05 April 2017

On the Edge of Our NBA Seats

Evey year at this time, with just a handful of games left in the NBA season, some enterprising sports journalist writes a story that says, essentially, that various playoff races are building to their exciting conclusions.

The Bias of Sports Media
Many Americans believe that American journalism is guilty of a left-right partisan bias. Generally people who say this are revealing their own left-right partisan bias. But there is a significant bias in American news media: a bias for news.

It's why all kinds of irrelevancies bubble up as news, and often last for weeks. Witness this week's dust-up over the inevitable confirmation of a highly-qualified Supreme Court judge. American journalists have wrung weeks of stories out of this controversy, even though the result is a foregone conclusion.

Which brings us to the ineluctable stories about NBA playoff races. The writers of these pieces know that battles for seeding are nonsense, that way more teams are allowed into the tournament than have any hope of winning the title, and that the best team doesn't have to nab the top seed. But they want a story, so they put on the blinders and outline the races. (Also, their employers own the broadcast rights to these shenanigans.)

Who's the #1 Seed? Who Cares!
For example, there is uncertainty about whether Cleveland or Boston will take the top seed in the East. We all know it hardly matters, because both Cleveland and San Antonio have won recent NBA titles as the two seeds in their conference. The big advantage of finishing first is a home game 7 in a series two months from now.

Then there is the battle for three and four in the East between Toronto and Washington. Are you seeing the humor in this? If the seeds are 1. Boston 2. Cleveland 3. Toronto 4. Washington, the ostensible second round match-ups are the same as if the teams finished 1. Cleveland 2. Boston 3. Washington 4. Toronto. If your goal is to avoid Cleveland, it's not clear that you want to nail down the third seed.

Even more significant are the races for the last playoff slots. Where you sit isn't nearly as important as simply getting a seat at the table. Two games separate Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, Indiana and Milwaukee with four spots available. Sounds compelling, until you consider that these thoroughly mediocre teams are just cannon fodder. LeBron James could beat any one of them himself.


In the West, the intrigue is around whether Portland's losing record will edge Denver's losing record for the right to get slathered by Golden State in the first round. Or is it whether Utah or the Clippers will earn the fourth seed? The stakes are high, because if Utah wins that race, they play the Clippers in the first round. Whereas if L.A. jumps up a seed, they get the Jazz in round one. 

All of this is utter rubbish, of course. The regular season is just a preliminary bout. The first round of the playoffs is just warm-ups. They could skip the first two rounds of the playoffs altogether and eliminate the need to seed anyone. Let Golden State and San Antonio square off for the right to host the Cleveland-Boston winner, and we won't have the charade of .500 teams filling up the bracket.

Instead, we'll have another week of this dreck. And don't even get me started on hockey.

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