It is so unfair (if the standings stay as they are) for the leader of pacific division to get a free pass in the season play-offs.
As it stands:
Why should L.A Valiant get a free pass? Their forth overall, just because their division is bad (or at least was bad at the beginning of the season) shouldn’t mean they should get a free pass.
This is most likely due to them expecting OWL to grow larger to the point where every team can’t match against every other team every stage (currently every team does not play against 1 specific team every stage), therefore the two divisions. It’s more future proofing than them thinking this is actually fair, in my opinion.
But this is for the season play-offs, not stage playoffs, every team play against each other every season.
This type of scenario causes problems in every single sport. Especially the NBA where one conference has been stronger than the other for almost 2 decades straight.
In the NFL you see teams with losing records even make the playoffs because they “won their division (of awful teams)”. Was hoping OWL would be more progressive/smarter and not have this.
Hmm… Maybe that’s my problem. I’m not from the U.S and don’t follow NBA, and no soccer league works this way.
In basically all American sports, you are heavily rewarded for having bad teams in your conference/division/arbitrary grouping. In the NFL it is perhaps the worst because you can make the playoffs while having a much worse record than other teams, while at the same time playing worse teams. Because there are 8 divisions and winning your division gets you in. If the other 4 teams in your division suck, congrats you are in the playoffs. If you are in a division of all good teams, good luck.
In the NBA the difference isn’t really in making it to the playoffs, but making it to the championship game. As the league is split in half for the playoffs, the 3/4 best teams could all be in the same conference. Which leads to the 4th/5th best team playing in the “finals” and getting destroyed.
It doesn’t really matter, the top teams still will eventually face off with one another and the bad teams will be knocked out. But yeah this happens in just about every sport
So it has created problems for other sports as well. Thanks for explaining it to me.