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ESPN Daily

Breaking Down the Surprising Success of the NBA’s In-Season Tournament

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.63.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The NBA In-Season Tournament has had its fair share of criticism ever since the idea was first floated by Adam Silver. Everything from its merits, the timing and even the bold, colorful court designs drew the ire of basketball purists across the nation. But now, as the tournament heats up in its final stretch, people seem to get it. Four teams are left standing as the setting shifts to Las Vegas for the semifinals tonight. The Lakers have a chance to add more hardware to the Lakers’ trophy case, but first they’ll have to get past the finally healthy New Orleans Pelicans. And in the East, it’s a clash of two red-hot offenses in the Milwaukee Bucks and Indiana Pacers. So today, our friend Ramona Shelburne joins the show to tell us what her biggest takeaways from the tournament are, who she thinks has the best chance to bring home the inaugural In-Season Tournament title and how this is exactly what the league wanted all along. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Ramona Shelburne, the semi-finals of the first ever NBA in season tournament begin tonight.

0:06.7

You were at Tuesday's game where the Lakers punched their ticket to Vegas, but I gotta ask you

0:11.1

first, what's been your impression of the tournament so far?

0:18.0

Well, the first game or two of this thing.

0:21.0

I don't know if I quite understood. I think it was more of this is just

0:26.8

different because we say it's different and the courts are different and nobody can

0:32.3

it's kind of hard to see on these courts and you're calling it

0:36.0

in season tournament or the mid season tournament and IST

0:40.0

like nobody quite knew what all this was about it just felt like regular season

0:44.9

games that were different because you said they were different but as it has

0:50.2

gone on and as players have embraced it really I think it's gotten kind of fun

0:58.8

it's gotten interesting I'm surprising myself by liking it. Like initially I was not on board. I was like,

1:06.7

this is just a made-up tournament. These are regular season games that you're just

1:11.9

calling part of a tournament.

1:13.6

And yet I was at the game on Tuesday night in Los Angeles where the Lakers beat

1:18.6

the sun's in a really exciting game and it felt like a tournament game. It felt different than a regular season game.

1:26.0

And so, yeah, let's do this, let's do this IST or whatever you want to call it because it's fun and it is different somehow.

1:35.0

And that's even before we get to Las Vegas here because when you talked about Austin Reeves hitting a big

1:44.6

jumper and the crowd getting so excited and Austin Reeves himself being very

1:49.0

excited. We saw Tyrese Halliburton who recently said,

1:52.6

I'm tired of losing and now has this opportunity to win something

1:57.1

in this tournament.

...

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