy pick up game.
With the point differential, teams are still trying and running plays which makes the offense look better and produces a better casual watch which most fans are casual watchers.
Why is running up the score dumb? It’s exactly what we want to see as nba fans, is a blowout game still having players working hard till the buzzer