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.

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!

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!