No Offense To The WNBA, But Their Playoff Format Is Horrendous
Listen, this is just my two cents. My time covering women's basketball this year, which started when I went to the NCAA Final Four, covered the Olympics until they actually started, and went well into the first round of the WNBA playoffs, officially ended last night when the clock struck 0:00 on the Indiana Fever game. I was a part of the 1.84 million people that were watching Caitlin Clark play in the first round, but I unfortunately was not a part of the crew watching the other three first round matchups, which in total, combined to add up to less viewers than the single Fever game. Anyways, I do enjoy the game and despite what people may comment below, blogs about the sport do get plenty of clicks. So with that being said, I wanted to offer just one suggestion on how to make it better: change the playoff format.
This is the "New Playoff Format", opposed to the one adopted in 2016 that consisted of four rounds using the traditional…..1-1-5-5 series system. First two rounds were single elimination, while the 1 and 2 seeds got double byes in to the semis. Now while I understand that they needed change, what they came up with is….wrong? I have no problem with the 3-5-5 format at all, but the structure of how they play the games is outrageous. For those of you that didn't know, the higher seed gets Game 1 and Game 2 in their home arena. And then if it were to go to Game 3, it goes to the lower seeded city for the elimination game. Huh?
So take the Indiana Fever's series for example. They had to go to Connecticut where they were underdogs for Games 1 and 2. They never even got a shot to play on their home floor. And if you want to say that's fine because Connecticut earned the right to make it difficult for Indiana in this series, my rebuttal would be that in no way shape or form should there even be an opportunity for that higher seeded team to have to go on the ROAD for an ELIMINATION GAME.
So if the Fever would've held that small lead with 3 minutes left last night, they would've made the 3 seed in the league pack up their bags and head to Indiana? That's wrong. But so is the idea of not giving the Fever some sort of advantage in Game 2? Look I'm just a blogger with an English Education degree, but if I was trying to market the league, more of these series would've gone to an elimination game than the…..zero…..that did. Maybe because the higher seeded team never had to leave town? You know what they say in women's basketball: the series doesn't start until you have to win a game play a game on the opponent's home court.
Anyways, that's just my two cents. I'm sure it's a money thing but people forget that Angel Reese is in the league now. On the backs of her and her sidekick Caitlin, and with private jet money coming in, I think we can perhaps send these girls on a plane ride between games 1 and 2 to make the series and the product more interesting. Instead we had a grand total of zero road teams even win a game in Round 1.