<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Asked <a href="https://twitter.com/mcuban">@mcuban</a> what he thought about realignment for playoffs. He wants to shift 4 teams West to East and 4 East to West.</p>— Bryan Gutierrez (@BallinWithBryan) <a href="https://twitter.com/BallinWithBryan/status/537752357027598336">November 26, 2014</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>.<a href="https://twitter.com/mcuban">@mcuban</a> said he mentioned this idea of realignment to <a href="https://twitter.com/ZachLowe_NBA">@ZachLowe_NBA</a> but formally mentioned it tonight.</p>— Bryan Gutierrez (@BallinWithBryan) <a href="https://twitter.com/BallinWithBryan/status/537752646539440128">November 26, 2014</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>.<a href="https://twitter.com/mcuban">@mcuban</a> said he would shift the 3 Texas teams and New Orleans to the East and shift Chicago, Indiana, Milwaukee and Detroit to the West.</p>— Bryan Gutierrez (@BallinWithBryan) <a href="https://twitter.com/BallinWithBryan/status/537752784070651905">November 26, 2014</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Cuban's idea only works for now, since there would be 4 very strong teams move to the East and one and a half (Bulls and Bucks) to the West. The getting rid of conferences, have just the divisions and one league standings is imo the perfect solution. The location of the teams on the map was just made for the proposal of 5 divisions. It would also create more inner division rivalries like Minnesota with those teams in Wisconsin and Illinois, Memphis with Atlanta etc. Just for fun, with Cuban's idea, the standings would be: 1. Toronto 2. Memphis 3. Houston 4. San Antonio 5. Dallas 6. Washington 7. Atlanta 8. New Orleans 1. Golden State 2. Portland 3. LA Clippers 4. Phoenix 5. Chicago 6. Sacramento 7. Milwaukee 8. Denver
The Hawks are from much further East than the T-Wolves and play in the same general area as Hornets and the Florida teams. Why would you move them to the West?
Look at the map, then you'll understand, but forget about my idea. SB Nation is right on point with their idea!
Time slots would be in issue in the playoffs if a far Eastern coast team plays a Western coast team. Even the 9:30 CST games here are pushing it for me. That would be 10:30 EST. If the game were played in the east. The tip off time for PST would be like 4:30 or 5:00. Time is the issue. We should keep West/East in the playoffs format, but have each team play Western conference teams and Eastern conference teams the same amount: 41-41.
Assuming the league does expand to 32 teams, would this work? Division leaders get the top 4 seeds. Bolded the would-be leader as of now. WESTERN CONFERENCE Northwest: 1. Denver Nuggets 2. Portland Trailblazers 3. Seattle Supersonics* 4. Utah Jazz Pacific: 1. Los Angeles Clippers 2. Los Angeles Lakers 3. Sacramento Kings 4. Golden State Warriors Southwest: 1. Dallas Mavericks 2. Houston Rockets 3. Phoenix Suns 4. San Antonio Spurs Midwest: 1. Chicago Bulls 2. Milwaukee Bucks 3. Minnesota Timberwolves 4. Oklahoma City Thunder EASTERN CONFERENCE Northeast: 1. Brooklyn Nets 2. Boston Celtics 3. New York Knicks 4. Philadelphia 76ers Great Lakes: 1. Cleveland Cavaliers 2. Detroit Pistons 3. Indiana Pacers 4. Toronto Raptors Central: 1. Charlotte Hornets 2. Louisville Colonels* 3. Memphis Grizzlies 4. Washington Wizards Southeast: 1. Atlanta Hawks 2. Miami Heat 3. New Orleans Pelicans (3-Way Tie) 4. Orlando Magic In essence, adding 2 expansion teams and swapping Chicago+Milwaukee for Memphis+NOP.
They don't. As a result of this system: 1. The regular system is far more interesting in the West. If you had about 8 teams in each conference making the playoffs, the whole regular season is kind of pointless outside of a bit of seeding. Playing 82 games so you can get an extra home game for one round of the playoffs is not exactly compelling. But having 12 teams fight for 8 playoff spots? It makes every game matter far more. 2. The playoffs are more exciting. No one cares about the 8th team in the East or 16th best team in the NBA. Neither is winning the NBA title, and whether they are in the playoffs or not is irrelevant. In the first round of the playoffs, 1v8, 2x7, etc in the west will be far more interesting than 1v16 or 2x15 would have been. And by the 2nd or 3rd round, most of the teams impacted would be gone anyway.
