Another thing is people here in North America also believe that you can climb back up no matter where you are and win the championship. A prime example is the 2019 St. Louis Blues who were at the bottom and then bounced back to win the Stanley Cup. This probably would not happen in pro/rel.
without a doubt. The problem of promotion and relegation leagues is power and success is monopolised at the top. Big clubs stay big and small clubs get smaller.
@@rjcraig6302Exactly! Compared to many other teams in the Playoffs, their fandom is one of the smallest, plus The Oilers are regarded as a 'one player team' in Connor McDavid, totally ignoring the amazing players around him, not to mention the coach & GM. Who have transformed the team, from no hopers early in the season to Stanley Cup Final contenders.❤🇨🇦🏒🏆
There wouldn't be any need for relocations. Lesser teams would just be relegated and then they would have to try to rebuild from there. To not have relegations is in a way to abolish losing. Not surprisingly, they also abolished the draw.
I'd love for the NHL to adopt pro/rel. The only thing I'd change is removing the 2nd tier pro/rel playoff. While I think it's fine that a team can get hot and win a championship, the strongest team in the second division should be rewarded with promotion, the worst in the first, straight relegation. Imagine the 14th place team in division 2 getting promoted? If a playoff is a must, make it between the bottom two division 1 teams and the top two division 2 teams.
To be fair I was slightly influenced by my all time favourite format, which was what they used to adopt in Sweden, where top and bottom would be swapped between the Elitserien and the Allsvenskan and then the next bottom two in the Elitserien would play 2-3-4-5 in a six team round robin with the top two going up or maintaining there place. Otherwise you can end up with a situation where a lot of teams in the second tier have nothing to play for.
11:08 - I agree with you about the playoffs. This is the reason people think the president’s trophy is “cursed” even though the presidents trophy wins a plurality of the time of all 16 playoff positions. I think smart coaches and GMs know that even if a President’s Trophy or division title is on the line, it’s better to treat the remainder of the regular season after clinching the playoffs as a tune-up; rest anyone whose hurt, get some bubble players some more reps, maybe experiment with a new strategy. There’s no reason to get beat up because you may lose home ice advantage *if* the a certain team meets you in the playoff and *if* the series goes to seven games
Correct me if I’m wrong, but at least in my experience, you get the generational fandom you’re talking in the US with university sport teams in the NCAA (maybe Canada as well with their USports, please let me know Canadians). I went to a college where it was the only one in the state, therefore the whole state has a shared love and sense of pride towards the university, going so far as to officially put the university’s logo onto the state license plate for cars! A lot of the collegiate teams have that community, whether nationwide or just locally, more so than most professional teams do. I am much more invested in my college’s performances than the nearest NFL or NBA team.
I’ve seen a few proposals to do a system like this in college football instead of the current “SEC, BIG10” bs. They’re tiered and everyone plays games within those tiers. Top teams from lower tiers play bowl games against bottom teams from upper tiers for relegation. National champ is winner of top division. Its actually a really cool concept
I spoke about this in a different YT comment previously, but the thing that American collegiate sports and English/European soccer have in common is that they are community institutions in a way that American franchises just aren’t. It’s hard to move The Harvard Crimson to Providence, Rhode Island because their city council have approved funding for a stadium while Cambridge, MA won’t. Franchise owners threaten this all the time and follow through on it often. In contrast, The English FA approved an American-style relocation once 20 years ago, and they are the most hated team in the country to this day. It’s mostly a cultural sensibility that English and European soccer teams are *not* the playthings of billionaires. However, promotion and relegation-particularly in a system that spans the spectrum from the pinnacle of the sport down to glorified beer leagues, gave the victims of the aforementioned relocation a way to fight back. Fans of Wimbledon FC immediately (re)founded AFC Wimbledon in 2004, and after an open tryout on Wimbledon common, they started in the ninth tier of English football, but immediately had crowds of thousands showing up to these glorified beer league games. After several promotions, they now regularly play against the team they simply call “the Franchise” as they cris-cross each other between the third and fourth tier of the English football pyramid. AFC Wimbledon regularly sell out their home stadium, while the 30k seater a billionaire built Milton Keynes is usually mostly empty-every other team in England earned their spot in the league, that team just bought their spot, and the whole country knows it.
