On August 15th, the NBA announced their inaugural in-season tournament schedule for the beginning of the 2023-24 season, and with the right moves, the LA Clippers could really take advantage of it.
Initially, the idea of the tournament was floated around a few years ago to make the regular season more interesting. After a few years of tweaking the idea, the NBA decided to debut the tournament in the 2023-24 season.
The league’s 30 teams will be divided into six groups of five. Each team will play one game against the teams in their group, with the teams with the best record in each group advancing to the knockout round of the tournament. There will also be two “wild card” teams that advance to the knockout round, determined by which non-advancing teams have the best record in each conference.
More information on how the groups were selected can be found here, but the short of it is that the Clippers got dealt a fairly good hand with the way the drawing worked out.
Their group, Western Conference B, consists of the reigning champion Denver Nuggets, New Orleans Pelicans, Dallas Mavericks, and Houston Rockets. Among the three Western Conference groups, theirs is the only one where three of the five teams missed the playoffs completely, and Group B has the second-lowest combined win percentage, at 0.48. That mark is just 0.01 higher than the lowest, Group C, which consists of the San Antonio Spurs, the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Sacramento Kings, the Golden State Warriors, and the Oklahoma City Thunder.
While Group C might seem preferable, the middle pack of those teams, excluding the Kings and Spurs, exist within 0.049 win percentage of each other while the middle teams of the Clipper’s group are separated by a difference of 0.074. The Clippers also sit five spots in front of their next closest competitor, the 10th-seed Pelicans, while the Warriors only sit two spots in front of the eighth-seed Wolves.
Taking all of this into consideration, the LA Clippers could be poised for a massive run during the inaugural NBA in-season tournament.
The Dream Scenario
Ideally, the LA Clippers should be expected to be the second-best team in this group, behind the Denver Nuggets. Anything else should be concerning for the Clips, barring any major injuries, given that they were 6-9 against these teams in the 2022-23 season. When you remove the Nuggets from that count, who the Clippers were 0-4 against, the advantage sits at 6-5.
Their only other real threat is the Pelicans, who went 3-0 against the Clippers last season. However, the Pelicans never saw the Clippers at full strength, with Kawhi Leonard missing one of those games and Paul George missing the other two. With the tournament starting just nine games into the season for the Clippers, health shouldn’t be too big of a factor here.
There is another factor that could contribute here: champion’s fatigue. Over the last five years, the NBA champions went a combined 22-28 through the first ten games of the following season.
While some of this is due to untimely injuries or players moving around in the offseason, much of it is due to the simple fact that teams, especially the ones poised for success in the postseason, just don’t care enough about the first handful of games in the season. The Nuggets could follow this example and drop some easy games in October and November.
With that in mind, an argument could be made that the Clippers could win their group outright, moving on to the knockout round. It’s not the best or strongest argument, as it relies on a championship team losing motivation at the start of a season, but it’s not an unreasonable one.
Of course, Denver could also follow in the steps of the Milwaukee Bucks or Toronto Raptors, who went 7-3 in their first ten games following their championship. Should that happen, there is still hope for the Clippers.
The Next Best Thing
The Clippers should go 3-1 in their group play games. That’s just where the expectation should be. Anything else, there will almost certainly be bigger problems to address than the result of an ultimately meaningless in-season tournament.
For Group A in the West — which consists of the Memphis Grizzlies, Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Lakers, Utah Jazz, and Portland Trail Blazers — all of the teams were fairly competitive in head-to-head play with each other last year, going a combined 36-30 against each other.
The Grizzlies and Suns, who had the best overall standings among the five teams, couldn’t find an edge against their opponents, with each team going .500 against the other teams in the group. In short, it’s not out of the question that one of those two wins the group with a 3-1 record, with second place having a 2-2 record.
Group C should have clearer lines drawn than Group A, with the Warriors and Sacramento standing ahead of the rest. However, it’s not unlikely that Minnesota could cause some headaches for them.
Neither team held a winning record against Minnesota, with Golden State going 2-2 and Sacramento going 1-3, and because of injuries, the Timberwolves’ core five have only played a total of around 75 minutes together up to this point. A fully healthy Wolves team could make some waves in the group play, causing either Golden State or Sacramento to fall to 2-2 with the Wolves.
If that happens, the Clippers would secure the Wild Card spot in the West and move forward into the knockout round.
So What Happens?
A knockout run isn’t guaranteed for LA. Health has always been an important factor when talking about the Clippers, and the Pelicans could pose a larger threat to them in a game both teams would really want to win. However, they should be considered one of the favorites.
While the NBA hasn’t announced how the knockout bracket will look, the two Group A winners will likely face each other, the Group B winners will face each other, and the Group C teams will face each other, pitting the two wild card teams against one another.
For the East, that team will likely be the Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks, or Brooklyn Nets. Against all three of those teams, the Clippers went a combined 4-2 last season, faring the best against the Knicks, who they swept 2-0. They split the series against New York and Cleveland, going 1-1 in both instances. In a high-pressure game with no injuries, the Clippers could easily come out of the wild card round of the tournament.
If that happens, they’ll face either the winner of the Group A, B, or C games, where their run would likely stop. Still, going that deep into the tournament would put them in a semi-final game, which will be played in Las Vegas.
So what does all this mean? Well, to start with, it could serve as a morale boost for the team, propelling them forward into the long stretch from December to the All-Star Break with a little more competitive fire. More substantially, going that deep in the tournament would give the Clippers four regular season wins, all of which will be added to their overall record.
The in-season tournament, in terms of the impact it will have on the postseason or NBA Finals, is ultimately fairly meaningless. The winning teams don’t win a substantial amount of money as far as the NBA goes, and while there are league honors involved, everyone will still be focused on the tournament taking place in the spring.
However, with all that, it does serve an important role for the middle-of-the-pack teams like LA. It could give them an early competitive spark, and it’s possible that a few key wins in the in-season tournament could push a team like the Clippers to perform better in the regular season than they might without it. That’s what the teams, ultimately, are playing for.
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