[rQUOTEr]Searching for Balance: The NBA’s Lopsided Conference Problem Spoiler It’s time for the NBA to take a serious look at scrapping the East-West conference system, and several league sources say that discussion is now happening in some infant stage. The schedule, both its makeup and length, represents the heaviest of several obstacles standing between the league and true postseason fairness. Screaming about conference imbalance is easy, but changing the system plunges you into the muck of schedule adjustments, flight times, arena booking, gate receipts, the imperiling of traditional rivalries, and more. Negotiating that thicket is overwhelming, and when people meet overwhelming barriers, the inertia of the status quo wins out. That can no longer suffice. The superiority of the West is laughable. The West is 64-26 against the East head-to-head this season, a winning percentage that would be the highest ever for one conference over the other. During the last decade, the no. 8 seed in the West has on average finished about seven games ahead of the East’s no. 8 seed. At least one lottery team from the West has finished with a better record than the East’s no. 8 seed in an average season during that stretch. Flip it around: The ninth-place team in the West has ended up with a better record than about 2.5 Eastern Conference playoff teams on average since 2003. We are staring at a realistic scenario in which two of the league’s three best players, Kevin Durant and Anthony Davis, miss the playoffs, while Brooklyn, Indiana, and Milwaukee slog through first-round playoff series. It’s time to think harder about deemphasizing conferences and making sure the 16 best teams overall participate in the playoffs. “The obligation of the league office is to make the competition as fair as possible,” says Jeff Van Gundy. “Why would you ever reward someone who’s worse with a treat?” Several teams have informally pitched fixes. In an email exchange last week with Grantland, Mark Cuban conjured up a temporary plan that would shift Chicago, Detroit, Indiana, and Milwaukee to the West, with the three Texas teams and New Orleans moving to the East. Robert Sarver, the Suns owner, says he brought up the idea of abolishing conferences for at least the purposes of playoff seeding at the league’s board of governors meeting in October. The wound of having the 48-win Suns miss the playoffs last season is still fresh, but Sarver vows to keep poking at the issue regardless of his team’s fate going forward. “It needs to be looked at,” Sarver tells Grantland. “I’m getting closer to the point where I just think there needs to be a change. It is on the league’s radar screen now.” Representatives from at least one other Western Conference team — the Thunder — have informally suggested a top-16 playoff structure over the last six months, according to several sources. Some pitches have included the wrinkle of re-seeding the playoffs after each round, league sources say. League higher-ups understand the outcry. “We are studying the issue closely,” says Adam Silver, the NBA’s commissioner. It’s convenient for Western Conference owners to propose some form of realignment now. The top teams would all but guarantee themselves at least two home playoff games, which can rake in $2 million apiece in gate receipts — and much more in some markets. But Cuban’s plan would only be temporary, subject to revision as the league’s balance of power shifts, he says. “A shakeup will create interest,” Cuban says. “And after five years, you can learn and adjust from there.” The imbalance is so severe right now that even an imperfect stopgap measure would be better than granting the East eight playoff teams just because that is what tradition says the NBA must do. Plucking the 16 best teams by overall record, even with the league’s current imbalanced schedule, would do a better job of rewarding teams that most deserve playoff shine. In an ideal world, you’d balance all 30 team schedules before putting everyone in the same pool for playoff seeding. Teams now play 52 games within their conference and just 30 games against the opposite conference. If every team is competing against every other team for playoff spots, then they should all play more or less the same schedule. That isn’t happening today. But guess what. The schedule imbalance benefits the East! Those teams get to slap-fight against themselves 52 times! The interconference gap is even larger than it looks. The diciest pitfall of just going with the top 16 teams under the current imbalanced schedule would be rewarding a team that plays an easier overall 82-game slate. But that is already happening. The NBA, at least for now, could scrap conference designations and put the 16 most deserving teams into the playoffs without changing the schedule at all. If any top-16 system proved too unstable, the league could guarantee slots to the teams with the 12 best records and put the next eight into a mini-tournament to decide the bottom four seeds.1 Any change would appear to be a hard sell for Eastern Conference owners who enjoy playoff revenue.2 There is anxiety around the league over more new owners voting in their teams’ interest rather than thinking league-first — a trend that seized the lottery reform debate and promises to intensify as the NBA discusses changes to its revenue-sharing system. Some in the anti-change crowd argue that the league’s power structure will eventually flip, and the East will reclaim the supremacy it enjoyed during most of the 1980s. Those people are probably right. The worst teams are in the East, and the lottery system will eventually shift more of the best draftees to those teams. “The root of the problem,” Cuban says, “is that we have a race to the bottom.” Older Western Conference stars will retire. The Nets and Knicks, looming big-money juggernauts, will emerge from a purgatory they imposed upon themselves with crazy spending and bad trades. A well-managed team in the West will do some dumb things, suffer bad luck, and become a doormat for 10 years. Star players set to hit free agency know the East is weak, and it takes only a couple of big West-to-East shifts to tilt the league’s axis of power. People have floated lots of reasons for the West’s long-term superiority, and while those theories have real merit, none of the underlying causes are intractable. If the East will eventually achieve equal footing, why bother with drastic measures like the abolition of conferences or a new playoff seeding system? But that’s exactly the point. There will always be random imbalances in the league’s macro structure. You don’t want those imbalances to affect which teams get to compete for the championship, and the easiest way to do that is to reserve playoff