The beauty of the NBA is that it is unafraid of change.
The post below is written by Warriors television play-by-play announcer Bob Fitzgerald. All opinions are his alone, and do not represent those of the Golden State Warriors.
The beauty of the NBA is that it is unafraid of change. It is a league at the forefront of many of the best things in professional sports - diversity, globalization, charity, teamwork, marketing and technology.
Unfortunately, the one major gap in this tremendous sport of professional basketball is in defining its champion. When the sport is supposed to be at its zenith in terms of interest, intensity and quality of play, in my opinion, the NBA comes up short. There are 3 major problems with the current system that have existed for nearly 20 years.
- The best 16 teams are not selected for the post-season and haven't been for 20 years.
- By not using a 16 team "seeded" bracket, Western teams are faced with a much more daunting road to the Finals. Essentially running a marathon while Eastern teams run a 10K to the NBA Finals.
- Much more deserving Western teams are mistakenly put back into the draft "lottery" rather than the play-offs, while much weaker Eastern franchises are gifted "play-off" spots, this continues to perpetuate the disparity between the conferences.
Adam Silver has indicated he wants to take a look at improving "the game" in the NBA. Scheduling, travel and play-off system are all on the agenda and these issues can be improved simultaneously.
All of this can be addressed by adjusting the "conference" setup in the NBA. This has happened in the league's history several times as teams like Chicago and Milwaukee were once even in the Western Conference.
Fortunately, the NBA's current regionally-based six-division setup would still work. However, rather than having the six divisions placed within two conferences, it would make more sense to have them broken into three conferences - West, Central and East and view the league "vertically".
Understand, there will never and should never be a balanced schedule. There isn't in baseball, football or hockey either. Think about it - if Eastern teams currently play 52 games in a much easier conference and STILL can't have one of the best 16 records in the league they have PROVEN without doubt they are not a play-off team worthy of competing for the NBA title. The goal is to have the 16 best teams playing for the NBA title and an equitable seeding process in the tournament to decide a champion.
The necessary regular season schedule change is quite simple. Let's use the Golden State Warriors as an example for their 82 games.
- Play Pacific Division teams 5 times (20 games)
- Play Mountain Division teams 4 times (20 games)
- Play Central conference teams 2 times (20 games)
- Play Eastern conference teams 2 times (20 games)
- Play one rotating Eastern and Central team each year (2 games)
The benefits of this schedule reformat are considerable. MUCH less travel. Close proximity allows for easy fan travel and fosters rivalries. Much better local television broadcasts as roughly half the games are in the same time zone for every team. Winning a division would actually mean something.
Start with all six division winners making the playoffs. And then the next 10 best regular season records, regardless of location. Seed the teams 1-16 based on regular season records, make out an NBA Championship bracket, play seven-game series and use the 2-3-2 format to mitigate travel concerns. This is what the NBA play-offs would look like this year:
A few notes for NBA owners that need to have the facts handy to make these needed changes going forward. Here is the 20 year by year conference disparity between West/East. The strength of the new format is that after the division winners, the next 10 play-off teams are not bound by location, it allows for a future years when the East may become stronger.
Also, here is a 20 year list of the teams (and their win totals) that deserved to be in the play-offs and were relegated to the lottery while vastly inferior squads mistakenly took their place in the post-season. That's a pretty long list of owners that should be voting for change. Heck, 15 years ago, even Eastern teams were put in this unfortunate position-
The post above is written by Warriors television play-by-play announcer Bob Fitzgerald. All opinions are his alone, and do not represent those of the Golden State Warriors.