2016 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions Preview

I told myself after last year's tournament that I wouldn't do this again this summer. I told myself it would take too much time and too much effort, and that I couldn't find a way to justify doing another one. But the itch is back, and that means a tournament is back in the works.

I am back once again to find the greatest single season basketball team of all time, even though my prior two experiments ended with the exact same results. That said, with the sort of media attention the 2016 Golden State Warriors have gotten, it has me thinking. The simplest solution would be to just simulate a game between them and the '96 Bulls, but there are a couple hiccups. First and foremost, the 2016 champion has not been determined even though the Warriors are the heavy favorites (which I'm sure has you questioning why I'm doing an intro post so early), but second of all, I'm insane and want to make this process fully involved.

This year's tournament is going to have multiple stages, partially out of necessity. The main reason I even did a second NBA Tournament of Champions last summer was because the initial field for the 2013 Tournament of Champions was incomplete since my 1950 and 1951 champions weren't in my simulator. I waited a couple years to refill the field to get that 64th team. That means this year, there are 65 NBA champions available to make it into the field. To make the math pretty, that means someone has to go. However, I am expanding the field even further to take advantage of a resource that my simulator does provide: the nine seasons' worth of champions from the ABA. It's an interesting premise, since the two leagues didn't really interact much outside of court and the negotiation room prior to the 1977 merger.

This gives us 74 teams competing for the honor of being the greatest team of all time (or the '96 Bulls fighting off all of the blasphemers daring to infringe on their territory, depending on your point of view). Needless to say, 74 is a bit of a weird number when it comes to a tournament, so I need to narrow the field ever so slightly. With that in mind, I am seeding the 64 teams from last year's championship based on their 2013 and 2015 performances (with the knowledge that this is a disadvantage to the '14 Spurs and '15 Warriors, but not a huge one). These teams will be ranked 1-64, with the 2016 NBA Champion getting put in at spot number 33 before I move everyone below them down a spot. I'm then going to break up the field into groups of seven, with the top seven teams being in one, then teams 8-14, and so on, until we get to the last nine teams. The top few teams from that group of 57-65 will all be safely in, but the lowest seeded teams will play in their own double robin group, with the bottom two teams dropping out and narrowing the field to 72 teams.

That begs the question of how I am going to rank the ABA teams. For them, I am going to play a single round robin between their nine champions in the next couple of weeks. No ABA teams will be eliminated at this stage; rather, this is a ranking system where they will get combined into the groups of seven NBA champions corresponding to their finish in this round robin tournament. This is an effort to, as fairly as possible, rank the ABA teams in relation to the NBA teams and get them integrated into the tournament with as little bias as possible.

Once those rankings and the play in round are completed, the 2016 Tournament of Champions will proceed almost identically to the 2015 iteration. The 72 teams will be broken up into eight groups of nine teams apiece where they will play a double round robin. I'm keeping the same format of four pools playing a day with the knowledge that there will be a few back to backs amongst this followed by at least one day off, and every team will get a pair of byes just based on how the math with this will work out. Once again, the top four teams from each pool will advance into the Elimination Round, which will follow the familiar best-of-sever series matchup.

I hope you're as excited for this new installment of the Tournament of Champions! Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks as I unveil the results of the ABA seeding process and unveil the teams who will be playing in the play in round.