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A Turkish Airlines EuroLeague season that has so far served up thrills, drama and parity like never before – with the playoff and play-in races fully decided only in the last two rounds – now has something new and exciting for fans.
The first-ever Play-In Showdown is upon us, starting on Tuesday, April 16, and available on EuroLeague TV.
Introduced before this season, the Play-In Showdown lets four teams battle it out for the two spots remaining after the top six regular-season teams advanced directly to the best-of-five playoffs.
How it works
Here's a reminder of how the Play-In Showdown is set to unfold:
The play-in opens on Tuesday with two games. In the first, seventh-place Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv hosts eighth-placed Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz, with the winner of that game advancing a series in which second-place Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens has home-court advantage.
The loser between Maccabi and Baskonia will have a second chance to make the playoffs three days later, when it will host the winner of Tuesday's second game, in which Anadolu Efes Istanbul hosts Virtus Segafredo Bologna. That game's loser is eliminated and its winner must win again. Whichever of the four teams is left alive on Friday will move on to challenge defending champion Real Madrid, which finishing first in the regular season.
Thanks to the play-in, fans get a chance to see their favorite teams reach the playoffs, and ultimately compete for the Final Four, and make up for having bad stretches of the season, or what was some really bad luck.
Razor-thin margins have ended seasons before
EuroLeague fans are used to seeing how every game matters, but when it comes to making the playoffs, single shots often matter, too – even in the case of a miss.
That was the case five seasons ago when a three-point attempt after a game was decided missed for Olympiacos Piraeus in the next-to-last of what were then 30 rounds. What was a four-point difference in a defeat would have been a single point had that shot fallen, and one week later, it would have been Olympiacos in the playoffs instead of the team it lost to, Zalgiris Kaunas.
Under the new format, Olympiacos would have survived as the ninth team out of 16, although tied on 15-15 records with two teams above it. In 2019, it was eliminated and would wait three more years, with a playoff-less pandemic year in between, to return to the postseason.
With the Play-In Showdown, a little more than half of the teams in the EuroLeague, 55.5%, get to extend their season, with the very best six of them assured of direct advancement to the playoffs. By contrast, the NBA version of the play-in guarantees that two-thirds of its 30 teams play beyond the regular season, 10 in each conference.
Teams can now come back from bad luck with injuries
Efes is the prime example of a team whose bad luck was overcome by the new format. Decimated by injuries early in the season, where it main stars and contributors have missed nearly 60 games during the season, Efes was left for dead, and even made a coaching change after Round 24, when it held a 9-15 record and sat in 16th place out of 18 teams.
But the coaching change, combined with players returning from injuries, saw Efes finish the regular season with an 8-2 record. And only because of the play-in showdown, it only seem fair that Efes's campaign continues after the regular season, and that one of the hottest teams in the competition over the past two months is still in the field.
On the other end is Virtus, which opened the season with 14 wins in the first 19 rounds, and sat in the second or third place of the standings for more than two thirds of the season. Unlike Efes, which dug itself out of the hole, Virtus's bad stretch is ongoing as it enters the play-in with seven straight losses, but one can argue Virtus certainly deserves another shot at the playoffs for what it has done during the first four months of the season.
And just like Efes, Virtus's season would have been over if not for the play-in.
The play-in made every game matter
It might be said that the Play-In Showdown should not overly penalize even the seventh-place team in the standings, which this season is Maccabi, which lost a head-to-head tiebreaker against sixth-place Fenerbahce.
Yes, the seventh-place team would have clinched the playoffs under the old format – and now it needs to play an additional game, or two, to earn its playoff spot – but Maccabi will have home-court advantage as it tries to nail down a playoff place.
As it happens, Maccabi is the only team not playing in front of its fans this season, but in any other situation, the seventh-place team would give its own fans a chance to witness the rare delight of having one, or perhaps two, win-and-go-through home games. And victories in such games can really serve as momentum-builders for teams.
And let's not forget how the new format involving the play-in has made the postseason races longer, involving more teams and keeping EuroLeague fans' on their toes due to increased number of permutations and scenarios.
Due to 10th place being that last one that leads to the play-in, even the 15th ranked team, in this case FC Bayern Munich, had its postseason chances alive until the penultimate regular-season round. That means that as many as 15 fan bases had their teams playing high-stake games in the final rounds of the season.
With do-or-die games on its first and last days, the Play-In Showdown gives a first book-end to the do-or-die games of the Final Four at the opposite end of the playoffs, creating a symmetry to the postseason that gives fans even more games that matter in a league where all of them do.
