2016 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: Group Play Day 3

64 of the 72 teams in this year's Tournament of Champions have played their opening game. The remaining eight will also get their debuts in over the next couple of days, while 56 other teams play their second games.

The Tournament is officially in full swing now, as we still have about five more full weeks of basketball to narrow this field of 72 down to 32. Every game matters, at least until we get close to the end and teams find themselves eliminated with nothing but pride to play for.

On today's slate, Groups G and F will conclude the first back to backs of the Group Stage. Meanwhile, Groups E and H are back in action after having yesterday off. With two groups and 14 teams playing their second games in as many days, I intend to adjust minutes a little bit, just to make sure that these players aren't getting overworked. All simulations are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's play!

2016 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: Group Play Day 2

Let's get the other half of the field into the action.

Yesterday saw the official kickoff of Group Play for this year's Tournament of Champions. 32 teams have seen their fortunes rise or fall, while four teams got an immediate bye. We're repeating the pattern today with the groups that have yet to see any action.

A couple of these groups are going to be playing the front end of back to backs, just with how the randomizer set up the schedule, but this will all be balanced out over the remaining five weeks with byes and scheduled two day gaps between games.

In the meantime though, Groups B, D, F, and G begin their tournament play today. All simulations are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Let's get to it!

2016 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: Group Play Day 1

The marathon begins.

Over the next five-plus weeks, I am going to simulate a total of 576 games between 63 of the last 65 NBA champions as well as the nine ABA champions. It's a lot of information to pore through, though I'm not going to try keeping stats again this time since it's just too much. Tracking game results, however, is doable.

A couple weeks or so ago I unveiled the official tournament field of these 72 teams and their combined schedules. After going through this grueling gauntlet, only 32 are going to remain.

To minimize workload on a given day for me, our fictional arena staff, and the players themselves, I'm splitting each of the 18 rounds of the double round robin group play in half, so four of the eight groups will play their scheduled games or receive their scheduled byes each day. This schedule was randomly generated, so there will be some back-to-backs scheduled here; it was unavoidable. With two byes sprinkled in for each team, combined with built in off days as a result of those back to backs, it shouldn't be bad. Each team will play 16 games over the course of the next 36 days, which from a little research is a fairly standard regular season workload.

To kick off the tournament, Groups A, C, E, and H will open their schedules. The remainder will tip off tomorrow. To find these results, I am going to try to work with each team's roster to get the best possible lineups out on the floor, while also making sure to manage minutes to not exhaust anyone, especially with back to backs factoring into the schedule. All simulations are provided by WhatIfSports.com. Good luck to our competing teams, and let the NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions begin!

COAS Picks the 2016 MLB All Stars

As is my custom, it is the end of June, MLB All Star Game ballots are due, and I need to exercise my right as a sports fan!

I kind of abused a similar system earlier this year and was one of the idiots who repeatedly voted for John Scott to get into the NHL All Star Game. That's more of a for-fun thing though. The MLB All Star Game, for reasons I still don't totally understand, still determines home field advantage in the World Series.

Since this is the case, I take my voting for these honors very seriously. As much as I want to spam vote Cubs, I can't in good conscience do that. The All Star Game should be a showcase of the best talent Major League Baseball has to offer.

I always want to wait on casting my ballots until right before the deadline, though MLB tweaked the rules this year and imposed a daily vote limit. This means I won't cap out on my 35 allotted votes, but I'll be close. Below are my picks for this year's Midsummer Classic in San Diego.

American League
1B- Miguel Cabrera, DET
2B- Ian Kinsler, DET
SS- Xander Bogaerts, BOS
3B- Manny Machado, BAL
C- Salvador Perez, KC
DH- David Ortiz, BOS
OF- Mookie Betts, BOS
OF- Mike Trout, LAA
OF- Mark Trumbo, BAL

Most of these were pretty straightforward. Miggy and Ian Kinsler are putting up some fantastic numbers in Detroit, Xander Bogaerts has been ridiculous, Manny Machado is a homer machine, as is Mark Trumbo, Mike Trout is obvious, and Mookie Betts is the best of the rest of the outfielders. David Ortiz, especially in his last year, is a no-brainer. Catcher was a little trickier because there aren't really any outstanding picks, but Salvy is the obvious pick of this bunch.

National League
1B- Anthony Rizzo, CHC
2B- Ben Zobrist, CHC
SS- Corey Seager, LAD
3B- Kris Bryant, CHC
C- Wilson Ramos, WAS
DH*- Nolan Arenado, COL
OF- Dexter Fowler, CHC
OF- Yoenis Cespedes, NYM
OF- Marcell Ozuna, MIA

Major League Baseball needs to revamp the fan voting and since they allow a DH vote for the AL, they need to allow an automatic write-in for someone in the NL to be the DH. I actually swapped Nolan Arenado for Kris Bryant on the Tuesday before the deadline after Kris Bryant did things to baseballs no one has ever done before. It's a fairly Cub-heavy lineup, which is a little biased, but who of the Cubs on this list, other than Arenado for Bryant, can you justifiably argue? Maybe Paul Goldschmidt or Wil Myers for Rizzo, but Rizzo has a legit argument. You could also easily put Daniel Murphy ahead of Ben Zobrist and I wouldn't complain, though Zo was scorching hot in May to get here. I don't know that you can argue many outfielders ahead of Fowler; Ryan Braun, Carlos Gonzalez, or Starling Marte might be justifiable choices. Bryce Harper's average is too low for me though. Elsewhere, as much as I'd love to keep up the David Ross write-in campaign going, Wilson Ramos has had a phenomenal year. Really, as long as the guy who spits on umpires who is inexplicably deified by idiot Cardinals fans doesn't win, I'm good. I can't in good conscience vote for Addison Russell to be in the game. Corey Seager has been phenomenal for the Dodgers and gets my vote. The other two outfield spots go to Yoenis Cespedes, who has been excellent for the Mets again, and Marcell Ozuna, who's having a breakout year in Miami.

