Well, it’s been a while since the NBA post, so here’s a refresher on how these posts work as we finish off the professional leagues with the NFL. As always, the criteria for evaluating playoff systems will be how well they produce a deserving champion, their effectiveness at crowning the best team, and how entertaining they are. Both the method of selecting teams and the playoffs themselves are evaluated.

The NFL playoffs are very well designed. By taking six of sixteen teams from each conference, making the playoffs remains a major accomplishment while ensuring that only the best teams clinch a playoff spot early, meaning that the playoff race is very compelling. Furthermore, the NFL playoffs give clear advantages to the higher seeds, as the top two seeds in each conference get a bye in the first round and the higher seed always gets home-field advantage in a single-elimination playoff. At the same time, every team in the NFL playoffs is considered to be among the top 12 teams in the league, meaning that every team in the playoffs should be good and by extension capable of making a run to the Super Bowl. This makes the playoffs themselves very compelling.

When we look at the criteria for evaluating playoff systems, we can see that the NFL playoff structure does an admirable job fulfilling them. They certainly are entertaining, as every game is incredibly important and the games themselves are generally high quality. The structure also produces a deserving champion, as the lower seeds have to make up for their less than great regular seasons by winning an extra game against very good competition. The structure does not lend itself to selecting the best team, but this has more to do with the single-elimination structure to the playoffs, which allows for more upsets than a series structure, that is necessitated by the physically punishing nature of football itself that makes it infeasible to play multi-game series. As the NFL playoffs structure fulfill the goals of a playoff system to the highest level that is feasible for a football team, I would say that the NFL playoff structure is perhaps the best designed of all the playoff structures in professional sports.

Unfortunately, the method by which the NFL selects teams is simply horrendous. By a 16 team conference into four divisions with each division winner getting an automatic bid to the playoffs, a team outside of the top six teams in the conference will automatically be assured of winning a division over 18% of the time.* In contrast, this only happens 1.5 % of the time in the NBA and NHL’s division structure. Furthermore, this probability rises when you consider that NFL schedules are highly imbalanced, as each team only plays 13 others. The end result is that highly undeserving teams often make the NFL playoffs and sometimes they even make it to the Super Bowl (a perfect example is the 2008 Arizona Cardinals).

The sad thing about this is that if the NFL simply had two divisions in each conference instead of four, this problem would immediately disappear, even if they used a pod structure so that the Packers and the Bears still played each other twice a year. However, this type of change would require the NFL to not choose to be inanely stupid, which does not appear to be a trait that will disappear any time soon, considering that we just saw the NFL reform overtime for the playoffs but not the regular season.

For those interested: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

*When calculating these probabilities, it is assumed that over a long period of time, all teams will cycle through periods of being good and bad randomly. This is not necessarily true, as some owner-GM-coach combinations will be highly effective (or ineffective) over a much longer period of time than the ‘normal dynasty’. That said, using this assumption probably underestimates the likelihood that a mediocre team will win a division due to the lack of good opponents in the NFL and overestimates that same likelihood in the NHL, owing to their respective division sizes, roster sizes, and various other factors. The NBA is more difficult to figure out with regard to how this would work out because the NBA switched to three divisions quite recently. Also, the MLB was not discussed with regards to the likelihood of an undeserving team winning a division because there is no salary cap, which gives massive institutional advantages to franchises like the Yankees and Red Sox and disadvantages to small market clubs.

The NBA Playoffs are a mixed bag. On a structural level, the NBA Playoffs are decidedly flawed. Basically every structural element to the NBA Playoffs is terrible, and the only saving grace to this structure is that the various flaws actually serve to mitigate each other. The reason for this is that the NBA has recognized several of the idiotic elements of the playoff structure and adapted their playoff structure to mitigate the effects of these elements, rather than simply eliminate them.

