(via ESPN - #364 by JohnsonTV)
Dumping in here as more NBL comments rather than ESPN comment…
I know the NBL’s doing the play-in style format because the NBA’s doing it, and hopefully it’ll be a success - but it’s still a touch odd when there’s not the same reasons as to why the NBA doesn’t call the play-in tournament part of the playoffs. (Draft reasons over there - you only go into the lottery for the first 4 draft picks if you’re not “in the playoffs”, and they couldn’t change that definition so easily as it’d disqualify four more teams from that.)
There was also an article on the NBL’s site about how whether the “play to the final buzzer” thing had been settled - unlike the unwritten gamesmanship rules in US sport, where a typical NBA player on a winning team would just dribble it out. But then, US sport doesn’t use for-and-against except as a last resort (in the NBA it’s like the seventh and last tie-breaker), partly due to the heavy in-division and in-conference scheduling [to be fair, I still don’t entirely know which one is the chicken or the egg here…]
In the end, Melbourne were one point ahead of Perth on for-and-against going into the final game (100.04% vs 100.00%; +1 vs ±0)… Melbourne won by 9, requiring Perth to win by 11, and the latter won by 12. 
Not really going to buy into whether we’re going to see more of the “oh it’s just bad gamesmanship” stuff here in something like this, but I guess in an American sport it’s always going to be on the lips, especially with the premier product much more easily accessible on TV and online.