Just a little thought experiment while the tournament is going on right now.

Right now, the incentives for the winner of the in-season tournament is that that every player gets $500k and the "NBA Cup", whatever that is. Tyrese Haliburton made a comment about it, and said that the real incentive for the tournament winner should be an automatic playoff bid.

While I don't agree with that, I do think the incentives for the winning team need to be more than just some more money if they're really going to take it as seriously as we'd hope. In order to do that, I'd be in favor of introducing a points based system to determine playoff seeding, and the winner of the in-season tournament, on top of the money, receive a chunk of points towards a better seed. Here's roughly how it would work:

• Every win is 5 points
• Every win against a division opponent is 2 points
• The winning All Star team earns their respective teams 15 points per all star player
• The winner of the in-season tournament gets 30 points

And if you wanted, we could possibly expand this to include giving points to the MVP and other award winners, etc. If we want a real incentive for the in-season tournament to ensure players actually take it seriously, I think this would be the best bet.