NBA: The play-in tournament is back, but is it a good thing?

The NBA play-in tournament will (maybe) preventing tanking

One major aspect of fans’ interest dwindling throughout a season is teams tanking, the end of the season has always been plagued with teams resting players to influence their season record into having a better draft pick.

Typically, the end of the season would see the teams roughly 5-10 games out of the playoffs prematurely end their season. Leaving blowouts and frankly unwatchable games towards the latter months of the regular season.

There’s no definitive data or science behind this, as the play-in is a one-and-a-half-season sample but the result have shown promise in the NBA’s eyes thus far. Evan Wasch, the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics told Sports Illustrated’s Howard Beck that the league has been “pleased,” with the small sample of increased competitiveness after the lottery odd changes and play-ins introduction.

Less tanking means that teams put better a TV product out on the floor. They are doing this now because the play-in has added another pathway to make the playoffs, even if you had a rough start to the season.

In previous years the Spurs, Warriors, Kings, and Pelicans might have packed it in, rested their stars, and begged the basketball gods for a good lottery pick. This season, all of the teams mentioned either made the play-in or were two games away from it.

Does the play-in fix resting? No, does it fix the OKC Thunder or the Houston Rockets possibly having G-League-level rosters for half the season? No, but the play-in gives the middle-of-the-pack teams a chance to elevate from 9th-12th  in the standings into the playoffs; and that has given us more enjoyable basketball.