On the other hand, the structural idiosyncrasies of the NBA Playoffs do yield several advantages from an entertainment standpoint to the NBA Playoffs. Combined with the inherent advantages of basketball games themselves, the NBA Playoffs become one of the most entertaining championship systems on a game-by-game basis. Unfortunately, this comes at the completely unnecessary expense of diminishing the overall narrative of the playoffs.

To begin with, let us look at the inherent advantage that basketball games have in a playoff atmosphere, namely that basketball is a high scoring sport, which leads to two positive results. Firstly, the score often changes multiple times every minute. In a playoff atmosphere the stakes are much higher than during the regular season, which in turn leads to elevated attention that lasts the entire game, unless it turns into a blowout, whether it is high or low scoring. Secondly, the high rate of scoring can lead to close games including multiple high-important scoring plays in the final minute, which can result in multiple swings of emotion for each team’s supporters in a way that slower paced sports cannot match. To look at this in another way, we can consider sports as a series of events (scoring) and buildup to events. As basketball is high scoring, it benefits from having a much higher number of events and buildups, which is beneficial in a playoff atmosphere where a fans attention to the game is already elevated.

This inherent advantage that springs from basketball games is the biggest positive of the NBA playoffs, as it makes every game exciting in a way that football, baseball, and hockey are not (this is not to say that football, baseball, and hockey do not have comparable merits, but they do not benefit as much from a playoff atmosphere). Unfortunately, the NBA Playoff structure is an abject failure of taking these individually games and turning them into an exciting narrative. The primary reason for this is that the NBA has too many teams in the playoffs.

Here are the records in games and series for the upper seed in the first round since 2003, the year that the first round became a best-of-seven series:

Notable here is that the 1 and 2 seeds have a combined series record of 27-1 (the lone loss being Golden State over Dallas a couple years back) and are 110-36 in individual games. Now, one could argue that this makes the 7 and 8 seeds underdogs that otherwise disinterested fans can root for, a la mid majors in the NCAA Tournament. While this is an interesting notion, it’s also inaccurate. Professional teams rarely can generate any type of national support unless there is something about the team itself that would lead fans to root for them. For instance, many people rooted for Golden State over Dallas because Golden State had been very bad for a long time and thus stirred national sympathy (the same thing exists for teams like the Cubs). However, there was no great outpouring of support for say, the Detroit Pistons against Cleveland last year. The result of this is that the 1-8 series and 2-7 series are typically uninteresting formalities featuring teams that generally do not deserve to make it to the playoffs.

The logical solution to this problem is to remove the 7 and 8 seeds. The 3-6 and 4-5 seeds could play either a play-in game or best-of-three series to face the 1 and 2 seeds, as that way the more deserving 5 and 6 seeds would still make the playoffs and the 1 and 2 seeds wouldn’t have a long layover that would make them rusty. Alternatively, the bottom four seeds could just be scrapped, an idea that has merit, as no team in the bottom half has made it past the conference semifinals since 8^th seeded New York made it to the NBA Championship in 1999, a lockout-shortened season in which New York finished 6 games out of first place. Before that, the Houston Rockets won the NBA as a 6-seed in 1995, the lowest seed ever to win the championship.

To finish off, we will examine the two elements of the NBA Playoffs that unnecessarily detract from their ability to award the best team or most deserving team the championship. First of all, the expansion to three divisions, combined with division winners getting a guaranteed top 4 seed, is terrible in conception. The NBA has already had problems with this issue in 2006, when the worst team in the Western Conference Playoffs (Denver), was awarded a high seed for winning its division. This is patently unfair to teams who amass better records in the regular season, as it forces them to face a much more difficult path to the finals.

