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

Yes and that is the point. East is bad, but teams in West are getting punished for it. Bad teams (under .500) are making the playoffs while good teams with winning record in West are not.

This is why alot of these teams are bad, because they are making the playoffs. In their opinion, they are a playoff team. The owners make their money even if their team gets knocked out in the first round. Maybe if we would start punishing them for being bad, they might do something about it.

 

This would work. Eliminate 5 preseason games while also extending the roster cuts to allow teams the same amount of time to evaluate players toward the final roster.

Then have an NCAA style 1- 16 bracket

 

You still need 2 conferences, or else you lose the all star game and things like that. I would suggest, making it North and south.(or keeping east west) So Cali teams go to the north, Florida teams go south and what not.
No divisions however, the best 16 make it regardless of conference. And like someone suggested play 87 games, this way there is always a season winner in case 2 teams have the same record based on head to head games.
1vs16 , 2vs15,3vs14,4vs13 etc.. gets rid of the crappy teams out of playoffs right away or it could be massive upsets who knows.
right now it would be
Ind vs Lal, Por vs Min, S.A vs Cha, OKC vs Mem.
Miami vs Atl, Hou vs GS, LaC vs PHo, Dal vs Den.
Conference doesn't even have to matter, other than to say east or west is better than the other, and create rivalries that way.

 

you need conferences for playoffs. you can't have 14 western teams make it and 2 from the east. the nba can't take a whole region of the US out of the playoffs and still expect national tv coverage. that's another reason why they can't reseed the playoffs to take the top 16 teams in the league and have 1 play 16 and so on. all the eastern teams would be out in the first round and half the US would tune out. the eastern conference has to exist for the playoffs so they can watch their crappy teams for 2 rounds until the pacers and heat square off in the ECF.

even getting rid of useless devisions would be a big change. teams play division rivals 4 times per year, and cross conference teams twice. i guess you can keep the 2 games each vs cross conference teams twice making 30 games. if you then play everyone in your conference 3 times, that would be 42 games, plus the other 30 have us at 72 games per year. i guess you can then play the 10 teams closest to you 1 more time per year.

the issue is also the travel schedule. playing your division rivals 4 times a year each is supposed to make for an easy travel schedule while helping develop rivalries with nearby cities. if you play everyone an equal amount, you get rid of the rivalries to some degree and potentially add a lot of extra miles to travel. it can be done, if you stick to the 72 game schedule outlined above, but that won't happen because owners want their home games to make money.

so in the end, i think the divisions don't have a competitive use, but they do have a logistical and monetary use. the later being the trump card of decision making in business.