Cheers man, the channel is pretty new and I'm still figuring out some editing and audio stuff and what topics work and what doesn't. I'm also in the middle of moving house which doesn't help!
promotion/relegation works really well here in Sweden, it also makes the second league far more interesting since many former first division teams have been relegated throughout the years. My own team (MoDo Hockey) won the SHL championship in 2007 but were relegated in 2016. They remained in the second tier league for 7 years but returned to the SHL in 2023. Having a promotion/relegation system makes all tiers of hockey more enjoyable in my opinion. The argument that this would only empower a few of the wealthy teams and punish the weaker ones is absolute rubbish. Look at the EIHL or any other closed league in Europe, the same 3 - 4 teams win every single year. The AHL and ECHL would be far more interesting with a PRO/RLG system.
All 32 teams charge top dollar to pay high salaries, and every city gets to see McDavid, Bedard, etc (albeit less or more, depending on which division/conference you are in). If I'm a "tier 2" team, how am I supposed to make money if my season ticket holders baulk at paying full price for a year without top tier teams? You'd need two tiers of financial structuring, which would be a pain to manage, and no NHL player in his prime would want to get top tier money one season and then take a cut because their team dropped to the lower tier. NHL fans pay for NHL hockey, and all of the players want to be IN the NHL, and neither want a "B" class... and dropping $1B for a franchise only to end up in Tier 2? Relegation ain't gonna fly in NA!!
Actually kinda interesting you mention the financial structuring as it's something I love to play around with when I create edited worlds in Out of the Park Baseball. Again, I wasn't really advocating for this, it was more a thought experiment. However a B tier outwith the AHL and a higher salary cap in the tier A could resolve the dilution of talent post expansion.
My question about implementing the pro-reg league system in something like the NHL is how would it work alongside the entry draft. Who gets the first overall pick in said draft? The team that got relegated to a lower league or the worst team in the entirety of the league?
I suggested in the video just ranking every team from the bottom of tier two to the Stanley Cup champion. However giving it to the relegated team or even second overall would be an interesting variant. Kind of like a parachute payment teams in other relegation leagues recieve...
It would make the league a bit more interesting but it isn't really that needed. The only American league I think is in desperate need of one is with the MLS
Even then soccer fans here will be permanently split on this issue. The problem is that essentially our lower level pyramid has attendance levels similar to the other minor leagues and even for the big leagues if the competition doesn’t matter, attendance will be down. As much as I don’t agree with the USOC decision, even I noticed that the home clubs sometimes have to switch to developmental fields because the home stadium is too big and they don’t draw enough to justify it until the end when they can actually see them win the cup. The same problem can be seen in the CCC, which is a way higher competition where early schedule attendance is down. This is more or less bad marketing but could be solved. The other problem is one that really can’t be solved at all, and that’s the death of other independent clubs. Basically something like San Diego FC and the San Diego Loyal playing together isn’t going to happen. Outside of New York and Los Angeles, you don’t really see two teams in one city (for those two it’s usually capped off once they get two). Basically it would make pro/rel way more difficult since there’s only one team in the city and thus the owners would prefer the current MLS/Super League format.
Aye, noted. The video I'm working on is much louder. The problem is I have a fairly low end voice. If I push the volume it tends to peak. So I'm just trying to EQ the latest one down in the low frequencies. Balancing it is proving not my strong point.
The reality of it is a lot of teams experience massive roster turnover when promoted and relegated. For one thing, the salary caps get smaller further down the pyramid, so if you’re talented enough to demand a Premiere League contract, and your team gets relegated, the team’s going to be looking for the best way to unload you and you’ll probably end up transferred to a team that’s still up. That said, if you were a bench warmer on a team that gets promoted, they might want to unload you to free up a roster spot and you’ll end up back on a team that’s still down. If a Premier League club trades a player to a team in the Championship, that probably means that player is not good enough to play in the Premier League-it’s no different than a player getting sent to the minors, or put on waivers. Furthermore, in the soccer world they call them ‘transfers’ and instead of a trade deadline, they talk about the ‘transfer window’ and there are some key differences I’m not quite sure of, but I think it’s usually teams will pay cash to another team to transfer their contract over, so there isn’t “Team A gets this player from Team B in exchange for this player” type deals very often
The conclusion is so typical of how the modern market drives change in how institutions make rules and structure their organizations. No brand or company stands by itself. The small clubs' democratic participation in a tiered system is forsaken for the freedoms of the owners to have their "emirates cup" or whatever. This is part of why we don't see international best on best hockey regularly anymore. In a tiered system, no matter how small the club is, the system you use is democratic, and it promotes a sense of community much more rarely found in a franchised league, and it actually makes smaller towns have bigger opportunities to be known as a good "hockey town" and drive audience based on that. The club becomes synonymous with being a citizen in the town which rallies around their local heroes.
