2025 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: Play In Round

Let's get this tournament started.

As mentioned in the introductory post, we have 83 championship teams that are already into the field. Because this is not an even number, we need to get the field to a nice round number. Rather than pre-eliminating anyone, we're going to find a nice, round number of teams to add to get us to where we can group teams up.

20 of the 30 NBA franchises have won a championship, though I use an asterisk here to knock it down to 19 as the 1951 Rochester Royals are not on WhatIfSports, which knocks the Sacramento Kings' lone title off the board.

This gives me 11 teams for five spots. The Kings, since that 1951 title in Rochester, have not even made it back to the NBA Finals. Other franchises that have not had the fortune of making it to basketball's biggest stage are the Charlotte Hornets, Los Angeles Clippers, Memphis Grizzlies, Minnesota Timberwolves, and New Orleans Pelicans. Conveniently, that leaves us with five teams for five spots: the Brooklyn Nets, Indiana Pacers, Orlando Magic, Phoenix Suns, and Utah Jazz.

Also conveniently, all of these teams have made multiple trips to the Finals without a ring. So to help determine which iteration of each franchise would earn the invite, we will do a play in round.

The franchises with two appearances will play a home-and-home, with aggregate scoring determining the winner. Now because the Phoenix Suns have three Finals appearances, they have some extra legwork that goes in with each team playing four games, so if there's a tie, head to head, then point differential, will be the tiebreakers.

All simulations are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's play!

2016 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: Play In Round

We're into the month of June now, and we're nearing the start time for pool play. However, we have some narrowing down of the field to do.

Last month, we got the 2016 Tournament underway with a round robin for the ABA teams. With those results in, our nine ABA champs are ranked and have groupings to combine with our NBA champions that participated in last year's tournament. We're also throwing the upcoming NBA champion into the exact middle of the pack among the NBA teams at 33rd out of 65, just because that seems like the fairest place to put them. However, to get down to our cutoff mark of 72 champions, we need to trim some teams from the bottom.

Before the tournament started, I ranked every NBA champion from 1952 onward based on their performances in prior Tournaments of Champions. I have broken all of them up into nine groups of seven with the exception of the group at the bottom of the rankings, which has nine teams. We're then taking the bottom five teams from that group and having them play a double round robin during the NBA Finals to eliminate the worst two of the bunch.

I easily could have just done this based on the results of my rankings themselves, which would make this a lot easier: our bottom two teams have gone a combined 1-35 over the last two NBA Tournaments of Champions: the 1953 and 1954 Minneapolis Lakers. The '53 team has the dubious distinction of being the only team in the Tournament of Champions that has yet to win a single game, while the '54 Lakers beat the 1958 St. Louis Hawks in their penultimate game last year. The tricky part comes in the form of a trio of teams with just two wins apiece over the last two tournaments. The 1955 Syracuse Nationals won a pair of first round games in 2013 against the 1969 Celtics before bowing out, while the 1956 Philadelphia Warriors and the 1959 Boston Celtics each went 2-12 in their respective groups last year after getting swept in the opening round in 2013. But honestly, I don't think that's entirely fair to the '53 or '54 Lakers, who haven't played these teams in the tournament.

Now, 20 games is a lot to get done over a short span of time here this month, but I ultimately decided the fairest way to play this was to take all three: the '55 Nationals, '56 Warriors, and '59 Celtics will join the '53 and '54 Lakers as my play-in teams. These five squads will play a double round robin tournament. The top three teams will remain alive and get to play in Group Play once again, while the bottom two teams are done early. In the event of a tie in the standings involving an elimination spot, head to head record will be your first tiebreaker, followed by record against teams above the tie, then against teams below the tie, and finally point differential.

Since this is a double round robin, teams are playing a home-and-home with each team receiving two byes. All simulations are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's get this tournament officially underway.