One of the main concerns brought up during informal discussion of the non-playoff tournament (NPT) is providing an incentive to win while avoiding any situation in which missing the playoffs could potentially result in a higher monetary payout than making the playoffs. This proposal avoids that issue by adding payouts based on playoff result and NPT result, but adjusting the division finish payouts to match, preventing an overall average increase in payout.
From the WBA Constitution:
7. Each team receives a season finish based payout (SF) determined by their place in the division standings and according to the following schedule.
1st Place - $9,000,000
2nd Place - $7,500,000
3rd Place - $6,000,000
4th Place - $4,500,000
5th Place - $3,000,000
This proposal eliminates this money and instead, spreads it among the teams based on tournament result. First, the 1st and 2nd place teams currently receive a total of $66,000,000 ($16,500,000 per division x 4 divisions in the WBA). This money is instead divided up among the playoff teams (with $11m to the WBA champion, $10m to the runner-up, $8.5m to the two teams who lost in the conference finals, and $7m to each of the Round 1 losers).
The NPT uses 6 teams instead of 4 per league, so it would be difficult to structure it to last the same amount of time as the playoffs. It could theoretically be done with shorter series (best of 5 rather than 7 or 9), but this would cause some series to begin in the middle of a sim. For that reason, this proposal calls for a simple round-robin format, in which each team plays all other non-playoff teams in its league for one 3-game series (home-field advantage will alternate, with the team with the higher record getting home field in two out of the three games). After this round robin, the winners of the round robin in each league will meet for a best-of-7 series. The winner of this series will earn $7m, while the runner-up will earn $6m. The second-place team in each league's round robin will earn $5.5m, third place will earn $4.5m, fourth place will earn $4m, fifth place will earn $3.5m, and sixth place will earn $3m.
To summarize, the overall amount of money given out in the playoffs and NPT is exactly the same as the amount of money given out currently based on divisional finish. The WBA Champion and Runner-Up will make more, but a division winner who fails to make the WBACS will make slightly less.
I have created graphics showing how much money each team would have made, which will be posted to Slack. Assuming the results of the NPT match up with regular season records, here are the results:
Team Actual 2123 Payout Proposed 2123 Payout Difference
Black Forest 7,500,000 8,500,000 1,000,000
Buenos Aires 7,500,000 11,000,000 3,500,000
Cairo (Barcelona) 9,000,000 7,000,000 -2,000,000
Carolina 3,000,000 3,000,000 0
China 6,000,000 4,500,000 -1,500,000
Karachi 3,000,000 3,500,000 500,000
Ljubljana (London) 3,000,000 3,000,000 0
Los Angeles 7,500,000 7,000,000 -500,000
Manila 7,500,000 7,000,000 -500,000
Melbourne 4,500,000 4,000,000 -500,000
Mexico City 6,000,000 4,500,000 -1,500,000
Mumbai 9,000,000 10,000,000 1,000,000
Northwest 9,000,000 7,000,000 -2,000,000
Ottawa 4,500,000 4,000,000 -500,000
Paris 6,000,000 6,000,000 0
Puerto Rico 3,000,000 3,500,000 500,000
Rio de Janeiro 9,000,000 8,500,000 -500,000
Rome 4,500,000 5,000,000 500,000
Santo Domingo 6,000,000 7,000,000 1,000,000
Sao Paulo 4,500,000 5,500,000 1,000,000
This table was probably unreadable because the formatting on the website is terrible, so I'll post a screenshot of it in Slack too.
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