The NBA Play-In Tournament Will Return in 2022

The play-in tournament has been a novel, somewhat confusing addition to the NBA season. It is only a couple of years old but has already shaken things up quite a bit.

And now it will be returning. The NBA and Players Association have agreed to extend the play-in tournament for at least another year, meaning it will return at the end of the 2021-2022 season. The NBA Board of Governors is planning to make the news official soon.

The play-in format finds the teams that are positioned at seeds 7 through 10 in both the Western and Eastern Conference competing to make the playoffs. The winners of these games end up going on to being the 7th and 8th seeds, while the losers go home. It's added an extra layer of excitement to the league before the official postseason begins. Most people have been pretty supportive of the play-in tournament, which started during the Orlando Bubble experiment last year at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While it was started out of necessity because of the coronavirus, it sounds like NBA is sticking by it even as the pandemic comes to a close.