The other poor structure in question is the bracket used by the NBA. In the NCAA, the bracket structure to the tournament serves two purposes. The first is to make the tournament more entertaining, as it spawns bracket pools across the country. The other is practical in origin. It is impossible to play more than four games at a single site. If teams were reseeded after every round, they would either have to find a way to play an entire regional at one site, which would take a very long time, or go to the expense of flying teams around the country on with very short notice for both the teams and fans as to where their next game will be. Both of these measures are impractical, thus making reseeding impractical. These issues are non-issues for the NBA and the bracket fails to make the NBA Playoffs more compelling. Thus, it makes much more sense to reseed the teams every round rather than have a bracket system, because reseeding teams serves to lend weight to the regular season and thus give it more meaning. The NFL and NHL recognize this, which is why both leagues institute reseeding and thus have fairer playoffs. The only thing to be said about the bracket structure in the NBA is that it mitigates the problems of its asinine seeding structure, which really makes one wonder just what on Earth led the NBA to institute this system in the first place…

Probably something money related.

Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 for those interested. Next in the series will be the NFL, to round up the professional leagues.

One of many traits that make Major League Baseball unique among major sports in the U.S. is its unparalleled focus on the regular season. Only eight teams out of 30 make the postseason, namely 26.7% of the league. The NFL allows 37.5% of teams to go to the postseason, while the NBA and NHL allow over 50% of teams to go to the postseason. College football allows 57.1% of teams to go to the postseason, although only two teams get to play for the championship. Of course, in college football, what happens during the regular season doesn’t determine the championship game as much as a bunch of idiots, partisans, and a few analysts who have to compare teams with wildly imbalanced schedules think. College basketball, baseball, and hockey actually invite comparable percentages of teams to their tournaments, but in all three cases, many teams have virtually zero chance of making the NCAA tournament without winning their conference regardless of their record. So, basically, in baseball, the regular season is paramount.

Another important trait of Major League Baseball (unlike collegiate baseball) is the parity in the sport. Ignoring the MLS and other leagues that nobody cares about, MLB is arguably the league with the greatest parity in American sports. A top team will often win 60% of its games. A bottom team will win 40% of the time. Contrast this with the NFL, where we’ve seen teams go both undefeated and winless this year, or the NBA, where we have the Cavaliers and the Nets this year. Hockey at least has comparable parity, although statistically, baseball teams are more even.

Now, as Major League Baseball has a low percentage of teams making the postseason and a high degree of parity, three things are necessary to make a good championship system. The first is a large number of games in the regular season to differentiate teams. As each team plays 162 games, this criteria is met. The other is to ensure that the system for selecting playoff teams will take only the best teams. This is not the case by a long shot. The third is to make sure that the playoffs themselves are fair and award the most deserving team, while being entertaining. This is probably accomplished as best as is possible.

To start with the actual playoffs, the system is to have two best-of-five series for each league, then a best-of-seven series for the league championship, then the best-of-seven World Series between the American League and National League. This format is pretty good, as only playing a best-of-five in the division series keeps the playoffs shorter, which is important as overdrawn playoffs make attention from fans fall off. Meanwhile, a best-of-seven is probably the longest you can make a series in which fans will follow each game, so having best-of-seven series are acceptable for the later series. The only real criticism I have for how MLB runs the playoffs themselves is that the scheduling is irritating, as there are too many days off which draws out the playoffs unnecessarily and screws over teams that win in a sweep, as they sometimes have to wait a full week to play again. Even so, the playoffs themselves are generally as exciting as one can hope while working to fairly award a championship.

The problem with baseball is that undeserving teams often make it to the playoffs. This decade, in 2003 (Twins over Mariners), 2005 (Padres over Phillies, Mets, and Marlins), 2006 (Cardinals over Phillies), 2007 (Cubs over Mets), 2008 (Dodgers over Mets), and 2009 (Twins over Rangers), a division winner has gotten into the playoffs over a team or teams with better records. This is completely ridiculous. The whole point of the regular season is to separate teams from each other and then reward the best teams with postseason berths. Instead, we get a system where more deserving teams are routinely passed over for other teams based on little more than geography. The reason for this system is to try to get a nationwide audience for the MLB playoffs, rather than determine a legitimate champion.