spots for the 16 best teams. If the Eastern and Central time zones someday sport 12 of the league’s 16 best records, then, by god, those time zones shall get a dozen playoff teams. The balancing process would accelerate if teams that needed high draft picks the most actually got them. That’s how you sell realignment to East owners who can’t see past playoff gate receipts: Your 35-win first-round roadkill doesn’t get a lottery pick today, but in a 1-to-16 world where conferences don’t matter, you might pick 12th instead of watching the 48-win Suns grin on the lottery dais. “I’ve had conversations with East playoff teams that end up disappointed in their pick,” Sarver says. Every part of the NBA ecosystem is linked to all the others; shift one branch, and you shift them all — sometimes by accident. That was the sneaky potential ripple effect of the league’s defeated lottery proposal, which would have given teams at the bottom of the lottery — the “best” lottery teams — a better chance at leaping up the draft order. If the 13th lottery slot is more valuable, then perhaps its value approaches the $4 million or so a team might reap in revenue from two home playoff games. Tilt that equation enough and you’ve shifted the way a team might think about the abolition of conferences or the reconfiguring of playoff seeding. It might also change the way that teams construct short- and long-term building plans. This is in part what Cuban means when he talks about the “race to the bottom” being the root problem driving conference imbalance and other ugly trends. You can see the vision of a robust meritocracy: more teams trying their hardest and all the best teams getting a chance in the playoffs. But to really get there, the league would need to balance the schedule. The 52/30 conference split might not affect which teams finish in the top 16 this season, but it absolutely affects the order of finish, and it would have an outsize effect on the composition of the playoff field in some seasons. “While seeding teams 1 to 16 in the playoffs certainly has appeal from a competitive standpoint,” Silver says, “it would not seem fair when teams in different conferences play unbalanced schedules.” This is where you run into the realities of what it would take for each team to play every other team the same number of times3 over an 82-game schedule. “None of the ideas being floated comes without a significant impact on overall travel, which could ultimately have an adverse impact on the quality of the games,” Silver says. That goes double for the playoffs, where seeding 1 to 16 raises the specter of multiple cross-country series in the first round — a problem that Tom Ziller noted in this outstanding piece last week. Mega-travel is already a problem in some Western Conference series — a Los Angeles–to-Memphis journey is no fun — and as Ziller notes, perhaps the league could play around with selective application of the 2-3-2 format. Private travel is easier on players, but switching time zones and trudging into hotels at 4 a.m. is draining regardless. There is also widespread concern over the potential death of intraconference rivalries that can only be forged over multiple playoff series. Our chances of getting another Grizzlies-Clippers or Cavaliers-Wizards drop if their pool of potential first-round opponents expands from seven to 15. Historic rivalries like Knicks-Celtics or Bulls-Pistons could wither without the occasional postseason nurturing. That is worth worrying about. But geographic proximity ensures some rivalries will remain strong, and an open playoff system holds the promise of more frequent visits with some classic East-West rivalries. How cool would a Lakers-Celtics first-round series be?4 All of that is secondary to scheduling issues. Several front-office executives suggested a system in which teams play each opponent three times, but that amounts to a monster 87-game schedule with some home/road imbalances. Slashing the preseason would allow for those extra five games, but with all we know now about rest and fatigue, suggesting more games feels wrong — even if it means more money for everyone. You could achieve some coastal balance in the 82-game schedule by sending teams on super-long road trips that allow for more games against the opposite conference. The Blazers could come East on a three-week trip that includes multiple games, or perhaps even baseball-style two-game “series” against Philly, Boston, Toronto, and the New York teams. Give every team one or two such trips per season, and, boom, you might get something like a balanced schedule. But it’s unclear how feasible that is. Nobody likes bouncing among hotels for a month. Teams would have to scramble for practice space, increase travel budgets, and deal with other complications. Some arenas are empty for 200-plus days a year, but others are stocked with concerts and events; fitting in a revamped schedule with longer road trips and homestands would prove tricky in some markets. The silver bullet is slicing games off the schedule. You don’t even need to get down to a 58-gamer in which every team plays everyone else twice, minimizing travel headaches. Every game you lop off from 82 makes it a hair easier to nibble away at schedule imbalances. That’s obviously not happening anytime soon. Gate receipts are soaring in some markets, and neither players nor owners are eager to give those up. The Knicks approached a record $145 million in net gate receipts last season, nearly $3.5 million per game, and the Lakers pushed $90 million, per several league sources. A bunch of smaller-market teams don’t even sniff $1 million in gate per home game, but that scarcity makes every game feel precious. The NBA’s mammoth new national TV deal might withstand a schedule slice, since the league could earmark the same number of games for its broadcast partners. But local TV deals are based on teams filling 82 prime-time slots, and several teams are set to negotiate fat new local deals over the next couple of years. These are the realities that should matter in discussing realignment. They are complicated, with lots of stakeholders. Perfect balance will prove elusive, but it’s time to start talking about imperfect alternatives to the current conference and playoff structure. Chip away enough, and you could build something better than the warped system the league is using now. [/rQUOTEr]
If we do away with conferences, will we also do away with Divisions? Will Division winners automatically make the playoffs even if they might have a less than top 16 record? Also, will this kill "Rivalries"? Does that take anything away from the game? I'd imagine the sheety teams in the East who make the playoffs with 35-47 records will be mad about this ya know.
