No idea why casual sports fans lose their shit over March Madness every year when the NBA always does it bigger and better one month later.
Because they're casual fans. The chaotic nature traditionally of the tournament, the cinderella bandwagons and brackets getting ruined are a lot of the fun. And the players and the team construction and everything is window dressing for the single, lone, game.
I've often heard complaints about the NBA's best of seven format and how it undermines upsets because the better team should win every series. Upsets get driven more by injuries more often than by any other particular aspect to the games, especially as the series lengthen. It's rare that you get situations like 2010 where Cleveland and Orlando basically built to nullify each other, only for both teams to draw the Celtics who they had deconstructed their teams away from.
The longer season + longer series, slowly reduce the advantages of things like the Heat and Warriors recent "small-ball/positionless" styles, and then it's about LeBron or Curry just being so much better.
The win or go home nature of the NCAA Tournament is much different. One bad game will instantly end even the actual best teams' title chances.
For some reason I feel like we'd find that Simmons went crazy over all those seven game first round series in 2014. Five of them and a six game series.
