Some friends and I were speaking the other day during a game where it kind of appeared as though the Oklahoma City Thunder were taking the day off as they lost badly in a game where previously that had quite easily won the previous 2. It was a near 40 point rout in game 3 of that series and it just didn't seem right. Sure, there are instances where a team that has their backs against the wall can perform better than usual, but scoring 30 points more than they normally would? This isn't something that happens especially when you are playing against what it widely regarded as the best team in the NBA this season and one of the best squads to ever be put on the hardwood ever.
We were talking about how it looked as if OKC was actually playing for the loss to happen intentionally so as to not have a sweep of the incredibly lucrative semi-finals in the tournament. Sure, this is illegal and it is never supposed to happen, but even the coaching seemed to be off and the Thunder honestly didn't seem to be trying for the win. Is this possible? Well in that game it looked probable and you don't need to be an expert in statistic to now that holding the best team in the NBA to under 90 points while scoring more than 140 for the other team is certainly suspicious.
There was also some talk about how OKC wanted to win the series at home in their own stadium and in order to do so they would have to lose one of the games in Minnesota in order to get back there for it since 2 games back-to-back were going to be played in Minnesota.
Throwing games intentionally is illegal, that much is for certain but my group of friends thought that this is definitely what is going on. You see, when OKC has a home game in the semi-finals, the team brings in a tremendous amount of money. Those tickets, all 15,000+ of them, go for hundreds if not thousands of dollars a piece, and this is before we talk about merchandising, concessions, and of course the huge price tag that comes with the TV audience.
If you look at the Vegas sports-betting lines, OKC was favored by a mere 3.5 points in this game and previous games they were favored by considerably more, at least double that. Also, I noticed that a lot more money was bet on Minnesota for game 3 than in games prior. Is this because seasoned bettors are aware of the fact that OKC was going to throw the game? I mean, the Vegas lines can't come out and simply say that Minnesota is going to win, because statistically they are not capable of doing so, they had to cover their tracks lest they upend the entire industry.
But this leads me back to not just this one game, or even this series. It makes me want to take a look out further and look at the entire playoffs as a whole. Tournaments are supposed to be "only the best get in" right?
Well in the NBA there are at grand total of 30 teams in total. Nearly 20 of the teams are invited to the tournament since the addition of the "play in" tournament.
I think that when nearly 2/3 of the overall teams are invited to a tournament, and this tournament ends up taking nearly 2 months to complete, we need to at least entertain the notion that this tournament isn't actually about crowning the best team and instead, it is about taking as much money as possible from the viewing public while it takes place.
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In other tournaments that take place in sports, teams will have to play several games but for the NBA championship a team could potentially have to play 42 additional games in addition to the already absurdly long regular-season.
When you watch actual live sports, which I rarely do because of exactly this reason, you, the viewer, are subjected to a crazy amount of advertising. There is more advertising than there is game for the most part and the flow of the game seems to be dictated around this advertising and not the other way around. They used to be straight-forward about this in the past when they would have what they called "TV timeouts" but these days we are just blasted with advertisement breaks endlessly and since I guess that wasn't enough, there are adverts while the game is going on and the commentators even throw in product plugs while play is going on.
At what point will people just tune out? I already don't watch very many games live because of this and I stopped watching UFC numbered events because of it as well. The advertising is out of control and I can't even imagine how much money is involved in these broadcasts.
But when you think about it in terms of dollars and cents, it kind of seems a bit more logical to think that OKC and perhaps other teams would be compelled to intentionally lose games just to stretch the tournament on for a bit longer, doesn't it?