It's hard to argue with the theory that a team's best chance to win a championship would be to have the best record in the regular season. At least on paper, regular-season greatness should lead to a weaker playoff opponent and then, in the Final Four, matchups against teams with inferior records.
In the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague, however, those assumptions have not panned out. Not once since the onset of the current round-robin regular-season format for the 2016-17 campaign has the first-place team from the regular season won the EuroLeague title.
Moreover, 60 percent of the champions during that time – excluding, of course, the 2019-20 season, when no title was awarded due to the pandemic – entered the playoffs without home-court advantage.
While all five regular-season winners since 2017 survived their playoff series and advanced to the Final Four, none did so cleanly. Even though 25% of the best-of-five series in that period have been sweeps, top seeds were not among them. They lost at least one game each year. In fact, in the past two seasons, both series between the No. 1 and No. 8 seeds went to the deciding fifth games before the favorites escaped at home!
Once in the Final Four, the top seeds have struggled even more. Only FC Barcelona in Cologne in 2021 reached the championship game. The others all lost in the semifinals.