ABA 2008 Playoffs

Latest news on the playoffs from ABAlive.com

5 out of 8 teams will receive byes!?! OK... Anyway, the teams getting byes are Vermont, Manchester, San Diego, Texas Tycoons and the host team, Quebec.

Beijing has 5 players trying out for the Olympics, so they are not participating.

Unfortunately, the other 12 teams still in contention will have to battle for only 3 regional spots. No one said the ABA made sense.

Below are the respective press releases for each division playoff and my thoughts on them:

South Division

Three teams in the South division: West Texas Whirlwind, Georgia Gwizzlies, and Atlanta Vision. West Texas (3-6) will play Georgia (1-7) -- what a clash of the Titans!

The winner will go on to lose to Atlanta (6-2), who is pretty much guaranteed a spot, even though they have only played 8 games, beating such notable teams as the aforementioned Gwizzlies and the incomparable Bahama Pro Show (1-5, to be 1-7 after next week in Halifax).

I reiterate my protest that a team like Atlanta, who has so far played only 8 games of an 18-game season does not deserve to be in the playoffs against teams like Halifax, who have laboured to play as many games as possible.


West Division

Four West division teams:San Fran (5-10), OC (14-12), Maywood (3-23) and Long Beach (10-7) will play off to send their representative to Quebec.

My guess is that the doormats of the league -- Maywood, as if I had to say their name, which should be Maywouldn't -- and San Fran will fall to OC and Long Beach, who appear to be fairly good teams. Both OC and Long Beach have recently beaten higher-ranked teams, so they are both feeling good. Their matchup should be a good one.

Long Beach pretty much owns OC, winning all five of their matches this season, although the margins have been getting closer over the past few games. I'm going to say Long Beach goes to Quebec.


Northeast Division

Five teams from our Northeast division will play for the chance to play in Quebec. Jersey (7-10) will play Boston (8-16) and Montreal (8-17) will play Westchester (8-6). The winners of those games play off to see who will go against Halifax for the Northeast spot in the Awesome 8, or whatever they call it.

You may not remember Jersey or Westchester. They both cancelled games with us (which should have been forfeits for the record books, but I am not the league statistician).

Jersey appears to have a defensive game, with most of their opponents scoring an average of only 108 points per game. Unfortunately, Jersey has an average score of 103 points. They lost big to Vermont (but who hasn't?) and luckily they had First State to beat up on, to help Jersey's record with 4 of Jersey's 7 wins coming against the Fusion.

Westchester has beaten Jersey 4 out of their 5 matches of the season, with close scoring margins in 4 of the games (between 1 and 9 points), so Jersey is probably a weaker team than their record shows.

This is a bit of a toss-up, given the lack of exposure to Westchester or Jersey, but my guess is Jersey will win over Boston (Jersey did beat the Kebs, after all) and Montreal should beat Westchester. Montreal whupped the Phantoms in their only match-up this season, 130-96.

In the play-off, I think Montreal will win over Jersey, based on Montreal's record versus Jersey's record against common opponents, as well as Montreal's experience against a variety of teams, rather than Jersey's history of only playing a few teams who happen to be within an hour's drive, except for getting trounced in Vermont and Beijing. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Jersey doesn't travel much, they get destroyed away from home.

Our game against Montreal should be a good one. Even though they won the season series 3-2 against us, our team is by far the strongest it has ever been and we are riding a high of wins (assuming the Bahama Pro Show don't stack their team with Vermont players). If Montreal plays their scheduled end-of-season games in Beijing, I think they will lose to us in the playoffs, either because we will play better than them, or they will still be suffering from jetlag or depression after probably losing both games in China. Getting past Westchester will likely empty Montreal's gas tank, just in time for our well-rested players to run up and down the court against them on the way to victory.

So there you have it: we have a playoff game, probably at home, since the other teams are playing off to get to us, and probably against Montreal.

Looks good for us going to Quebec!