NBA In-Season Tournament solves 1 big problem by creating another

Welcome to the Winner’s Circle, a weekly column by Bet For The Win senior writer Prince J. Grimes.

Everything in sports is better when the stakes are higher, and betting has become a good indicator of that. Betting activity predictably increases around major tentpole events like playoff games, March Madness and the Super Bowl.

The money that flows around these events shows just how much more engaged fans are, from casuals to die-hards. And I expect a similar jump in engagement around the new NBA In-Season Tournament debuting in 2023, if not for group stage games then definitely for the knockout games and championship.

Those stakes illustrate why it was smart for the NBA to turn a part of its marathon of a regular season into a tournament. In theory, attaching a prize to games that otherwise mattered a little less should increase not only fan interest but also the interest of the teams themselves, making it less likely for load management to occur on tournament nights (designated as Tuesday and Friday).

We’ll soon see how that plays out in practice, but even under the best case scenario, it does leave one glaring issue that’s easy to recognize when viewing the event through a betting lens: if the in-season tournament adds an extra layer of significance to some games played between Nov. 3 and Dec. 9, doesn’t it inherently reduce the significance of the non-tournament games in that span?

Hear me out. If a player needs (or wants) to sit out a game during a week where his team plays on Wednesday and Friday, he’s now much more likely to rest on Wednesday because that game doesn’t count towards the tournament. So, in designating certain days for the tournament, the NBA unintentionally created days for rest too.

This isn’t to suggest players will begin sitting games en masse or resting more than they already do. The regular season still matters, regardless of what some people may suggest. And this is only for a month near the beginning of the season. But if the NBA’s intention for the tournament was to allay concerns of increased load management, the tournament won’t help in that sense. Instead, it helps fans recognize which games matter more than others, and those will be the games they watch on TV and buy tickets for.

The other games will end up being just that, the other games. Well, at least to everyone except the sharps who prefer to bet on non-tournament nights, trying to catch bloated lines before a healthy player is ruled out. They’ll show up every single day.