Top 3 Yankee response categories:
- Trevino et al are God's gift to framing
- quit crying
- oh yeah? Who had the highest score in previous weeks, huh?
Promotion and relegation is often brought up in discussions around MLS, which makes sense because pro/rel is so common in European soccer and (generally speaking) that's where the best club soccer is played. But I was randomly thinking today that if you could model any pro sport in the US around the European model of (roughly speaking) 20-team leagues with an overall "champions" league, I think you could make it work best with basketball.
One of the big issues with trying to get pro/rel to work in MLS, as a national league, is that the distances are huge. But also, the populations are mostly centered in urban areas, where it is expensive to build a big enough stadium to host enough fans to make it a good atmosphere for a sport with a 70x110-yard field.
With basketball, you need way less space to build a facility that holds a court and 15K-25K fans, and in general it doesn't seem like you need such a big city to support a basketball team, when you have relatively small cities in the NBA like New Orleans (47th-largest MSA), Salt Lake (46th), Memphis (44th), OKC (42nd), and Milwaukee (40th).
So I starting trying to figure out what such a league might look like. Here's roughly what I came up with.
You start with four 20-team leagues. Each of these leagues plays a 38-game "regular season" -- you play each team in your league once at home and once away.
East -- NY Knicks, NY Nets, Newark, Jersey City, DC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, Boston, Montreal, Tampa, Baltimore, Orlando, Charlotte, Virginia Beach-Norfolk, Jacksonville, Rhode Island, Ottawa, Richmond, Hartford
Central -- Chicago Bulls, Chicago South, Detroit, Toronto, MSP, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Nashville, Milwaukee, Calgary, Edmonton, Louisville, St. Louis, Buffalo, Grand Rapids, Rochester, Knoxville.
Southwest -- Mexico City 1, Mexico City 2, Dallas, Houston, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Denver, San Antonio, Austin, Toluca, Kansas City, Leon, Queretaro, Juarez, OKC, Memphis, New Orleans, Tulsa, Birmingham, Albuquerque.
West -- Hollywood Lakers, Anaheim Clippers, Long Beach, Riverside, San Bernadino, Phoenix, San Fransisco, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, Porland, Sacramento, San Jose, Vancouver, Vegas, Tijuana, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Fresno, Honolulu
The top 8 teams in each league would then advance to the champions league, where the 32 teams would get randomly seeded into four groups of 8 (two teams from each league). One game home and away with each opponent would be 14 games for the group stage. These games would be interspersed during the regular season of league play. The top 4 teams from each group would advance to a seeded knockout stage, based on the group standings. This would be a 16-team best-of-7 knockout tournament, like the NBA playoffs, but starting from a lot more teams.
If you wanted to give it even more international flair, you could just have it be a worldwide club basketball tournament. Say advance 6 teams from each of the above 4 leagues, but also advance 4 teams from Europe, 2 teams from Asia+Australia, and 2 teams from South America.
Overall, this is entirely impractical as the NBA power brokers would have too much to lose, but I think it's fun to think about. I think the Southwest would be really fun with that much Mexico/US overlap, and the overall travel burden for the players would be a lot better, plus with fewer games I don't think you'd generally see star players doing any "load management." If you wanted to add some extra games to the calendar, you could have a "preseason" Open tournament that was an 80-team single-elimination tournament. Teams would have a huge incentive to not sit around and lose, because there would be so much additional money available by making the champions league, but there would also be some level of stability by not having true relegation.
Luis Arraez 2.6 WAR
Pablo Lopez 0.7 WAR
Luis has a .445 OBP and a 157 OPS+ and his fielding percentage is 1.000, he has yet to commit an error this season. Oh, well.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say Arraez won't maintain that over the season.
Luis Arraez's batting average today is .399. On this day in 1977, Rod Carew had a batting average of .379 and finished the season batting .388. But I get that historical analogs to present circumstances are not necessarily reliable predictors of future events.
Arraez was hitting .358 on June 6 last year after a 4-4 game the day prior. He made it up to .367 on June 11. He finished the season at .316.