I will say, you are wrong that your teams chances of winning decrease over time. In fact that's the beauty of the NA model. The draft and salary cap combine to make it more likely to produce more winners. I did the research on this using the big 5 association football leagues and MLS/NFL for comparison. From what I wrote (which is 2 seasons out of date) "For the side of the English system, I would cite the big 5 leagues of Europe (Premiership, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1). Taking into account winners in the last 30 years (the age of the premiership) you will find that 7 teams in England, 6 in Germany, 5 in Spain, 5 in Italy and 7 in France have lifted their league's top trophy. This stands in stark contrast to the NFL in America, the biggest American football league globally, where 16 teams have won their top trophy in the same period. This though is not unique to American football though as the MLS (America's top-tier association football tournament) has had 14 winners since 1996. If we were to cut it down to the last 10 years then the numbers for the European leagues would be 5, 2, 3, 3 and 4 vs the NFL's 9 and MLS' 8." The NA system by definition breeds more and more diverse winners. Promotion and relegation by definition reduces it. Plus you only consider the stanley cup as the only "win" possible, ignoring winning division and conference wins.
My argument was the more teams you have the less chance you mathematically have of winning. You're not wrong in that European spccer leagues concentrate strength at the top, but that's really a product of the Champions League, which is an outlier compared to North American sports. And the CL exponentially concentrates wealth. That's why I propose a closed league with a salary cap. Soccer before the 70s... while not an equal for parity with the NHL, did at least offer more champions. I'm not actually advocating for it. More just spitballin' an idea when I was screwing around with league structures in a hockey management game.
@@Outpost-13-Hockey no I getcha. I would disagree that it’s because of the champions league. I think it just sped the process up. In England at least it was the founding of the premiership and Roman Abramovich buying Chelsea that sealed its fate. But it’s in every league and has been for a long long time. Hell even in other countries we’re starting to see it like in Brazil where the number of competing teams has halved since I was a kid watching Liverpool raise the Champions League. But yeah, promotion and relegation could work in North American sports. I wrote out a similar proposal recently for a gridiron league which was similar.
I think you are confusing two things here. pro/rel in itself isn't the cause of lack of diverse winners, it's the lack of equal distribution of tv revenue or other revenue sharing programs. Sure, pro/rel DOES make this even harder since teams that relegate are cut off from that income source even if the WAS revenue sharing. But the root of the problem in (European) Football stems from the mentality of 'club first' instead of 'league first' like in NA
@@oilslick7010 no, I'd actually argue specifically it is the cause. Now just to be clear, money and the European competitions really sped that up (check my other replies for the numbers) but in general its more because you get punished for failure in pro/rel leagues it tends to create yoyo clubs which have been going for decades (Burnley is a standout in the UK). But the draft and cap system is the bigger fixes, which only really exist in the NA system, hence why I call them the American and English systems based on their grouped characteristics
One of the good things about a system without relegation is that any team could theoretically go from a team with a lottery pick to a contender in one season.
I'd argue that incentives teams to tank. How many games by February are worth watching with teams down in the bottom quarter of the league. I've always wondered what the value is as a fan watching a team with no hope of the playoffs with 20/30 games remaining.
@Inveterate-introvert although that is true, tanking rarely works, and it takes more than one or two players to go from bad to cup winners. Also, that could happen to a team even if they are not tanking, and they are just bad. Teams in sports with relegation also can still know that they will be relegated with a third of the games to go, with no reward, either
Oooft, that Rangers prediction aged before this published.
Goodness! Imagine if there were 0-0 results in US traditional team sports ? 🇺🇸
Another thing is people here in North America also believe that you can climb back up no matter where you are and win the championship. A prime example is the 2019 St. Louis Blues who were at the bottom and then bounced back to win the Stanley Cup. This probably would not happen in pro/rel.
without a doubt. The problem of promotion and relegation leagues is power and success is monopolised at the top. Big clubs stay big and small clubs get smaller.
