It’s Playoff Whine!

With the regular season drawing nigh, I’m trying to gird myself for that familiar refrain/whine: that the WNBA’s three-game series structure, where the team with home-court advantage must start on the road, is at a disadvantage; and thus it’s unfair.

EVERY. YEAR. Auuugghh!!!

I am apparently a cult of one on this, but I like that it’s this way. Sure, my preference would be for a home-away-home series, but my second choice is what they play now. Why? Because I’m not a big fan of the corronation run. I figure that if a series runs its extent, then having home court for that game is advantage enough.

The numbers bear me out, especially in the first round. The fact is that the team with the home-court advantage didn’t get there by chance. They are typically the better team, and typically win these playoff matchups. That said, I like to let the underdog have their chance.

But how to determine winners in multi-team leagues is always difficult. Someone is bound to be irked.

Tennis uses a ladder system. Often this is constructed to be so that the best plays the worst, second best plays second worst, and so forth. The seedings are created so that if the top seed always wins, the best player/team will have had the easiest relative path to victory. Ugh. I prefer a tiered system were seedings are based on blocks, but the competitors within a block are randomly sorted. As a result, in a 128-player field, the top 64 players in the ladder could face any of the bottom 64. Thus, #1 could face #128 (as happens now), or #65. Still an advantage, but not so large a one. Conversely, instead of having to play the #1, the #128 player could face instead the #64 player. Still not great odds, but better.

I think the WPS had the worst possible playoff structure: top four teams advanced. #3 and # 4 played, the winner faced #2, and the winner of that game faced #1. This means that for a #4 team to win (which it did, by the way), it would have to play two extra games. This would both tire it but also maintain momentum–momentum that the #1 would lose from have a bye for two rounds.

I think my preferred tournament style is the double-elimination. You have a main bracket. If you lose, you go to a loser’s (or second-chance) bracket. If you lose in the loser’s bracket, you are eliminated. At the end, the winner of the loser’s bracket faces the winner of the main bracket. Where this often falls apart, though, is that the final game is often winner-takes all. The winner of the main bracket doesn’t get the luxury of a loss like everyone else did. Not fair. If the main bracket winner loses, then there should be one last game. (Perhaps a reduced pot if you took a loss before winning the whole thing would give an added incentive for winning the main draw.)

But, as I said, there are any number of ways of running a playoff. In the case of the WNBA, I wish that the announcers would just stop WHINING about it already. Please. It’s been done this way for years. It’s how it’s done. Move on.