The NBA’s board of governors is meeting in Las Vegas, and part of their offseason plans are to explore the long-rumored mid-season tournament which has been bouncing around NBA circle for years.
What would a Champions League-style NBA tournament look like?
This could be a brilliant idea.
Photo by Luca Sgamellotti/Euroleague Basketball via Getty Images
James Dator has been covering a wide range of sports for SB Nation for over a decade, with a special focus on the NFL.
According to Marc Stein, the NBA is exploring the possibility of, what he calls, “an in-season, soccer-style tournament,” which could begin as soon as the 2023-24 season. It’s unclear what this proposal looks like, but it has the potential to be something special if the NBA executes this properly.
We should get details on what this looks like soon, but the hope is that this wouldn’t be some boring, U.S.-only affair. Nobody would want, or need that — and if the plan is to have it resemble England’s FA Cup by having NBA teams and G-League teams, that would just be sad. However, if there’s more ambition behind this we could have something really special on our hands.
What could a Champion’s League style basketball tournament look like?
Obviously we’re talking huge logistical challenges if we talk about expanding this to be a global club basketball tournament — but that’s the only way this really seems interesting. Ideally we’d see a 16 team tournament, at least to start, because you don’y want something like this overstaying its welcome and ruining the NBA season as a result.
If we formed a global bracket here’s how it should look.
- Top 6 teams from the NBA (Conference finalists, plus leading teams at tournament time)
- Top 6 teams from EuroLeague (Final Four, plus leading teams at tournament time)
- Top 4 teams who failed to qualify for EuroLeague
The idea would be to weight the tournament to the NBA and EuroLeague because that’s where the best players in the world are. The concept behind the “leading team” would be to make the current highest placing teams at the break who are not already in the tournament get a spot, but their seeding would be lower than previous top teams.
If we imagine this tournament was in place beginning in January last season, here’s how the field would have looked, with proposed seeding.
- Milwaukee Bucks (NBA Champions)
- Anadolu Efes (EuroLeague Champions)
- Phoenix Suns (NBA runner-up)
- Barcelona (EuroLeague runner-up)
- Atlanta Hawks (Eastern Conference finalists)
- AX Armani Exchange (EuroLeague third place)
- Los Angeles Clippers (Western Conference finalists)
- CSKA Moscow (EuroLeague fourth place)
- Memphis Grizzlies (regular season leader)
- Olympiacos (regular season leader)
- Miami Heat (regular season leader)
- Real Madrid (regular season leader)
- Lenovo Tenerife (non-EuroLeague qualifier)
- Fenerbahçe Beko (non-EuroLeague qualifier)
- Riesen Ludwigsburg (non-EuroLeague qualifier)
- Vanoli Cremona (non-EuroLeague qualifier)
In terms of how you’d execute this I suspect there would be a lot of ideas, but imagine if we took advantage of the All Star break, and incorporated elements of the international teams as well. It would be fun as hell to see dunkers from around the world try to throw down against the NBA, or compete in the three point and skill challenges.
Hell, if you really wanted to shake things up we could even change the All Star game itself to be NBA vs. The World. That would no doubt bring a lot of acrimony because people hate change, but we could table that and wait to see if the idea of the international tournament takes off.
I’m not going to lie, I think this tournament format would be so much fun. It would showcase players from around the world to NBA fans, while also giving top players from Europe a chance to test their skills against the best players in the world. Now we’ll need to wait to see what the NBA’s proposal looks like, because I’m sure this one is perfect.
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