Now that the teams have been selected for our hypothetical 3 on 3 tournament pitting NBA teams against each other, it’s time to seed them into brackets. We’ve added two teams comprised of players that were left off their original team selections, one per conference, to bring the tournament field to 32. The bracket has been built with the Western Conference on one half and the Eastern Conference on the other half, each seeded 1 to 16.
The SB Nation NBA 3 on 3 Tournament Primer -- The Bracket
West | East |
1. San Antonio - Duncan, Ginobili, Parker | 1. Chicago - Rose, Noah, Deng |
2. OKC - Durant, Westbrook, Collison | 2. Miami - James, Wade, Bosh |
3. Lakers - Nash, Bryant, Howard | 3. Indiana - Granger, George, Stephenson |
4. Memphis - Allen, Gay, M. Gasol | 4. Boston - Garnett, Rondo, Pierce |
5. Clippers - Paul, Griffin, Odom | 5. Atlanta - Horford, Smith, Jenkins |
6. Denver - Iguodala, W. Chandler, Gallinari | 6. Orlando - Nelson, Afflalo, Ayon |
7. Dallas - Nowitzki, Brand, West | 7. New York - Chandler, Anthony, Shumpert |
8. Utah - Burks, Favors, Hayward | 8. Philadelphia - Holiday, Turner, Bynum |
9. West Leftovers - P. Gasol, Harden, Randolph | 9. East Leftovers - Jennings, Wallace, Hibbert |
10. Houston - Motiejunas, Lamb, Lin | 10. Milwaukee - Ellis, Mbah a Moute, Ilyasova |
11. Phoenix - Gortat, Dragic, Dudley | 11. Detroit - Monroe, Stuckey, Jerebko |
12. Portland - Aldridge, Batum, Lillard | 12. Toronto - Bargnani, Ross, Lowry |
13. Minnesota - Rubio, Kirilenko, Love | 13. Brooklyn - Williams, Johnson, Lopez |
14. Golden State - Curry, Thompson, Bogut | 14. Cleveland - Irving, Varejao, Waiters |
15. Sacramento - Thomas, Evans, Cousins | 15. Washington - Wall, Ariza, Nene |
16. New Orleans - Gordon, Davis, Anderson | 16. Charlotte - Sessions, Kidd-Gilchrist, Mullens |
Seeds were based on regular season records from last season, with the extra teams slotted in to the ninth seed to give them a fighting chance (much to the chagrin of the eight seeds, since these leftover teams are pretty loaded).
The winner of each match up will be determined as follows:
A panel of experts from around SB Nation will be asked to predict how many times each team would win out of 20 meetings between the two teams. Five experts will be assigned to each matchup. Each team’s total number of victories will be calculated from the predictions, yielding a percentage likelihood that the team would win a single meeting.
Armed with those percentages and percentile dice (finally joining the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons and sports blogs -- nerds unit!) we’ll roll the dice to see who wins, introducing a random element into the proceedings. So even if a team is a 20 to 1 underdog, they still have a 5 percent chance of winning. We’ll play best two out of three. Upsets will definitely happen in individual games, and some underdogs will advance as well, just as we would expect in anything as unpredictable as a game of 3 on 3 where one player could get hot and carry his team to victory over a heavy favorite.
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