LAS VEGAS — The NBA In-Season Tournament is a success. That's pretty evident from fan reaction, player reaction, TV ratings, and social engagement. It gave the NBA a jolt in the early season, when games are just games, just one-of-eighty-freaking-two, and created environments that fans responded to well. There were hiccups, like the overly-bright courts, but even they accomplished the league's purpose of making the games feel different.
Then… Thursday at 5 pm. ET came, and the NBA suffered its first major "L" of the In-Season Tournament.
The Pacers and Bucks tipped off at 2 p.m. local. The game started roughly 36 hours after the Bucks made the semifinals, giving Midwest residents little time to find the expensive travel accommodations to make the game on Thursday. Most Vegas visitors were finishing brunch, Hair of the Dog, or just waking up.
The result was a crowd that was not only roughly 40% empty but also extremely… chill. Gone was the intensity that marked Monday's upset by the Pacers of Boston in Indy.
No one quite knew what to make of the tournament when it was announced this summer. But the combination of scheduled days for Tuesdays and Fridays, the different courts (even if they weren't as aesthetically pleasing as folks wanted), and the rest players were able to compete on meant the environments were good. The NBA announced record November attendance, especially in the In-Season Tournament Games. They created good environments, culminating in loud atmospheres even in places like Indiana, which has the lowest attendance in the league.
Think about that! They created a great environment in the lowest attendance arena in the league!
But then, of course, the league got to Vegas, and because they were trying to serve too many interests, they wound up with a half-hearted and half-full crowd for the first game of the semis.
The crowd was closer to an All-Star crowd, where corporate sponsors and business partners make up a huge chunk of the crowd. The game was markedly better than an All-Star Game, and it's a credit to the players for investing in the game despite the quiet environment. (The $500,000 prize money for the winner helps with that, it turns out.)
Still, the decision to hold the game in the middle of the afternoon on a Thursday was baffling.
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The league faced a number of scheduling decisions running into each other. The NBA needed to wrap up the knockout rounds in a week so as not to disrupt the rest of the regular season. Two weeks from now is Christmas, the NBA's marquee holiday. After that is trade season, when players can be dealt at any moment. Waiting a month to hold the event could cause complications for the players if their teams make significant trades, and it impacts the league's narrative talking points. Then there's All-Star, and then it's time for the race for the Larry O'Brien trophy as teams battle for playoff positioning.
The NBA couldn't hold the IST Finals game on Sunday; it would face the NFL slate.
So they chose Saturday after college football's regular season concluded, a wise choice.
It wouldn't be fair to give one team two days off and one team three, so the NBA needed to hold both games the same day — Thursday, between quarterfinals on Tuesday and the finals on Saturday.
As for Thursday, a gap was needed for warmups and pre-game activities for the second game. The NBA scheduled the late game for 9 p.m. ET, not wanting the 10:30 p.m. start they opt for during the regular season and playoffs, trying to get as many eyes on the late game as possible.
That meant the only way to get two games in was to start the first early in the day, a game that game tipped before Pacers and Bucks fans were off work at 4 p.m. CT. Ratings expectations will be low.
There's one more consideration with the timing of the tournament. Not only is this the first time such an event has been held by the NBA, making it a learning process for all involved, but because it was the first one, the league had to hedge their bets a bit in case it didn't work. Do you want the NBA In-Season Tournament going on for longer periods of time if it wasn't well received? The success of the tournament gives the league an opportunity to solve for these difficulties next season.
As the Pacers-Bucks game wore on, however, there were some promising signs for the future. The split of Pacers and Bucks fans (fairly even) meant that on controversial calls like a Brook Lopez charge in the second, you had fans in the same section going wild for opposite reasons. You can see what the semifinals can be, and we'll see what it looks like with the highest stakes in Saturday's Finals matchup.
Still, for a tournament that has surpassed expectations for so many and converted so many naysayers, Thursday's scheduling represented a rare loss for the tournament.
