Do We Love the NBA Play-In?

Also: Pizza costs in NY skyrocket. Still, that's a tasty slice

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It’s not like I don’t understand I’m being taken for a ride. You cannot — repeat, cannot — dress up the 9th and 10th place finishers in a conference by pretending there’s a lot riding on their one-off elimination game, even if it’s nationally televised.

So I certainly knew what I was watching the other night, as Sacramento wiped out Golden State to end the Warriors’ season — a season that absolutely should have been ended. “Put down” would’ve been a perfectly applicable term. It’s kind of a shame that it took an alleged post-season game to do it, but there you go.

It was mildly amusing.

I am setting the bar exactly that low.

Anyway — the play-in tournament, or PIT as we’ll call it, is here to stay. It’s one of NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s pet projects, along with the in-season tournament. They both make a few bucks and pull in a few extra TV viewer eyeballs, and that’s pretty much the whole conversation around league offices.

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I started to write a full piece on the PIT, but I got bored. Instead, I drifted off while thinking about who might face the New York Knicks in the first round. The Knicks had a really good season without ever seeming like a complete team, and they can really grind your gears on defense. They wound up the No. 2 seed in the East.

Thinking about the Knicks made me think about a NY slice. (If you’ve been there, you know.) And that made me wonder how much a street slice is going for these days, since you can pretty much grab one anywhere and at any time of the day or night.

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It turns out that a gentleman in the greater NYC area has been wondering this same thing. Not only that — he’s been tracking. And let me tell you, pizza-flation is real.

This man, Liam Quigley, began charting his slice purchases almost a decade ago — he ate 464 slices over eight years — and last year he finally put everything on a graph. Long story short, the average cost of a plain slice across the five boroughs shot up from $2.52 in 2014 to $3 in 2022, a price increase of nearly 20%.

For pepperoni lovers, hideous news: The cost of a slice spiked 37.5% during that time. It was up to $4.58 a slice by 2022, and it can only have gone up since then. Oy vey.

I mean, prices go up. We’re all adults here. But Quigley, who’s a reporter in real life, also pointed out that most places have become demonstrably more miserly when it comes to the sauce, and that just hurts our heart.

"The biggest thing I have noticed is the decline in the amount of sauce put on slices," Quigley said. "I'm sure this is a cost-saving measure, but the overall quality of your average slice in the city has definitely suffered."

I believe him. On the other hand, I’d have to look far and wide around where I live in California to find even one place willing to sell its pizza by the slice. (The one joint in my town that did closed down during the pandemic and never reopened.)

I’d gladly pay $3 for a slice — or $4, maybe even $5 — rather than buy a whole pie. But I guess that’s not my America.

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Oh! New York also was recently crowned the most expensive pizza location in the United States. According to the constantly reliable New York Post, “Gouge-weary Gothamites are now regularly forking over $33.65 for a one-topping pie on average.”

Sounds scandalous.

Then again:

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I will have one hundred dollars’ worth, please.

Enjoy the PIT. The actual NBA Playoffs begin this weekend.