Another terrible thing is east teams get to rest much earlier in the regular season and still have a high seed. (I understand the spurs do as well, but they are an outlier) Simple solution, every team plays 58 games. 2 against each team, 1 home 1 away. Top 16 make the playoffs. If it were up to me I'd contract the number of teams to enhance the level of talent in the league, but there is no way that will ever happen
Conferences really only make sense for regular season scheduling. The east would have an advantage in the short term using an NCAA style best 16 make it playoffs, but over time bad eastern conference teams going to the lottery instead of the playoffs will give them more opportunities to improve, and likewise good teams like the Suns won't be collecting more talent from the lottery for missing the playoffs with a better record than four eastern conference teams that made it. Currently, the bottom tier east playoff teams have no way to get more talent realistically. Nobody mistakes them for a contender who is likely to attract a top tier free agent, and they aren't getting draft picks to improve either. They have to be absolutely terrible to miss the playoffs and get lottery picks. With a league wide best 16 teams make it and get seeded accordingly style playoffs, there would be less sitting stars at the end of the season, or games meaning nothing because your playoff position is "locked up". There is still plenty of opportunities for "rivalries" and you wouldn't need to make the finals to have a Celtics vs Lakers series for example. Having the best record in the league would mean having an easier bracket to reach the finals. But since the quality of teams is increased at the bottom, it would still be a more interesting playoffs. Best record in the league vs 16th best record, 2nd best record vs 15th seed; 3rd seed vs 14th seed. For example last year the playoffs with this system would have been: Spoiler Bracket one: 1) San Antonio 16) Charlotte 8) Golden State 9) Memphis Bracket 2: 4) Indiana 13) Phoenix 6) Houston 11) Toronto Bracket 3 2) OKC Thunder 15) Brooklyn Nets 7) Portland 10) Dallas Bracket 4: 3) LA Clippers 14) Washington 5)Miami 12) Chicago Winner of bracket 1 plays winner of bracket 2 Winner of bracket 3 plays winner of bracket 4 Winners from there play each other in the finals. An example if the favorites had all won in this system last year, the second round would be Bracket 1: 1) San Antonio 8) Golden State Bracket 2: 4) Indiana 6) Houston Bracket 3: 2) OKC 7) Portland Bracket 4: 3) LA Clippers 5) Miami Again an example with favorites winning all series, conference finals equivalent Round would be: 1) San Antonio 4) Indiana 2) OKC 3) LA Clippers example of Finals with favorites = 1) San Antonio 2) OKC
The Western Conference is insane. The Rockets are 14-4 and they are only 4th, just one game ahead of the 7th seed. 7 of the top 8 teams are in the West. The worst 4 teams are all in the East.
Yep this would be the NCAA style best 16 matchups if the playoffs started today: 1) Golden State 16) Sacramento 8)LA Clippers 9) Washington ____________________________ 4) Portland 13) Phoenix 5) Houston 12) Cleveland ______________________________ 2) Memphis 15) Miami 7) San Antonio 10) Atlanta _______________________________ 3) Toronto 14) Milwaukee 6) Dallas 11) Chicago Of course by the time today's games have finished they will all likely change dramatically.
And look at how much the matchups would have shifted after one day. Rocket's chances would have dramatically increased: 1) Golden State 16) Miami 8) La Clippers 9) Dallas ____________________________ 4) Memphis 13) Phoenix 5) Toronto 12) Cleveland ______________________________ 2) Houston 15) Milwaukee 7) Washington 10) Atlanta _______________________________ 3) Portland 14) Sacramento 6) San Antonio 11) Chicago