And the Oilers are in a similar situation heading into the Cup Final right now
Or The Vegas Golden Knights winning a Cup in their inaugural season. 🏒🏆
@@rjcraig6302Exactly! Compared to many other teams in the Playoffs, their fandom is one of the smallest, plus The Oilers are regarded as a 'one player team' in Connor McDavid, totally ignoring the amazing players around him, not to mention the coach & GM. Who have transformed the team, from no hopers early in the season to Stanley Cup Final contenders.❤🇨🇦🏒🏆
@@tudormiller887 they made the finals but didn’t win it.
There wouldn't be any need for relocations. Lesser teams would just be relegated and then they would have to try to rebuild from there.
To not have relegations is in a way to abolish losing. Not surprisingly, they also abolished the draw.
I'd love for the NHL to adopt pro/rel. The only thing I'd change is removing the 2nd tier pro/rel playoff. While I think it's fine that a team can get hot and win a championship, the strongest team in the second division should be rewarded with promotion, the worst in the first, straight relegation. Imagine the 14th place team in division 2 getting promoted? If a playoff is a must, make it between the bottom two division 1 teams and the top two division 2 teams.
To be fair I was slightly influenced by my all time favourite format, which was what they used to adopt in Sweden, where top and bottom would be swapped between the Elitserien and the Allsvenskan and then the next bottom two in the Elitserien would play 2-3-4-5 in a six team round robin with the top two going up or maintaining there place.
Otherwise you can end up with a situation where a lot of teams in the second tier have nothing to play for.
11:08 - I agree with you about the playoffs. This is the reason people think the president’s trophy is “cursed” even though the presidents trophy wins a plurality of the time of all 16 playoff positions. I think smart coaches and GMs know that even if a President’s Trophy or division title is on the line, it’s better to treat the remainder of the regular season after clinching the playoffs as a tune-up; rest anyone whose hurt, get some bubble players some more reps, maybe experiment with a new strategy. There’s no reason to get beat up because you may lose home ice advantage *if* the a certain team meets you in the playoff and *if* the series goes to seven games
Correct me if I’m wrong, but at least in my experience, you get the generational fandom you’re talking in the US with university sport teams in the NCAA (maybe Canada as well with their USports, please let me know Canadians). I went to a college where it was the only one in the state, therefore the whole state has a shared love and sense of pride towards the university, going so far as to officially put the university’s logo onto the state license plate for cars! A lot of the collegiate teams have that community, whether nationwide or just locally, more so than most professional teams do. I am much more invested in my college’s performances than the nearest NFL or NBA team.
is this Wyoming by chance?
I’ve seen a few proposals to do a system like this in college football instead of the current “SEC, BIG10” bs. They’re tiered and everyone plays games within those tiers. Top teams from lower tiers play bowl games against bottom teams from upper tiers for relegation. National champ is winner of top division. Its actually a really cool concept
I spoke about this in a different YT comment previously, but the thing that American collegiate sports and English/European soccer have in common is that they are community institutions in a way that American franchises just aren’t. It’s hard to move The Harvard Crimson to Providence, Rhode Island because their city council have approved funding for a stadium while Cambridge, MA won’t. Franchise owners threaten this all the time and follow through on it often. In contrast, The English FA approved an American-style relocation once 20 years ago, and they are the most hated team in the country to this day. It’s mostly a cultural sensibility that English and European soccer teams are *not* the playthings of billionaires. However, promotion and relegation-particularly in a system that spans the spectrum from the pinnacle of the sport down to glorified beer leagues, gave the victims of the aforementioned relocation a way to fight back. Fans of Wimbledon FC immediately (re)founded AFC Wimbledon in 2004, and after an open tryout on Wimbledon common, they started in the ninth tier of English football, but immediately had crowds of thousands showing up to these glorified beer league games. After several promotions, they now regularly play against the team they simply call “the Franchise” as they cris-cross each other between the third and fourth tier of the English football pyramid. AFC Wimbledon regularly sell out their home stadium, while the 30k seater a billionaire built Milton Keynes is usually mostly empty-every other team in England earned their spot in the league, that team just bought their spot, and the whole country knows it.
Not at all the case in Canada.
@@pantsumonster is that because junior hockey is done thru clubs and small town teams?
Only 285 subs... You deserve a lot more!
