The play-in was sold as a cure for dead games in March and April. That part worked. What nobody wanted to say out loud is that it also gave the league’s most stuck teams a permanent reason to stay stuck.

Ten teams, one delusion

Since it became a fixture in 2021, the format has put seeds seven through ten in each conference into a mini-bracket for the last two playoff spots. A team that finishes ninth is, in theory, two wins from a playoff series. That is a very cheap lottery ticket, and front offices have noticed.

The result, in my view, is a lot of rosters built to be exactly good enough. Not good enough to scare anyone in a seven-game series, but good enough to hold a top-ten seed and avoid the uncomfortable conversation about a rebuild. The old model at least forced the .500 teams to pick a direction.

The lottery reform made it worse

The 2019 lottery changes flattened the odds so the three worst teams share the same top chance at the first pick. The intent was to reduce the payoff for tanking. Put that next to the play-in and the incentives get strange: finishing dead last is less rewarding than it used to be, and finishing ninth is more rewarding than it ever was.

That squeezes the middle in both directions. Teams don’t commit to the bottom because the prize is diluted, and they don’t commit to the top because the play-in makes the middle feel respectable.

The part the league likes to point to

The drama is real. Golden State losing to Sacramento in the 2024 play-in was a bigger story than most first-round series, and a team of that pedigree being eliminated in a single game made people watch. The league isn’t wrong that the tournament produces tension.

But tension in a game between the ninth and tenth best teams in a conference is a strange thing to optimise for.

Raise the price of entry

The simplest fix is also the least popular: make the play-in harder to reach. Trim it to seeds eight through ten, or require the ninth and tenth seeds to win twice on the road. Either change would make finishing outside the top eight cost something real again.

As it stands, the play-in doesn’t reward the teams on the bubble so much as it excuses them.