Lincicome: For the play-in-bound Bulls, there’s nowhere to go but up and down

Relevance is earned, I suppose, except in politics and the NBA, although less harm is done in basketball.

So here we are again, the Bulls facing another “play-in tournament,” sort of the electoral college of sports, designed to offer hope to the hopeless, allowing losers to think more of themselves than they rate, a false bottom in truth, a footstool for foot wipes.

Still, it is a way for the Bulls to measure themselves, to avoid looking at the standings, which requires bending the neck and looking up.

Tussling to be No. 8 instead of No. 9 at the end of a long season is a distinction and at least not No. 10. Thus, the Bulls avoid complete irrelevance, unlike those “lottery teams” plotting revival with significant draft choices.

I am not going to argue that it would be better for the Bulls to miss this little contrived trinket altogether and just lose their way into a better draft position. It seemed like that was what was happening with the unloading of their best players, but, alas, other teams wanted to lose more than the Bulls did, so credit the Bulls for courage or for idiocy.

It is not true that the “play-in” was created just for the Bulls, although the Bulls are now in their third one in a row, a false reminder of faded glory, like a favorite sock lost in the drier. Oh, I wondered where that went.

The “play-in” is not to be confused with the “play off,” an altogether different pile of laundry. Pay attention now because how it works is as complicated as it is stupid.

The NBA plays 82 games to find the best 16 teams, eight in each conference. Those are the playoff teams. Were it so simple. Here’s the official explanation:

“Teams that finish 1-to-6 in the standings of each conference are guaranteed a playoff spot. The teams that finish 7-to-10 in the standings will enter the NBA Play-In Tournament. These teams will battle for the seventh and eighth playoff seeds.”

In other words, it ain’t over until we find another way to stretch an endless season. And sucker another sponsor into paying for it.

So how does this “battle” sort itself out? Well, No. 7 hosts No. 8. The winner is then officially No. 7. But, wait, the loser gets one more chance.

No. 9 and No. 10 (remember them?) play and the loser goes wherever losers go. The winner plays the loser of 7 and 8. And the winner is the official No. 8.

This makes 16 teams, eight in each conference to begin the long slog into June, confirming the old saw, “30 days hath September, all the rest have basketball.”

There may be a special distinction in being in the final mix, and even should the Bulls make it, I am not going to compare their presence to shooting par from the red tees, finishing first in the overweight division of a marathon, or being good at mixed pickleball. Oh, wait. I just did.

College basketball makes it easy. The Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, simple, precise, full of assonance and alliteration, and no math required.

It would be much handier, of course, if the NBA playoffs were more condensed, not that the outcome would likely change. That’s another problem. The team that is supposed to win always wins.

To play another basketball season of two months or so after plodding along for five and a half for no apparent purpose is a kind of insanity, much madder than anything that happens in March.

Baseball ends in a World Series, ignoring the world, which doesn’t seem to mind. The NFL culminates in the Super Bowl, hardly ever super and never played in a bowl. Hockey states its goal from the beginning, the Stanley Cup, grows beards and gets on with things.

Of course, one is as great a fraud as the other since the best team almost always wins in the end, or if not the best team another close enough to cause yawns.

Congratulations to the Bulls. I guess. Hard to figure out the proper foam fingers to wave.