2016 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: Group Play Introduction

Congratulations to the Cleveland Cavaliers, our 2016 NBA Champions! You have entered the ranks of the immortals, teams who will forever be remembered in history as champions. But just how good are you historically?

That's what I'm setting out to answer this summer... again. I'm taking the last 65 NBA champions, as well as all nine ABA champions, and putting them into one big tournament with the intent of finding the greatest of them all.

Now, all of the preliminary stuff has been settled. The nine ABA champions have finished off their mini tournament to rank themselves, and those rankings are set to go. Meanwhile, I have whittled down the 74 team field to 72 with the recently completed Play In tournament.

At this point, we can get to the nitty-gritty. Before the tournament started, I preranked all the NBA champions based on their performances in the 2013 and 2015 tournaments. I then broke those rankings up into groups of teams, most of them seven-team groups; the top seven teams formed a group, followed by teams 8-14, and so on. The exceptions came in the middle, where I only took teams 29-34 for the purpose of adding the 2016 Cavs, and then at the end, where I took the last nine teams and divided them up for the Play In Tournament. Ultimately I ended up with nine pools of seven teams, then added in the ABA teams to the respective pool that matches their finish in the ABA Seeding Tournament.

With that information in mind, I can officially set up the groups. I will once again have eight groups for double round robin play, where each group will receive one team from each pool. This is an effort to keep each group competitively balanced, or as close to it as possible. Each of these groups will simultaneously run a double round robin tournament, where every team gets home and away games against everyone else in the group. Of the nine teams in each group, only four will advance on to the Elimination Round, meaning only 32 of our 72 teams advancing to this stage get to play beyond the first week of August. So with our teams in place, here are the groups for this year's Tournament of Champions.

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.

The NBA Finals, Legacies, and Tournament Berths

Basketball's biggest stage gets lit up tonight, as the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors begin their grudge match for an NBA Championship. Over the next two or three weeks, there's a lot on the line.

I haven't talked a ton about the NBA this season, other than preparing for the upcoming NBA Tournament of Champions, which I'll have more on later. For now, I want to actually look at the ramifications of this upcoming series.

On one side, you have a Cleveland team led by the best player of his generation. This time though, LeBron James actually has his full supporting cast in the form of Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving. James and company romped through the East to bring Cleveland to its second straight Finals, while LeBron is playing in his sixth in a row... a mind boggling stat.

On the other side, you have rewritten history. As early as November and December, I thought it was blasphemy for anyone to be uttering this Warriors team in the same breath as the 1996 Chicago Bulls. But Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green have carried this team forward and, after a major scare against Oklahoma City in the Western Conference Finals, are back to finish their title defense.

I have no idea who is going to win this series, and I'm not making a prediction because I haven't seen enough basketball to really make an educated guess. What I do know is that multiple legacies are up in the air at this point.

If the Warriors complete the season, they absolutely enter the conversation for greatest team of all time with the '96 Bulls and the 1986 Boston Celtics, who a lot of people forget about when talking all time great teams. 73 wins broke the Bulls' 20 year old record that I never thought would get toppled, but I saw an interesting stat earlier this week.

Even if GS sweeps CLE, they'd finish 89-14 (.864), their season win % would not be as good as the 95-96 Bulls' 87-13 record (.870)

— Mike & Mike (@MikeAndMike) May 31, 2016

The biased kid who watched that '96 Bulls team wants to scream this stat from a mountaintop, combined with the fact that Golden State got taken to the limit by Oklahoma City, while the Bulls didn't run into nearly this many problems in the playoffs as Golden State has. But the Warriors had to deal with Steph Curry missing a few games and getting back to himself, and Oklahoma City was no slouch of an opponent. As much as I hate to admit it, the '16 Warriors just might be a better team.

That brings us to the flip side of this argument. Given the Warriors' historic success, LeBron has a lot riding on the outcome of this series as well. If you've read Confessions of a Sportscaster since the beginning, you'll note that I am not a fan of LeBron James. I've moved past the debacle that was The Decision, but I do still think LeBron flops and whines too much. The former point is a bigger sticking point, since Jordan whined to a degree too in his day. One thing I won't critique LeBron for on the whole is his Finals record.

Don't get me wrong, 2-4 is not good, and in my opinion based on that he will never be better than Jordan. At the same time, his Finals record isn't really his fault. Of the four Finals losses, you can only blame him for 2011 against Dallas. You could also argue he got bailed out in 2013 by Chris Bosh and Ray Allen, but they still had to play Game 7 that year. Otherwise, LeBron has done pretty much all he could and even willed some pretty mediocre teams to the Finals. Look back at the '07 Cavs; I'm not sure MJ could have willed them to the Finals.

That said, if the Cavs are able to pull this out, LeBron skyrockets up the all time player chart for me. He's fairly high up as it is, but a title against the most successful regular season team of all time pushes him up another level entirely. Even if they don't win, if LeBron plays incredibly well and/or pushes this series to the brink, he still goes up quite a bit. I still don't particularly care for him, but damn it if I don't respect his place in history.

And all of this doesn't even take into account the NBA Tournament of Champions! The winner gets an entry into this summer's field of 72, which includes some hellish matchups. The field is almost entirely set, with the Play In Round currently in progress. When both the Finals and the Play In Round conclude, I will unveil the groupings for this tournament.