The Inside The NBA folks seem to have no idea how a tournament works and it’s difficult to listen to them talk about this tournament.
Why is point differential such a difficult concept for them to understand?
Candace Parker’s idea is to ignore the group and just advance the top teams with the best records, out of all the groups. Then what’s the point of the groups? It’s a tournament. I don’t think she realizes that point differential would still come into play.
Chuck wants the 2 top teams in the West to advance because they have the best regular season records. Let’s ignore the fact that they couldn’t play well in the tournament.
This tournament has a lot of potential as we saw in that Kings/Warriors game. Most of those plays in the 4th quarter would’ve never occurred if this was just a regular season game.
I do believe that these games need to be independent of regular season games though.
If you’re still struggling to understand how tournaments with groups work, play some FIFA or watch any sport outside of America. It’s a really fun system.
Because if you don’t watch soccer you won’t understand it compared to other tournaments we have in the US.
We don’t do group play in March Madness. College football, hockey, etc.
So unless you’ve been interested in a sport where it’s present, it’s a brand new and admittedly confusing concept at first.
After you know what’s going on it’s obvious this is a good system.