Cheers man, the channel is pretty new and I'm still figuring out some editing and audio stuff and what topics work and what doesn't. I'm also in the middle of moving house which doesn't help!
promotion/relegation works really well here in Sweden, it also makes the second league far more interesting since many former first division teams have been relegated throughout the years. My own team (MoDo Hockey) won the SHL championship in 2007 but were relegated in 2016. They remained in the second tier league for 7 years but returned to the SHL in 2023. Having a promotion/relegation system makes all tiers of hockey more enjoyable in my opinion. The argument that this would only empower a few of the wealthy teams and punish the weaker ones is absolute rubbish. Look at the EIHL or any other closed league in Europe, the same 3 - 4 teams win every single year. The AHL and ECHL would be far more interesting with a PRO/RLG system.
Ngl the jersey situation would be a logistics nightmare.
The new Canadian Premier League is trying to build up to a 2 tier promotion relegation system.
Babe! New Outpost-13 video just dropped!
Nice video, I think it would actually work the way you played it out
All 32 teams charge top dollar to pay high salaries, and every city gets to see McDavid, Bedard, etc (albeit less or more, depending on which division/conference you are in). If I'm a "tier 2" team, how am I supposed to make money if my season ticket holders baulk at paying full price for a year without top tier teams? You'd need two tiers of financial structuring, which would be a pain to manage, and no NHL player in his prime would want to get top tier money one season and then take a cut because their team dropped to the lower tier. NHL fans pay for NHL hockey, and all of the players want to be IN the NHL, and neither want a "B" class... and dropping $1B for a franchise only to end up in Tier 2? Relegation ain't gonna fly in NA!!
Actually kinda interesting you mention the financial structuring as it's something I love to play around with when I create edited worlds in Out of the Park Baseball.
Again, I wasn't really advocating for this, it was more a thought experiment.
However a B tier outwith the AHL and a higher salary cap in the tier A could resolve the dilution of talent post expansion.
My question about implementing the pro-reg league system in something like the NHL is how would it work alongside the entry draft. Who gets the first overall pick in said draft? The team that got relegated to a lower league or the worst team in the entirety of the league?
I suggested in the video just ranking every team from the bottom of tier two to the Stanley Cup champion. However giving it to the relegated team or even second overall would be an interesting variant. Kind of like a parachute payment teams in other relegation leagues recieve...
It would make the league a bit more interesting but it isn't really that needed. The only American league I think is in desperate need of one is with the MLS
Even then soccer fans here will be permanently split on this issue. The problem is that essentially our lower level pyramid has attendance levels similar to the other minor leagues and even for the big leagues if the competition doesn’t matter, attendance will be down. As much as I don’t agree with the USOC decision, even I noticed that the home clubs sometimes have to switch to developmental fields because the home stadium is too big and they don’t draw enough to justify it until the end when they can actually see them win the cup. The same problem can be seen in the CCC, which is a way higher competition where early schedule attendance is down. This is more or less bad marketing but could be solved.
The other problem is one that really can’t be solved at all, and that’s the death of other independent clubs. Basically something like San Diego FC and the San Diego Loyal playing together isn’t going to happen. Outside of New York and Los Angeles, you don’t really see two teams in one city (for those two it’s usually capped off once they get two). Basically it would make pro/rel way more difficult since there’s only one team in the city and thus the owners would prefer the current MLS/Super League format.
OMG, the audio needs to be reworked! I can barely hear this on full volume
Aye, noted. The video I'm working on is much louder. The problem is I have a fairly low end voice. If I push the volume it tends to peak. So I'm just trying to EQ the latest one down in the low frequencies. Balancing it is proving not my strong point.
How do you deal with trades in that system? I bet players would not love being sent from tier 1 to tier 2
The reality of it is a lot of teams experience massive roster turnover when promoted and relegated. For one thing, the salary caps get smaller further down the pyramid, so if you’re talented enough to demand a Premiere League contract, and your team gets relegated, the team’s going to be looking for the best way to unload you and you’ll probably end up transferred to a team that’s still up. That said, if you were a bench warmer on a team that gets promoted, they might want to unload you to free up a roster spot and you’ll end up back on a team that’s still down. If a Premier League club trades a player to a team in the Championship, that probably means that player is not good enough to play in the Premier League-it’s no different than a player getting sent to the minors, or put on waivers. Furthermore, in the soccer world they call them ‘transfers’ and instead of a trade deadline, they talk about the ‘transfer window’ and there are some key differences I’m not quite sure of, but I think it’s usually teams will pay cash to another team to transfer their contract over, so there isn’t “Team A gets this player from Team B in exchange for this player” type deals very often
The conclusion is so typical of how the modern market drives change in how institutions make rules and structure their organizations. No brand or company stands by itself. The small clubs' democratic participation in a tiered system is forsaken for the freedoms of the owners to have their "emirates cup" or whatever. This is part of why we don't see international best on best hockey regularly anymore.
