2025 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: Introduction

I wasn't sure I'd ever get back to this. My daily workload became too much and I didn't have the bandwidth to start up a massive project like this again.

But with the 2025 NBA season now complete, and bandwidth seemingly in a better place... let's give this another whirl.

I've done a project like this a few times before. Back in 2013 I went as far back as the first NBA Championship (with some caveats due to team availability) and did a single elimination tournament to try and determine the best NBA team of all time. Not surprisingly, and much to my delight, the 1996 Chicago Bulls ran roughshod over their competition en route to the title. Two years later I revised the tournament to include group play and actually have all teams that were available. With a little bit more of a battle, the 1996 Bulls once again came out on top. A year later, I decided to add in ABA champions to the list, with a different result as the 1985 Los Angeles Lakers were the ones who took home the hardware.

So I've been sitting on this for several years now. The original plan was to do another one of these in 2022; that would give me an even number of teams to build a tournament similar to what I did in 2016. That was in the height of my "I don't have bandwidth" era though, but I've nonetheless kept this filed away, waiting for an opportunity to use it. Now in 2025, I finally do, though I had to make some adjustments to keep the field at an even number.

My usual simulator, WhatIfSports, has teams going as far back as 1952. That gives me the last 74 NBA champions. The ABA is also on the simulator, which gives me their nine champions for a total of 83 teams. From here, there are five franchises that have made at least one (incidentally, all have made at least two) NBA Finals but have not won an NBA championship. That's 88, a nice divisible number that allows for a format similar to what we've used.

Like we did in 2015 and 2016, I will set up eight pools of teams. In this case, each pool will have 11 teams. This will allow for a double round robin of each team playing 20 games, a little bit bigger of a sample size compared to the last time I did this. The top eight teams will advance to the usual elimination stage, which means double the number from prior years with 64 teams. I'll have a pre-seeding stage prior to this round to try and balance the bracket out, but I'll have more on that when we get to that stage.

Prior to the tournament starting, I will have a preliminary round to determine the last five teams in, and from there I'll unveil the groups for pool play.

Looking forward to getting back into this grind!