Most lopsided season in history? (Western vs. Eastern Conference)

Forget the win/loss numbers, the heat are still favored to win it all. They only had 54 wins during the regular season.

Hell, look at what the Hawks are doing to the Pacers. Regular season wins dont matter in the playoffs.

 

What's the point of having a regular season then? Though I do agree with you somewhat in the sense that records are less important than matchups.

It's just an inherent fairness of competition issue really. Abolish conferences, seed 1-16, put Phoenix in and Atlanta out, and Miami would be playing Phoenix (if it wasn't a skewed schedule)...or maybe Toronto...basically a better 1st rd matchup than the Bobcats.

Also, I don't think the Heat were/are favored to win it all, but they're close...point is fair though.

Edit: ok as of right now they are favored to win it all, but that wasn't the case start of the playoffs, and odds change after every game. And again, this should support changing the playoffs bc it's unfair competitively for the Heat to have such an easier path than any Western team.

 

I don't like the idea of abolishing conferences altogether. I enjoy all the inter-conference rivalries that form because teams meet in the playoffs year after year, not to mention extra regular season meetings. No conferences and a simple 1-16 seeding would take most of that away.

But I don't know a perfect solution either. I think they should probably start by changing the lottery. A key issue right now is all the tanking and 'we don't tank but we don't try either' situations. Especially because bad GMs get to keep their jobs for half a decade and more by covering themselves with this idea of rebuilding.

If the draft was less rewarding to terrible teams and much kinder to 30-45 win teams, these terrible teams would try to spend. And bad GMs would run out of excuses quicker. It wouldn't solve everything but I think it would be a good first step. Poor management has been the problem with the East, especially in many of the mid size / big markets.

 

I thought I had seen the worst but this is an all time low for the eastern conference. What pisses me off is the heat have such a baby **** road to the finals while everyone in the west has to go through murders row.

It's just so unfair.

 

I think you meant intra-conference, but yeah, I do like the rivalries too. I'm not sure if the anti-tanking measures would help just horrible East GMs in the long run. It has nothing to do with location imo. It's just the luck of it that most of the bad GMs over the last 15 years have been in the East and most of the good ones have been in the West. There's a lot of inertia in the NBA. Good teams stay good and bad teams stay bad...it takes a dramatic move or luck or both to change a team. I don't know the best solution either, but it's just pretty messed up that 12 of the last 15 years has been so unbalanced. It's like the 1990's in the NFL when the NFC just destroyed the AFC for the majority of Super Bowls.