The NBA Play-in tournament logo is seen prior to the game between the Miami Heat and the Chicago Bulls at the United Center on April 16, 2025. (Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

Like many in the NBA mediasphere, I’m usually quick to nitpick things I don’t like about the league’s current state of being. The regular season is way too long, the nerds have ruined the sport, the All-Star Game is a joke, tanking is out of control (and the league refuses to fix it), teams are taking too many 3s, foul-baiting is baked into the rules of the game… you get the idea.

Under Adam Silver, the league’s response has usually been a steady stream of vaguely well-intentioned policies — the In-Season Tournament, the 65-game eligibility rule for awards, another round of lottery-odds flattening — that nonetheless feel more like weird, technocratic half-tweaks nobody asked for than genuine solutions to the NBA’s biggest problems.

Which is why, in theory, the Play-In Tournament should be right near the top of my shit-list as well. (And in fact, maybe this whole post is just my contrarian streak running amok — it’s been known to happen.)

But instead of tearing it down, I want to actually offer a defense of the Play-In, which starts tonight with Heat-Hornets and Blazers-Suns, continuing tomorrow with Magic-Sixers and Warriors-Clippers. I think it actually has had a positive effect on the league and has accomplished basically all of the things it intended to.

For one thing, the Play-In was designed to keep more teams in the mix — and actually trying to win — as the dog days of the NBA regular season dragged on through February and March into mid-April. And to that end, the mission was successful. Think about just this past weekend: Ahead of the Friday slate, we were looking at meaningful games both that night and again during the evening on Sunday, thanks to the battles around who would be what seed (and what that would mean for the Play-In bracket).

Proponents of the Play-In argued that expanding the postseason race would keep more teams competitive deeper into the season, and we can see that borne out in the data. Looking at full, 82-game seasons in 5-year blocks since the NBA last expanded in 2004-05, the average No. 10 seed per conference under the Play-In era has been significantly better — by about 3 wins per season — than it was in earlier eras. There is now a pronounced “moat” in each conference between the No. 10 seed (which has gravitated closer to the rest of the playoff pack) and the league’s bottom-feeders, suggesting that more teams are staying engaged in the race rather than bailing out and tanking.

A similar story goes for all “fringe” playoff contenders in the Play-In era, in fact. Seed Nos. 6-10 all have better records over the past handful of seasons than they did before, to some degree or another. Whether motivated by fear of missing the Play-In — or just as powerful, fear of making it, as we saw from teams like Toronto and Atlanta, seeded in the 5-6 range — we’ve seen this new wrinkle lead to increased urgency down the stretch of the regular season for teams at the edge of the playoff picture.

Then there’s what happens once the Play-In Tournament begins. And that’s where this experiment was always going to be a delicate balancing act. If the Play-In simply sent nothing but seed Nos. 7-8 to the “real” playoff bracket, we might have asked: “What’s the point?” We could have just gotten those teams anyway, without the new gimmick. At the same time, if a bunch of 9- and 10-seeds were knocking off 7s and 8s to make it in, we might have complained that the Play-In was draining the regular season of whatever meaning it still had left — handing inferior teams playoff spots they hadn’t really earned.

In reality, the Play-In seems to have struck a pretty good balance. In the 5-year history of its current form, a 7-seed has never fallen out of the playoffs altogether, and 8-seeds have defended their spots 60 percent of the time. Meanwhile, 9-seeds have used their lifeline to sneak in three times in 10 tries, and after years of futility, a 10-seed finally broke though into the main playoff bracket last season:

Subjectively, this seems like a pretty good mix to me! Most of the time, we get the same teams we would expected based on their seedings; 16 of the 20 playoff spots to emerge from the Play-In have gone to pre-tournament 7- and 8-seeds. But every so often, a team from the outside does sneak in — often enough to keep things interesting.

The Page-McIntyre playoff system, upon which the Play-In Tournament is based, has long been praised for this balance. It gives lower seeds a chance, but forces them to win twice before the favorites win once. The result is a format that introduces just enough randomness to matter, but not enough to feel unfair.

Finally, we have to judge the Play-In Tournament on the way it interacts with the actual NBA playoffs — and on that front, it’s delivered as well.

Aside from motivating more teams to play harder later in the regular season, or cynically juicing the TV revenue figures with an extra set of “playoff-like” games during the week after the regular season, the only other argument for the existence of the Play-In is the idea that deserving 9- and 10-seeds might get lost in the shuffle otherwise — or at least that the 7- and 8-seeds they face need further sharpening to prove they are playoff-ready.

And, again, the data actually shows a successful effect in this regard. Since the adoption of the Play-In Tournament, 7- and 8-seeds have gone from collectively winning just 8 percent of their first-round NBA playoff series from 2005 to 2019 to doubling their success rate, at 15 percent, under the current Play-In format:

It bears pointing out that all of this improvement was driven by 7-seeds, who went from winning just 7 percent of the time from 2005-19 — a worse success rate than 8-seeds! — to winning 20 percent of the time since the Play-In was introduced. By comparison, 8-seeds continued to win at the same exact rate (10 percent) over both time periods.

But we know that those 7- and 8-seeds sometimes exchanged places through the Play-In versus what seeds they would have held under the old system — to say nothing of the teams who wouldn’t have made it at all previously. So I think it’s fair to categorize them all together as “teams who emerged from the Play-In”.

And those teams, whether due to an improved selection process — i.e., the Play-In unearthing better teams than the regular-season standings would have — or simply being prepared better for the playoffs proper, have won much more often in the opening round of the “real” bracket than they used to.

Put it all together, and the Play-In Tournament appears to serve an actual positive purpose in the NBA ecosystem, rather than being just another pointless gimmick nobody asked for. (Which, let’s be honest, is what I fully expected it to be when it was first introduced.) It has improved the middle-class of teams in each conference, motivating them through the power of FOMO; it has given us just the right amount of Cinderella stories without too many undeserving teams advancing into the main bracket; and it seems to be producing more competitive opponents for the top seeds once they get into the playoffs for real.

(My biggest complain with it might simply be that its stats don’t count anywhere — they neither belong to the regular season nor the playoffs, so player accomplishments this week live in a weird record-keeping no-man’s land. But this would be easily corrected by simply counting them as playoff stats, which I think is plenty defensible.)

Anyway, the Play-In Tournament manages to thread a rare needle that most of the league’s other recent changes haven’t: It wasn’t on many fans’ wish-lists beforehand, but it has added real value without detracting from what already worked or introducing major unintended consequences. If only all of Adam Silver’s initiatives as commissioner could say the same, the league would be in great shape.

Filed under: NBA