So here's my theory on what I think happened.
As my scenario demonstrated (see the link in the third post of this thread), if a team is tied for a playoff spot at the end of the season, even if a separate tiebreaker results in that tie being broken by a half game, OOTP still schedules the tiebreaker. Apparently this was a recent rule change I was unaware of that would prevent, for example, a team getting gifted a wild card spot because a team they were tied with lost a one-game playoff for a division spot. So what OOTP did in my scenario made sense.
But in the OP's scenario, it appears OOTP didn't pay attention to whether the two teams were tied for a playoff spot at season's end. Instead, it just saw that they were only separated by a half game and scheduled the "tiebreaker" anyway.
So that's my theory - OOTP is only using "teams are separated by half a game heading to posteason" in its decision to schedule a tiebreaker instead of "teams were tied for playoff spot at regular season's end AND are now separated by half a game heading to postseason".
I have absolutely no way to prove my theory, but there it is.
Did that make sense?
