What Lakers Fans Need To Know About The NBA's New In-Season Tournament

LA gets in on the fun next Friday.

So the NBA's inaugural In-Season Tournament, a very bizarre Adam Silver project to goose pre-Christmas league interest that no one else seems to much want or understand, just got underway on Friday with the first "Tournament Night" activity of the year.

It's all a bit convoluted, and fairly meaningless, but I'll explain it to you just the same.

Every game was part of the tournament's Group Play stage. Each of the NBA's 30 clubs has been divided into six five-team groups, and will play against each of the other teams in those groups once from November 3rd through the 28th (i.e. four Group Play games total per team). 

The eight teams with the best Tournament Night records will advance to the Knockout Round phase of the tournament, a series of three single-game elimination stages comprising a Quarterfinals on December 4th or 5th, a Semifinals on December 7th, and a Championship on December 9th. The 22 teams that didn't make it that far will play regular season games amongst themselves, sort of the equivalent of the kids' table at a family gathering, on December 6th and 8th.

For the curious, yes, every game of this in-season tournament aside from the actual championship match will count towards a team's 82-game regular season schedule.  If you're an older team like your Los Angeles Lakers or their Crypto.com Arena neighbor the Los Angeles Clippers, why would you want to effectively play an 83rd regular season game, just for the chance to win an extra $500K?

Your 3-2 Los Angeles Lakers will be playing in the “West A” group, alongside the 2-3 Phoenix Suns (who just lost back-to-back games to Victor Wembanyama's San Antonio Spurs), the 2-3 Utah Jazz, the 2-3 Portland Trail Blazers, and the 0-5 Memphis Grizzlies, reeling without gun-toting leader Ja Morant. 

LA's first Tournament Night game is next Friday, November 10th, against the Suns. It will next play Memphis (who will still be without Morant) on November 14th, Portland on the 17th, and will conclude this round against the Jazz. Among these clubs, only the Suns and Jazz pose a serious threat to a healthy-ish Los Aneles. Assuming LeBron James and Anthony Davis and a few three-point shooters are healthy, they should be able to mop the floor with the Grizzlies and Blazers.

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