The final season of “Inside the NBA” on TNT hasn’t offered a shortage of jokes and hot takes, courtesy of NBA legend and analyst Charles Barkley. In the latest episode, a hot mic caught Barkley insulting the Golden State Warriors, and then he said the league should rig the Play-In Tournament so that the struggling Detroit Pistons and Utah Jazz matchup in the Finals. As of Tuesday, both the Pistons and Jazz are 0-4, sitting dead-last in their respective conferences.
“We should rig the play-in tournament. Everybody bet on the Jazz and Pistons, let them play for the Championship,” Charles Barkley said to co-hosts Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, and Shaq, via ClutchPoints on X, formerly Twitter.
Charles Barkley’s hilarious Play-In suggestion
When the NBA introduced the Play-In Tournament, it didn’t quite please everybody. For instance, Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James complained about the Tournament, saying that whoever thought it up needed to be fired.
After that remark, though, the Lakers have gone through the Play-In to qualify for the playoffs in three out of the past four seasons, tallying an undefeated record.
Before this recent innovation, only the Top 8 teams in the Eastern and Western conferences, respectively, automatically qualified for the postseason.
However, perhaps as an attempt to add stakes to the regular season and disincentivize tanking, the league introduced the tournament. Now, only the top six teams in each conference win a guaranteed playoff spot, leaving seeds seven to 10 to play for the final two postseason berths.
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While this tournament has given the ninth and tenth seeds a shot to make their seasons mean something, it has also meant that the seventh and eighth seeds could still lose the spots they’d clawed all year to get to inferior teams because of ill-timed shooting slumps or flukey shooting.
It could also just prolong the agony for the eventual winners, since they’ll just get the opportunity to face early elimination from the first and second seeds.
Perhaps this sentiment provoked Charles Barkley to crack his Play-In joke about the Pistons and Jazz. Since nobody expects much from the seventh and eighth seeds anyway, why not just let the two worst teams in the league (so far) battle it out?