March Madness in the NBA? Single-elimination tournament should be closer than ever
The NBA Cup can easily become a single-elimination tournament after expansion -- even if the madness is in December, not March
This week marks the beginning of the best annual tournament in American Sports. There is just nothing like the NCAA Tournament in basketball. No sporting event matches the tension of putting an entire season on the line in a single game. Most sports use a postseason series format, forcing the drama to build over weeks. Football uses a single-elimination format, but the college football playoff only has 11 games, and the NFL's postseason has 13. March Madness has 67. That's 67 opportunities for small-sample chaos to envelop a sport and give us upsets and heroics that no other sport has really been able to replicate.
The NBA has tried and mostly failed with its in-season tournament. The NBA Cup is fun. The money on the line does incentivize players to try harder, and once the knockout round arrives, the basketball is generally entertaining. But the group stage is confusing and a bit too predictable. You're not going to get the same caliber of Cinderellas in a four-game round robin as you would in a single-elimination setting. Besides, none of this matters if the fans don't know when the games are played. A colorful court isn't enough to convince the average fan that a game on Tuesday matters more than one on Wednesday.
I doubt many people would dispute the notion that the NBA should use a March Madness-style single-elimination format for the NBA Cup, but the numbers don't work out. The NBA has 30 teams. For a true, single-elimination event, they'd need 32, the same amount left after the first round of the NCAA Tournament. They could import a couple of foreign or G-League teams, sure, but aside from watering down the competition, that raises questions about whether or not Cup games could still count in the regular season standings. Realistically, the NBA isn't big enough today to support a single-elimination tournament.
But that could change. On Monday, ESPN reported that the NBA's owners will vote on whether to explore expanding into Seattle and Las Vegas at next week's board of governors meeting. While an official vote on expansion likely wouldn't come until July at the earliest and the current target for expansion is not until the 2028-29 season. If it comes, there could be 32 teams by the end of this decade.
And if there are? We have our path to March Madness in the NBA. Well, more like November and/or December madness, but the principle applies. Get to 32 teams and the NBA Cup could pretty easily become a single-elimination tournament. At that point, Cinderellas become a much more viable possibility and every team in the league gets to play in at least one high-pressure elimination game.
There would have to be some differences, of course. Logistically, the NCAA can use a single-elimination tournament because once a team loses a game, its season ends. That wouldn't be the case for a regular-season event in the NBA. The league would have to find a way to ensure that everybody winds up playing the same number of games. That's a solvable problem, though. The easiest answer would be to just create loser's brackets after each round. That would allow every team to play exactly five games and rank somewhere between No. 1 and No. 32 in tournament finish, which could then be used as some sort of tiebreaker to add some more stakes to the event.
Would a single-elimination NBA Cup be as exciting as March Madness? The answer is probably no. College basketball has regular-season tournaments as well, though they are admittedly smaller in scale. Nothing can top elimination games in the postseason, and the NBA will never do away with the seven-game series format for a variety of reasons, so while we do get a handful of every spring, the pros will never be able to match the volume of such games that college basketball produces.
But the fundamental purpose of the NBA Cup is to drive interest in the regular season. The results to this point have been tepid. The games are good. The tournament structure is hit-or-miss. But March Madness is universally beloved, and if the NBA can replicate even a shred of what makes it work, it should. It may not have quite the same tension as its collegiate, postseason counterpart, but a single-elimination tournament featuring the entire NBA would be a blast, and for the first time, such an event seems as though it might be within reach.
