devaluing the regular season so many times in so many sports and it just seems so hollow to me. I don't know that I've ever decided not to go see a pro team in regular season because I thought that they could maybe get knocked out of the playoffs one day down the road. This will happen to literally every team except the champion. And again this is speaking only for me but I sat down and watched the entire second half of New England vs New York last night because it was the best thing on. I couldn't have told you how either of those teams had done during the regular season if there had not been the seed number next to their name but I was entertained by the game.

Also, particularly for the MLS there are almost no casual fans. Because the MLS is not a particularly good league on a world scale you are not getting international fans watching like you do for the NBA, and soccer is such a niche sport in the US there are either mostly diehards or people who don't give a hoot about soccer. Maybe there is data to support this claim but it feels like a boogeyman argument similar to thoughts that the college football playoff would ruin the regular season or that NIL would be the death of the sport.