The NBA is essentially a business alliance. Therefore, the primary considerations are viewership and profits. The best-of-seven, best-of-four series can ensure the quality of the game while maximizing the revenue. This is the essence of the NBA. Moreover, some NBA players merely view playing basketball as a job - they clock in and clock out at regular hours - that’s all. There is only one champion, and for most people, although that is their goal, it is often unattainable.
Did I say “no idea?”
You said “don’t really know”. Which is pretty close to “no idea”, yes?
No, it is not. Your quote cut off the rest of my post which explained what I meant.
To clarify, it feels like your confusion could be based on two things:
- You believe the game solved who the better team is. That the Giants actually were a better team than the Patriots.
- You don’t think the game solved who the better team is, but you think it’s very strong evidence and you disliked the relative lack of certainty that you inferred from my post.
If it’s 1, I just fundamentally disagree that a 1-off win tautologically defines a better team. If it’s 2 then it’s just quibbling over levels. Is there a 3rd option?
Eta
Little googling gives this quote from The Drunkard’s Walk
And it’s that line of thinking that’s the problem. Champions are determined by winning, not by being the best. Being better is always helpful to becoming champion, but it’s not sufficient, nor is it necessary. (That is, there are teams that were best, yet failed to become champions, and teams that became champions despite not being the best.)
If we wanted to determine the best, we’d have a long season where each team played every other team the same number of times. And then use some mathematical metric to determine the best. This is often boring, so we have championships instead.
A championship uses a process to eliminate teams until there’s only one left. This is exciting because the best doesn’t always win.
I would love for the NHL to try something like a four game total goals series.
My likely faulty memory was that a best of 7 will find the “better team” more than 80% of the time in the NBA. Each game is really a statistical sample. To get that kind of accuracy in the NHL, you would need a best of 50 or something, because it’s so much more fluky.
I disagree. It isn’t because it’s boring. It’s because back in the day there were typically two leagues or conferences that didn’t play each other during the regular season, so there wasn’t a way of determining which first place team was better. Most famously, in baseball the AL and NL went over 100 years during which they only played each other in the World Series. The NFL, NBA, college football, etc. all have similar histories where teams from a given conference, league, division, etc. only played each other. In those days I think it’s legitimate to say the championship game really did serve the purpose of determining which team was better. Now, not so much.
Why? You want a goaltender having a single bad game to determine the entire series?
No, I want offence to be incentivized.
My point was, and is, that a 7-game series in baseball will not necessarily identify the best team. Whether that’s as it should be, or an abomination that cries out to God for intervention, is up to the individual.
My secondary point was that fans enjoy the harmless fiction that their team’s championship means they have proven themselves the very best and exposed the losers as frauds.
Plenty of fans revel in the fact that their team’s championship wasn’t won by the best team, but rather by their inferior team knocking out a superior one; that’s the whole allure of the David vs. Goliath or Cinderella narrative after all. The whole point of the 1980 Miracle on Ice, for instance, was that the Soviet team was vastly superior to the American team and would have won “nine out of ten times” in the words of Herb Brooks himself, yet it was the plucky Americans that beat the Soviets (and then later on beat Finland to take gold.)
If Americans were to say that the USA team was in fact the superior roster, it would actually detract from the glory of it.