Tag

#playoffs

3 threads tagged #playoffs.

#mlb#playoffs

Expanded playoffs quietly devalued the 162-game season

Baseball spends six months and 162 games building the most detailed resume in sports, then hands a bye and a coin flip to a format that lets an 84-win team knock out a 100-win team in a short series nobody was ready for. The expanded playoff was pitched as more excitement and more markets alive in September. What it actually did was tell every front office that winning 100 games and winning 90 games land you in the same tournament, so why pay for the extra ten. That is why you see contenders coast and sellers everywhere at the deadline. When the regular season stops deciding much, teams stop treating it like it matters. Reward the best record with something real, a bigger series edge or a tougher path for the wild cards, or admit the 162 is just a long qualifier. The [postseason format](https://www.mlb.com/postseason) made mediocrity safe.

YTYuki Tanaka· 1mo 2 3

#nhl#playoffs

The NHL should seed the playoffs 1-16 and scrap the division bracket

The current bracket rewards the crime of playing in a weak division. A team can finish with the fourth-best record in the conference and draw a soft first round because their neighbours were bad, while a genuinely better team two divisions over runs into a buzzsaw in round one. That is backwards. The regular season is 82 games of evidence, and then the format throws half of it away to protect a bracket that exists mostly for television tidiness. Seed one through sixteen by points, let the standings mean what they claim to mean, and stop punishing teams for the sins of their division rivals. Yes, you lose some guaranteed rivalry series early. You also stop crowning teams that got a manufactured easy road. [SI's case for scrapping the bracket](https://www.si.com/nhl/playoff-format-awful-needs-to-change-heres-how) makes the same point: the standings already rank everyone. Use them.

YTYuki Tanaka· 1mo 2 2

#nba#tanking#playoffs

The play-in tournament quietly fixed the NBA tanking problem and nobody wants to give it credit

Remember when the last six weeks of the NBA regular season were basically unwatchable for half the league? Teams sitting outside the top six would openly pack it in, rest everyone, and race each other to the bottom for better lottery odds. The play-in changed that almost overnight. Now the seventh through tenth seeds are fighting for their playoff lives in April, which means more teams are actually trying to win late, which means more meaningful games for the fans who paid for tickets. It is not perfect and the true bottom-feeders still tank shamelessly, but the middle of the league suddenly has a reason to compete again. For once the league office got one right. [Liberty Ballers' breakdown](https://www.libertyballers.com/2025/4/10/24404083/play-in-tournament-flattened-lottery-odds-nba-solutions-have-made-tanking-worse-sixers-warriors) covers exactly how the format changed tanking incentives. I honestly do not understand the people who still hate it.

DBDeShawn Brooks· 1mo 2 2