Silver: competition committee will look at whether divisions have outlived usefulness.

I'm sorry but divisions in the NBA are really useless. This isn't the NFL where they're important.

 

they are only important in the nfl because of scheduling. nba could re-ignite rivalries and make divisions important again by changing their scheduling system.

 

When you play 82 games, it's hard to make the schedule unbalanced enough to make the division meaningful.

Baseball plays more games, but they have short playoffs, making winning division important. For the NBA, you have more than half the league making the playoffs. That in itself makes winning divisions pretty meaningless.

 

I like the minor league idea - the 4 worst teams in the NBA will become D-League teams the following year, and the 4 best D-League teams graduate to the NBA.

This way, teams can go ahead and tank if they want. They get their draft pick and go to the D-League. The teams that play to win can be real NBA teams.

 

I'd be more inclined to keep divisions and do away with conferences, from a historical point of view they're sort of embedded though.

 

Always loved this idea. It is done in other leagues. Nothing would make players play harder than the embarrassment of becoming a D-league team and losing the perks of NBA lifestyle. It would majorly increase competitive spirit.

 

Eliminate divisions, reduce regular season to 50 games, every team automatically qualifies for the playoffs, season record determines homes court, nothing more, and make every playoff series, including Finals, a three games series. It would be an insane bloodbath, and ratings and profits would skyrocket. Sure, the regular season would be shortened, but the playoffs (the only thing most of the public really cares about) would be extended, and every owner would get a piece of that sweet pie.

 

Also if you finish under .500 a team that missed out of their own conferences playoffs with a record over .500 can replace that team.

 

You can't redistribute the teams, though. Many of these teams have played in same divisions for years and developed rivalries that the fans would like to maintain. Geographically, you also must consider travel times.

The problem with the NBA isn't in how the teams are distributed or with divisions. The problem with the NBA is that there are TOO MANY TEAMS. Over-expansion has killed the overall talent level, and watered down much of the bottom half of the league. If the NBA were to ditch 5 or 6 teams, it could become more dynamic and you wouldn't have an issue with half the league being in a position where they are chronically sub .500. The sport would also be more fun to watch, as the number of true contenders would rise and the competition would be better.

I have said this for years, the NBA has sold the doors to the players. David Stern was only in the business to market players, and not the teams themselves. He never cared much for the health of his league, he just cared about trying to create Jordan 2 (Kobe) and Jordan 3 (Lebron), which are the real money makers.

If the NBA really cared about the level of competition or health of the league they would have contracted several teams by now.

 

Even Lebron James himself admitted that contraction would be a good thing for the league.

http://espn.go.com/nba/truehoop/miamiheat/news/story?id=5952952

 

This would only work if there is truly enough basketball talent to fill 30 NBA rosters and make 2/3's of those teams competitive. Right now, there isn't. So, simply changing a bad team out for a slightly less bad team isn't going to fix anything.

The problem is talent distribution, and currently there are too many NBA rosters vs the amount of talent needed to make half the league atleast semi-competitive.

Moving D-League teams up isn't going to change anything. It doesn't in soccer, either. How many teams in soccer that get moved up actually ever compete or win anything? None.

 

The problem in the East is Lebron James.

1. Most players (even the best players) realize James is the best player in the league. So there is a tendency for other great players to want to go West and build a team that can get to the Finals and play him.

2. More Eastern Conference teams realize they don't have a chance to beat James and his team as currently constructed. So they are in the process of breaking down their teams and rebuilding either through trades and/or the draft.

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If Lebron opts out of his contract and somehow manages to come to the Western Conference in about 2 years other superstar players that have contracts coming into free agency will drift into the Eastern Conference.

It's all about Lebron.

 

You're theory would make sense except that it didn't work that way with Shaq and Kobe. Even when Shaq and Kobe were the powerhouse of the NBA, the west was still much deeper and much better than the east.

The east has sucked for a very long time. There are many different theories that suggest why, but yours is far off.

 

Having divisions spreads out the sense of competition and excitement by reducing the number of teams in a "race" and giving people a more "local" race to watch. Over an 82 game season if you are just watching a .500 team jockying in the middle of a 32 team pack the sense of urgency gets kind of lost.

 

One would hope that the NBA would care more about the fans than major league baseball and their owners, who took any rivalries the Astros had, as well as the fact that they played actual baseball (instead of the abomination that is the American League, with their designated hitter), and happily tossed all that Astros tradition and history in the toilet without so much as the courtesy of a reach around.


Yeah, whatever. Keep jacking around with the game, fools.

 

What about this: the worst four teams each year go to the Eastern conference. For playoff purposes we simply turn the East into a loser's bracket of sorts.

 

I would increase the number of regular season games to 87, and have each team play all the other teams 3 times each. I would do away with conferences and have only divisions. Each division winner would make the playoffs and all other playoff teams would be wildcards.

 

Even Lebron James? Why wouldn't he? He's fine. If Anthony Tolliver was in favor of contraction, that would be something.

 

I think what NBA needs to do is reorganize teams and instead of it being Western and Eastern conferences, Call it something else (Group A/B for example). It is really unfair that some good teams in West are missing playoffs while some sorry teams with much worse record make it.

 

lets go one by one down the list of each nba team and the decisions they have made over the past decade...the east is bad because of BAD management.