The San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder stampeded through the NBA’s regular season, finishing with two of the top five records in the sport and securing home court advantage in the first round of the Western Conference Playoffs.
The fact that one legitimate title contender will be doomed to a second-round exit is exactly why a segment of the NBA’s fan base – as well as some within the game – would have no problem doing away with the traditional playoff format of separate brackets for the Eastern and Western Conferences, the winners meeting in the NBA Finals. Instead, they would propose a radical change: seeding the 16 best teams in the NBA in order, regardless of conference affiliation, and playing things out from there.
“I think that’d be great,” Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens said. “I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with [the current system], per se. But I do think it would be really interesting to play a team in a playoff series that you’ve only played twice instead of four times. … I’m not out here asking for change, by any means. I just think it would be really interesting.”
It certainly would be different. With conference affiliations tossed aside, the first round of the playoffs could potentially feature a matchup of Stevens’s Celtics with their forever rivals, the Los Angeles Lakers. Or, setting aside the current struggles of the two franchises, the New York Knicks could play the Brooklyn Nets in the NBA Finals.
Making a switch to this format would also ensure the 16 best teams would make the playoffs every year. The current system occasionally allows the final spots in the playoffs to be decided by virtue of simple geography. Often in recent years, teams with winning records in the West sat home, victims of a far stronger and deeper conference, while Eastern Conference teams with losing records reached the postseason. This season, for the first time in over a decade, the ninth-place team in the Eastern Conference, the Chicago Bulls, had a better record than the Houston Rockets, the eighth-place team in the West.
A reform to admit the best 16 teams to the postseason would ensure the playoffs are of the highest possible quality and filled with the most deserving teams.
“That was not a topic specifically at the owners’ meetings we just concluded,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said after the league’s most recent Board of Governors meetings in New York. “We’ve talked a lot about seeding in the past. We didn’t talk about it at this meeting, but in the last several years, there have been several presentations from the league office made to teams, and we’ve considered various other ways of doing it.”
While it would certainly shake up the matchups, the first round of the playoffs this year would coincidentally feature several of the same matchups. The Spurs, the team with the second best record in the league, still would have played the Grizzlies (the playoff team with the second worst mark), while the Los Angeles Clippers and Portland Trail Blazers, Miami Heat and Charlotte Hornets and the Atlanta Hawks and Celtics all would have squared off against one another, as well.
The real differences would come in the ensuing rounds. If the league were to re-seed after each round it would reward the highest-seeded teams with the most favorable matchups as the playoffs progressed. Even if the league didn’t re-seed, keeping the same firm brackets it has now, it still would produce a more equitable system. Teams like the Spurs and Thunder, for example, wouldn’t meet in the second round.
That potential virtue does not appeal to everyone, particularly those in favor of sticking with more than 60 years of tradition in the sport. If the league began seeding No. 1 through 16 for the playoffs, there wouldn’t be a need for divisions or even conferences during the regular season. Moreover the league would need to make an effort to have a balanced schedule, regardless of geography, to ensure teams face opponents a similar number of times each season.
“I don’t like that at all,” Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers said. “I think it’s been pretty good the way it is. I don’t see why I would change it.”
There is also a practical deterrent created by additional travel burdens for any series matching an Eastern Conference team with a Western foe. The possibility of cross-country flights in every round would complicate an already challenging playoff scheduling process.
“I know that from a fan standpoint, there is real appeal to this notion of seeding your teams 1 through 16 going into the playoffs, and possibly two Western Conference teams could meet in the finals or two Eastern Conference teams,” Silver said. “Where we ended up was that – again, it relates directly to the resting issue and injury data, is that we would be dramatically increasing travel. Because if we’re going to seed 1 through 16 we would need to have more of a balanced schedule throughout the year. That would result in more travel.”
That combination of less tradition and more travel, at least for now, seems to have curtailed any possibility this kind of seeding realignment comes to fruition anytime soon.
That doesn’t mean it’s off the table for good, though.
“It’s something we continue to look at,” Silver said. “The current state of our seedings and drawings are what we think is the best way of doing it at the moment. I mean, maybe as planes get faster, new approaches to the season, we’ll look at other ways to do it. But it’s always a balancing act, as with so many things, so I’m comfortable with where it currently stands.”
