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Silver: 'I strongly believe' in-season tournament, playoff play-in will happen

Stacy Revere / Getty Images Sport / Getty

Commissioner Adam Silver says the idea of implementing an in-season tournament and a playoff play-in to spice up the NBA's regular season is alive and well.

"What we're now doing is having further conversations with the players, the players association, our teams, and media partners, and saying, 'what are the appropriate changes we should be making?'" Silver said at his annual All-Star media availability Saturday. "I strongly believe we will end up with some sort of in-season tournament and a play-in tournament."

Reports surfaced last fall that the league had sent a memo to all 30 teams proposing a revised 78-game regular season. The new setup would reportedly feature an in-season tournament with $1 million in prize money for each player on the winning team, play-in tournaments for the No. 7 and No. 8 playoff seeds, and a reseeding of the final four postseason teams based on regular-season records.

The league reportedly proposed implementing the changes for the 2021-22 season, the 75th anniversary of the NBA. But while Silver didn't go into detail Saturday, he did reveal there had been so much enthusiasm regarding the proposal that it "didn't make sense to do it as a one-off" for the 75th anniversary season.

"I may have been a little naive in thinking that for the 75th anniversary we could say 'let's make all these changes' ... The sense of virtually all the groups I spoke to is that these are significant changes, we should fully vet them and deliberate them, but then when it comes time to make them, we should make them," he said.

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