The NBA Playoffs Are a Joke

Many detractors of NCAA basketball will tell you that the NCAA Tournament is ridiculous. At the end of every college basketball season a committee chooses 65 teams to play for the championship. This often brings many jokes about how everybody gets a chance to win the NCAA National Championship even if they don't deserve it. But there is one thing to take into consideration. Ninety-nine percent of the time a team that makes the NCAA tournament at least has more wins than losses. That might seem pretty simple and win-loss record might not seem like a good enough reason to give someone a shot at the championship but in the NBA Playoffs not every team who gets a shot at the championship even has a winning record.

Since the turn of the century the Atlanta Hawks have been one of the worst franchises in all of sports. From 2000 to 2006 they accumulated a 188 - 386 record. It's not going much better for them this year as they've notched a 25 - 39 record so far. The best moment this franchise has had in the past 15 years is when one of their players wore a Dominique Wilkins jersey in a slam dunk contest because it reminded Hawks fans that they were good like twenty years ago. However the incredibly inept Hawks franchise could make the NBA Playoffs.

After getting off to a bad start the Philadelphia 76ers finally traded away their franchise player Allen Iverson, pound for pound the best player in the NBA. Amazingly the 76ers have now won seven games in a row while Iverson's new team, the Denver Nuggets, struggle to win. The only problem is that even with the 76ers 7 game winning streak their season record is still only 25 - 38, thirteen games under .500. But in the NBA teams that are thirteen games under .500 contend for playoff spots.