About time they catch a break:
Top 3 Yankee response categories:
- Trevino et al are God's gift to framing
- quit crying
- oh yeah? Who had the highest score in previous weeks, huh?
Promotion and relegation is often brought up in discussions around MLS, which makes sense because pro/rel is so common in European soccer and (generally speaking) that's where the best club soccer is played. But I was randomly thinking today that if you could model any pro sport in the US around the European model of (roughly speaking) 20-team leagues with an overall "champions" league, I think you could make it work best with basketball.
One of the big issues with trying to get pro/rel to work in MLS, as a national league, is that the distances are huge. But also, the populations are mostly centered in urban areas, where it is expensive to build a big enough stadium to host enough fans to make it a good atmosphere for a sport with a 70x110-yard field.
With basketball, you need way less space to build a facility that holds a court and 15K-25K fans, and in general it doesn't seem like you need such a big city to support a basketball team, when you have relatively small cities in the NBA like New Orleans (47th-largest MSA), Salt Lake (46th), Memphis (44th), OKC (42nd), and Milwaukee (40th).
So I starting trying to figure out what such a league might look like. Here's roughly what I came up with.
You start with four 20-team leagues. Each of these leagues plays a 38-game "regular season" -- you play each team in your league once at home and once away.
East -- NY Knicks, NY Nets, Newark, Jersey City, DC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, Boston, Montreal, Tampa, Baltimore, Orlando, Charlotte, Virginia Beach-Norfolk, Jacksonville, Rhode Island, Ottawa, Richmond, Hartford
Central -- Chicago Bulls, Chicago South, Detroit, Toronto, MSP, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Nashville, Milwaukee, Calgary, Edmonton, Louisville, St. Louis, Buffalo, Grand Rapids, Rochester, Knoxville.
Southwest -- Mexico City 1, Mexico City 2, Dallas, Houston, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Denver, San Antonio, Austin, Toluca, Kansas City, Leon, Queretaro, Juarez, OKC, Memphis, New Orleans, Tulsa, Birmingham, Albuquerque.
West -- Hollywood Lakers, Anaheim Clippers, Long Beach, Riverside, San Bernadino, Phoenix, San Fransisco, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, Porland, Sacramento, San Jose, Vancouver, Vegas, Tijuana, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Fresno, Honolulu
The top 8 teams in each league would then advance to the champions league, where the 32 teams would get randomly seeded into four groups of 8 (two teams from each league). One game home and away with each opponent would be 14 games for the group stage. These games would be interspersed during the regular season of league play. The top 4 teams from each group would advance to a seeded knockout stage, based on the group standings. This would be a 16-team best-of-7 knockout tournament, like the NBA playoffs, but starting from a lot more teams.
If you wanted to give it even more international flair, you could just have it be a worldwide club basketball tournament. Say advance 6 teams from each of the above 4 leagues, but also advance 4 teams from Europe, 2 teams from Asia+Australia, and 2 teams from South America.
Overall, this is entirely impractical as the NBA power brokers would have too much to lose, but I think it's fun to think about. I think the Southwest would be really fun with that much Mexico/US overlap, and the overall travel burden for the players would be a lot better, plus with fewer games I don't think you'd generally see star players doing any "load management." If you wanted to add some extra games to the calendar, you could have a "preseason" Open tournament that was an 80-team single-elimination tournament. Teams would have a huge incentive to not sit around and lose, because there would be so much additional money available by making the champions league, but there would also be some level of stability by not having true relegation.
Luis Arraez 2.6 WAR
Pablo Lopez 0.7 WAR
Luis has a .445 OBP and a 157 OPS+ and his fielding percentage is 1.000, he has yet to commit an error this season. Oh, well.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say Arraez won't maintain that over the season.
Luis Arraez's batting average today is .399. On this day in 1977, Rod Carew had a batting average of .379 and finished the season batting .388. But I get that historical analogs to present circumstances are not necessarily reliable predictors of future events.
Arraez was hitting .358 on June 6 last year after a 4-4 game the day prior. He made it up to .367 on June 11. He finished the season at .316.