Overall, the MLB playoffs aren’t that bad. Part of its problems is that it goes on at the same time as the NFL and college football seasons, and thus tries to schedule around major football games, in order to boost ratings. On the other hand, you can also say that the MLB playoffs value ratings disproportionately to crowning a champion fairly. Of course, most leagues do this, but MLB is arguably the most blatant offender in professional sports. These complaints are rather small, however, when you look at the BCS (and possibly the NCAA Basketball Tournament, should those who hate America expand it to 96 teams).

Part 1 and Part 2 for those interested.

Having started by looking at the travesty that is the NCAA Hockey Tournament (and yeah, I forgot to mention that that the incompetence of NCAA hockey refs in general makes it more likely for them to determine who wins a game…[COUGH] Miami [COUGH]), it seems fitting to move on to the NHL playoffs. The NHL playoffs, much unlike the NCAA Hockey Tournament, are very well suited to the sport. This is not entirely fair to the NCAA Hockey Tournament, which has to acknowledge that it involves student-athletes, not professionals, and thus cannot have a playoff as long as the NHL’s is. That said, the NHL playoffs do very well at accomplishing the primary three goals of a championship system: crowning the most-deserving team, crowning the best team, and being entertaining.

To begin with, let’s look at the structure of the NHL playoffs. Eight teams are selected from each of the two fifteen team conferences. This means that the majority of the teams in the NHL make it to the playoffs every year. Now, taking the majority of teams from the NHL and putting them in the playoffs certainly serves to devalue the regular season. However, the effect of this devaluation is significantly reduced because of the inherent advantages that come through the seeding structure. In every playoff series, the higher seeded team gets the extra home game if the series goes all seven. More importantly, the teams are reseeded every round, meaning that the higher seeded team will always get the lowest remaining seed. Thus, an 8-seed will often have to play the 1, 2, and 3 seeds to make it to the Stanley Cup, while a 1-seed’s worst possible draw is an 8-seed, a 4-seed, and a 2-seed. Another advantage to having a larger playoff means that the better teams in a conference can rest players with minor injuries, which means that the better teams will be able to play their best players at 100% when playoff time comes around.

This leads to the best part of the NHL playoffs, namely that it features a higher quality of play than the regular season. This is important for two reasons. First of all, it makes the NHL playoffs a lot more entertaining than the regular season. Second of all, it means that the winning team won when most teams are playing their best hockey, so there is always a fair argument that the Stanley Cup winner is the best team in the NHL no matter what happened during the regular season.

The structure of the NHL playoffs also means that the Stanley Cup winner can always argue that they are the most deserving team. Winning the Stanley Cup requires a team to win 16 games against the upper tier of the NHL. Teams that were mediocre during the regular season have to do this against the best teams, while teams that were great get a comparatively easier draw. At any rate, winning the Stanley Cup will generally show that the winning team had a good record against a tough schedule and won head-to-head against the other really good teams in the NHL.

To conclude this entry, I will look at a couple other important elements in the NHL playoffs. First of all, there is that there is a lot of parity in the NHL as compared to the NBA and NFL, which means that lower seeds can beat the higher seeds and legitimately argue to be better teams when they win a seven game series against higher seeds. Second of all, the biggest problem with the NHL playoffs is that the officiating is noticeably different from the regular season. The reason for this is that referees do not want to make a call that might determine the outcome of the series and thus attempt to simply let the teams play. I have sympathy with this sentiment, but it is highly flawed because it makes officiating even more subjective than it already is and thus leads playoff officiating to become even less consistent than during regular season.

Greetings to all from the newest member of Midnight Maize. I am the first person to formerly join this blog in what will hopefully prove to be the post-curse era that began with Michigan getting through the CCHA tournament and earning a highly improbable berth to the NCAA tournament. I will be providing commentary on Michigan sports and sports in general on topics that nobody else here covers. We'll see where that takes me.