
The Prize
Now that noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has announced God’s non-existence in our universe through mathematics, maybe he can start working on explaining the FIBA tie-breaking procedure.
No, no, don’t start on BiE; it’s as easy as dialing up Wikipedia to find the steps in determining seeding for tournament play: Placement is determined based on, in order, game results between tied teams; scoring average between games of the tied teams; scoring average for all games of tied teams; drawing of lots.
Nice and neat it may be, but empirically this definition falls short. Seriously somebody should explain to BiE how/why France ends up in the fourth seed in Group D (and with the unfortunate fate of drawing home Turkey in round one) when they clearly whupped Spain’s butts early? How/why does Team China, a team that’s seemingly won one game in all of 2010, advance over Puerto Rico who not only beat China in the preliminaries but also outscored and surrendered fewer points than either of the other two squads involved in the tiebreaker?
Ah, whatever. Here’s the way BallinEurope might have seeded the tournament, based firstly on record and thereafter on momentum – after five games, at least we’ve got that objective criteria.
1. USA, 5-0. Is there any doubt that Kevin Durant will, at some point in his career, be called The Best Player in the World? That outrageous amounts of big guys aren’t necessarily life-or-death in an international tournament? That Kevin Love, thanks to his hard work and exposure, will be the most popular Minnesota Timberwolf next season? That we should finally stop calling these guys “The B-deem Team”? Answers: No, maybe a little yet, absolutely not, and yes please.
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