In a tiered system, no matter how small the club is, the system you use is democratic, and it promotes a sense of community much more rarely found in a franchised league, and it actually makes smaller towns have bigger opportunities to be known as a good "hockey town" and drive audience based on that. The club becomes synonymous with being a citizen in the town which rallies around their local heroes.
I will say, you are wrong that your teams chances of winning decrease over time. In fact that's the beauty of the NA model. The draft and salary cap combine to make it more likely to produce more winners. I did the research on this using the big 5 association football leagues and MLS/NFL for comparison. From what I wrote (which is 2 seasons out of date)
"For the side of the English system, I would cite the big 5 leagues of Europe (Premiership, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1). Taking into account winners in the last 30 years (the age of the premiership) you will find that 7 teams in England, 6 in Germany, 5 in Spain, 5 in Italy and 7 in France have lifted their league's top trophy. This stands in stark contrast to the NFL in America, the biggest American football league globally, where 16 teams have won their top trophy in the same period. This though is not unique to American football though as the MLS (America's top-tier association football tournament) has had 14 winners since 1996. If we were to cut it down to the last 10 years then the numbers for the European leagues would be 5, 2, 3, 3 and 4 vs the NFL's 9 and MLS' 8."
The NA system by definition breeds more and more diverse winners. Promotion and relegation by definition reduces it. Plus you only consider the stanley cup as the only "win" possible, ignoring winning division and conference wins.
My argument was the more teams you have the less chance you mathematically have of winning.
You're not wrong in that European spccer leagues concentrate strength at the top, but that's really a product of the Champions League, which is an outlier compared to North American sports. And the CL exponentially concentrates wealth. That's why I propose a closed league with a salary cap. Soccer before the 70s... while not an equal for parity with the NHL, did at least offer more champions.
I'm not actually advocating for it. More just spitballin' an idea when I was screwing around with league structures in a hockey management game.
@@Outpost-13-Hockey no I getcha. I would disagree that it’s because of the champions league. I think it just sped the process up. In England at least it was the founding of the premiership and Roman Abramovich buying Chelsea that sealed its fate. But it’s in every league and has been for a long long time. Hell even in other countries we’re starting to see it like in Brazil where the number of competing teams has halved since I was a kid watching Liverpool raise the Champions League.
But yeah, promotion and relegation could work in North American sports. I wrote out a similar proposal recently for a gridiron league which was similar.
I think you are confusing two things here. pro/rel in itself isn't the cause of lack of diverse winners, it's the lack of equal distribution of tv revenue or other revenue sharing programs. Sure, pro/rel DOES make this even harder since teams that relegate are cut off from that income source even if the WAS revenue sharing. But the root of the problem in (European) Football stems from the mentality of 'club first' instead of 'league first' like in NA
@@oilslick7010 no, I'd actually argue specifically it is the cause. Now just to be clear, money and the European competitions really sped that up (check my other replies for the numbers) but in general its more because you get punished for failure in pro/rel leagues it tends to create yoyo clubs which have been going for decades (Burnley is a standout in the UK). But the draft and cap system is the bigger fixes, which only really exist in the NA system, hence why I call them the American and English systems based on their grouped characteristics
I’d love if my hometown most dominant AHL team would get a bump up GO BEARS
Every AHL team would get bodied by ANY NHL team is the problem.
@ the bears would have stomped most lottery teams last year
One of the good things about a system without relegation is that any team could theoretically go from a team with a lottery pick to a contender in one season.
I'd argue that incentives teams to tank. How many games by February are worth watching with teams down in the bottom quarter of the league. I've always wondered what the value is as a fan watching a team with no hope of the playoffs with 20/30 games remaining.
@Inveterate-introvert although that is true, tanking rarely works, and it takes more than one or two players to go from bad to cup winners. Also, that could happen to a team even if they are not tanking, and they are just bad. Teams in sports with relegation also can still know that they will be relegated with a third of the games to go, with no reward, either
The Chicago Wolves enter the chat.
No, no and no.