I would disagree with that. It's not really bizarre given leagues around the world do this to great success. Also I don't think the NBA is so single minded that they only worked on this in season tournament and nothing else to improve the game. I'm also not sure that very much time even needed to be spent on this idea given how it's already in place in other leagues and at the top level it's not very complex.

At the end of the day it was a pretty minor change to the existing infrastructure with respect to how much improvement it could impose. I see it as no negative with possible positive.