Monday, June 30, 2025

2025 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: Group Reveal

The field is filled. Let's set the stage.

Yesterday the final five teams were announced that would be participating along with the 74 NBA and nine ABA champions in this year's tournament. This gives us 88 teams that will be playing, a huge growth from the last time I did this.

The format will nonetheless be the same; there will be eight groups of 11 teams that will be playing double round robins amongst each other, giving each team a total of 20 games to try and prove their worth.

Because of the sheer number of teams, I needed to do my best to balance out the groups. Thankfully, most of these teams have at least one prior sample of games for me to go off of. Years ago, I had built out a formula to score how each team performed in each of the tournaments, and from there I found the average score. Obviously a team that made a deeper run in a single tournament would get a little more weight than a team that has struggled through all three appearances, so it's not perfect, but it's better than a randomly assigned bracket like I used in 2013 that included a first round matchup between the 1992 Bulls and 2013 Heat.

There are 74 teams that have participated in one of these tournaments before, allowing for them to have a baseline score. 72 of those 74 teams are organized into nine different tiers, with each group getting one team from each tier in the name of competitive balance, but also to keep the very best teams from having to play each other too early.

The two teams not in that list are the 1953 and 1954 Minneapolis Lakers; two iterations of the franchise that have won a combined three games across three tournaments, easily the fewest among tournament teams. Those two Laker teams will join the 2020 Lakers and the five non-champion entrants who made it via the play in round into one tier that will be distributed across all groups, with every other NBA champion between 2017 and 2025 into another tier, giving us 11.

All tiers will have their teams randomly assigned to groups, with the exception of that '53/'54 Laker tier. By virtue of winning at least one previous Tournament of Champions, whichever group contains the 1996 Bulls and 1985 Lakers will get one of those two Minneapolis Laker iterations in their group, with the remaining six teams distributed among the remaining groups. The 2020 Lakers are in this tier not through any fault of their own; due to the circumstances of their playoff run this seemed like the fairest team to take out of the tier of other NBA champions to be crowned since the last time I ran this tournament.

A couple caveats for the group assignments: due to the sheer number of titles won by a couple teams (looking at you, Lakers and Celtics), there is no limit to the number of representatives from a single franchise in each group other than how tiers are set up. The only override that will be done is if any of our five play-in teams would get paired up with the team that beat them in that year's Finals (e.g. the 1993 Suns and 1993 Bulls cannot be placed in the same group).

Without further ado, here are the draws for the 2025 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions Group Play.

Group AGroup BGroup CGroup D
2013 Miami Heat2015 Golden State Warriors1985 Los Angeles Lakers1997 Chicago Bulls
1986 Boston Celtics2002 Los Angeles Lakers1987 Los Angeles Lakers1988 Los Angeles Lakers
1977 Portland Trailblazers1983 Philadelphia 76ers2001 Los Angeles Lakers1984 Boston Celtics
1994 Houston Rockets1975 Kentucky Colonels1989 Detroit Pistons1973 New York Knicks
1998 Chicago Bulls2006 Miami Heat2010 Los Angeles Lakers1982 Los Angeles Lakers
1963 Boston Celtics2000 Los Angeles Lakers1975 Golden State Warriors1967 Philadelphia 76ers
1981 Boston Celtics2004 Detroit Pistons1960 Boston Celtics1971 Utah Stars
1974 New York Nets1968 Pittsburgh Pipers1973 Indiana Pacers1966 Boston Celtics
1965 Boston Celtics1952 Minneapolis Lakers1956 Philadelphia Warriors1961 Boston Celtics
2024 Boston Celtics2023 Denver Nuggets2017 Golden State Warriors2019 Toronto Raptors
1995 Orlando Magic1997 Utah Jazz1953 Minneaplis Lakers2003 New Jersey Nets

Group EGroup FGroup GGroup H
2012 Miami Heat2005 San Antonio Spurs1991 Chicago Bulls1996 Chicago Bulls
1972 Los Angeles Lakers1992 Chicago Bulls2016 Cleveland Cavaliers1971 Milwaukee Bucks
2014 San Antonio Spurs2009 Los Angeles Lakers2008 Boston Celtics2011 Dallas Mavericks
1999 San Antonio Spurs1976 Boston Celtics1970 New York Knicks1976 New York Nets
2003 San Antonio Spurs1969 Boston Celtics1980 Los Angeles Lakers1993 Chicago Bulls
1979 Seattle Supersonics1964 Boston Celtics2007 San Antonio Spurs1974 Boston Celtics
1990 Detroit Pistons1968 Boston Celtics1957 Boston Celtics1995 Houston Rockets
1962 Boston Celtics1972 Indiana Pacers1969 Oakland Oaks1970 Indiana Pacers
1978 Washington Bullets1955 Syracuse Nationals1958 St. Louis Hawks1959 Boston Celtics
2025 Oklahoma City Thunder2022 Golden State Warriors2018 Golden State Warriors2021 Milwaukee Bucks
2020 Los Angeles Lakers2025 Indiana Pacers1993 Phoenix Suns1954 Minneapolis Lakers
I ended up running numbers in terms of seedings, and the average seed in each group among prior participants ranges from about 35.5 to 38.1, so pretty balanced. I didn't grab point averages, but we're probably in a similar ballpark.

This go around, I will probably not do daily posts with all of the results; instead I'm thinking I will do a post for each round every few days. This will likely end up taking us into September with group play, so mid-September is our likely timeline for the elimination round, and likely ending the tournament all told by the end of 2025.
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