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Spicing up the Regular Season

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Nathan S

33 is the new 23
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Here's a fairly radical idea to make the regular season more interesting; let me know what you all think.

To begin, break up all 30 teams into 5 groups of 6 teams. Each team plays 10 games round-robin against the other teams in their group; 1 home, 1 away against everyone. Then each group has a mini tournament, where the top two teams get byes to the semifinals. Losers play 3rd and 5th place games, so every team plays a total of either 12 or 13 games. Each tournament game (including 3rd and 5th place games) has a prize of one playoff "ranking point." The final has a prize of 3 playoff ranking points, and earning a bye to the semifinals also earns a ranking point. Overall, this process should take a month or a little less.

The groups are shuffled and the process repeats 6 times, enough to face every other team once (and one team, possibly a historical rival, twice)*. At the end of the season, the 16 teams with the most playoff ranking points are seeded and advance to the playoffs as usual (aside from the absence of a conference system).

I've thought less about how the lottery would work in this scenario. The simplest possibility is to rank non-playoff teams by overall regular season win percentage, and then let the lottery system proceed as usual, but you can imagine more elaborate ideas that (for instance) reward lottery teams for being competitive in tournament games.


What I like about this system:

-Byes are a significant advantage (and they give you an extra rest day), which should encourage teams to take the 10-game round robins seriously. But the single-elimination format gives all teams a puncher's chance.

-There are 11 total ranking points available in every tournament, meaning that a perfectly average team will get a little less than 2 points per tournament, or around 10 points in a season. Winning a single tournament gets you 5 points, half way to that total (and probably halfway to a playoff spot). In other words, stakes are high.

-That should greatly discourage tanking; going into the 5th tournament of the year, every single team will still have a real chance to make the playoffs, and going into the 6th tournament, all but a few teams will still have a chance if they can just win a couple key games.

-Breaking up the season breaks up the monotony. Good and bad teams alike start from scratch at the beginning of each round. High-leverage games are never far off.

-Teams see each other twice in the round robin before the all-important tournament games come around. So while the tournament is single-elimination, teams *do* have a chance to feel each other out first, make adjustments, and form strategies, much as they would in a typical playoff series.



*To the mathematically inclined, I realize this claim is not as trivial as it appears to be at a glance. I'm aware of this, and should look into it more carefully sometime!
 

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