I begin with addressing division alignment. It has been discussed before, in many different venues with as many different outcomes, but my belief after much thinking is that conferences really serve no purpose right now that can't be also maintained by a strict division breakdown. The idea, when they were introduced, was to cut down on the cross-country travel that was such a hassle in the days of flying coach. With all the amenities these teams have available to them now, the most obvious of which is chartered planes that I can only assume are exponentially more comfortable and tailored than the typical 1960s Boston to LA PanAm flight would have been, that need no longer exists in the capacity it once did. However, we do still see teams affected by heavy travel schedules, especially the veteran teams that tend to have deep playoff runs. But when you have teams in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, and Portland occupying the same division, you're clearly not aligning them for the benefit of reduced travel. With the previous decade's relocations, we've needed to take another look at alignment, and with the talks of the Maloofs taking the Kings out of Sacramento put to rest for at least another year, now might be the time to address alignment concerns.
My proposal is not a quick-fix, let's-just-move-this-team-here-and-this-team-there suggestion. I suggest we take a hammer to the conference piggy bank and separate out our coins in a way that makes more sense: Five divisions of six teams each. It sounds uneven at first, but once you actually take a look at how the teams would fall in, it begins to become a much clearer geographic picture, with the benefit of reduced travel actually increased from the current two-conference format. Here's a quick look at my proposed alignment, the 5-Division system:
With the divisions including six teams each, traditional divisional rivalries remain intact for the most part, and they divisions make much more sense geographically as well. The Texas Triangle welcomes OKC into the fold. Phoenix remains a Pacific team. The current Central Division expands to include Minnesota, who really has been on an island since they joined the NBA in terms of distance to division rivals. And the Atlantic Division remains intact, joined by the Wizards and their wonderful new uniforms.
There are a couple things to note about this proposal and potential relocations. We all know the Nets are moving to Brooklyn after the 2011-12 season (if there is one, and if the Barclays Center is done in time. Who knows). The Kings have no certain future ahead of them. We can assume they will find the funding they need to build a new arena and stay in Sacramento, but that sort of thing is never 100%. If the arena plans do fall through and they instead move to Anaheim, as they intended at some point within the past month, then that does not affect this division alignment negatively (same goes for if they move to Seattle, or Vancouver, or Las Vegas, as all have been rumored over the past year). The other NBA franchise without a definite middle-term future is the Hornets, currently owned by the Association and while they did hit their minimum attendance mark set in their lease, keeping the team from opting out of the contract penalty-free, there do not seem to be many potential buyers with the desire to keep the team in town. If they leave New Orleans as the Jazz did before them, the cities best-equipped to attract the team would be those mentioned above, as well as Kansas City, with their relatively-new Sprint Center, which is currently without a major league sports tenant. A Kansas City franchise would still make most sense in the Southeast Division, given the proposed layout. The one kink that could be thrown in is if a team such as the Hornets or the Bobcats made the move West, inhabiting the Seattle-Vancouver region or Las Vegas (or Anaheim, who for some reason is really excited to host the C team of Greater Los Angeles), or if the Kings decide to return to their previous home of Kansas City. This could be easily rectified, however. In the first case the NBA could shift the Suns to the Southwest (sorry, Phoenix, but you're much more a Southwest city than a Pacific city anyways), and the Thunder to the Southeast, giving the relocated Hornets/Bobcats the Suns' old position in the Pacific Division. A Sacto-to-KC move would involve even less shuffling: Sacramento (now Kansas City in this scenario) could simply swap divisions with Utah. For these foreseeable moves, this 5-division structure seems to hold up.
The big change this would predicate would be the playoff structure. I thought long and hard about this as well, and I think the NBA needs a drastic overhaul of their postseason tournament. The NBA Playoffs have long been cited as the most predictable and uninteresting playoffs of the four major sports, and despite classic games each year, the argument holds up. Since 1984, only four times has a #8 seed upset a #1 in the first round, and only once has that #8 gone on to the NBA Finals. That was the 1999 Knicks, which I will throw out as the shortened season surely had an effect on the proper seeding of talent. The last NBA Finals to not feature a #1 seed was 1994, and that Finals saw the #2 seeded Rockets take on the #2 Knicks. The previous top-seedless Finals? 1978, when the third-seeded Bullets topped the fourth-seeded Supersonics in seven games. Maybe there's no good way to go about changing the end result and the finals matchups, but there is a way to make those early rounds of the playoffs more exciting and unpredictable, and here is where I employ the ideas of a couple of others to flesh out the new NBA Postseason.
Here's the scenario. We have played through an entire regular season, and have some idea who the best teams in the NBA are, and now we look forward to watching them prove it in the postseason. However, some of these "best teams" don't get this chance to prove themselves in the playoffs, as the current format restricts how many teams can get in from a particular conference. In my NBA, this restriction no longer exists. We are going to reward the best teams in the Association, like the current system does, but we're not going to penalize any team for playing in the toughest situations. This solution involves 12 auto-qualifiers and four wild card teams, and borrows from the excitement and uncertainty that March Madness provides to us every year. Without conferences providing us strict playoff seeding, I'll employ an idea I first saw from Bob Fitzgerald: turning the playoffs into a straight 16-team bracket, much like one of the regional brackets at the beginning of March Madness. With that in your head, let's talk about who gets in. Here we go:
a) The five division champions earn a playoff berth, as well as the guarantee to host the first round of the playoffs. Winning your division, no matter the level of competition, is an accomplishment, and those teams should be rewarded as such. Therefore we will not seed them any lower than 8th, similar to how current division winners cannot be seeded lower than 4th in their respective conference.
b) The five division runners-up earn a playoff berth. This makes playing well within your division meaningful. As we'll take a look at soon, the five-division alignment requires us to make some changes to the regular season schedule. One of the solutions involves a bit more in-division play than in the current system, so in order to reward the teams who play well within their division but get edged out by the top team, we will give them a playoff spot. These teams will be seeded no lower than 12th.
c) The two remaining teams with the best overall records who did not already secure a playoff spot are given one. We can refer to these teams as wild cards, or at-large teams, or really whatever you'd like to call them. The point is, here we reward the teams who play the best in the toughest divisions. In the alignment I detailed above, the Southwest Division is pretty brutal in terms of difficulty. The top two teams would get into the playoffs, but that leaves some heavy talent out. The two wild card spots aim to rectify this. If you have three 50-game winners in a division, one most likely won't be on the outside looking in as the playoffs begin. Or rather, when the "Entertaining As Hell Tournament," as Bill Simmons tentatively dubbed it, begins. These teams also would be seeded no lower than 12th.
d) The four remaining seed go to the top 4 finishers of a double elimination tournament that immediately follows the regular season and precedes what we know as the playoffs. First introduced to combat the tanking that teams subject their fans to when they're out of the playoff race, Simmons describes it as such:
"Shorten the regular season by four games, guarantee the top six seeds in each conference, then have a double-elimination tourney for the seventh and eighth seeds between the remaining ... teams. I suggest this for five reasons. First, it would be entertaining as hell. In fact, that's what we'll call it: the Entertaining-as-Hell Tournament. Second, I'm pretty sure we could get it sponsored. Third, the top 12 teams get a reward: two weeks of rest while the tournament plays out.
"Fourth, a Cinderella squad could pull off some upsets, grab an eighth seed and win fans along the way. And fifth, with the Entertaining-as-Hell Tournament giving everyone a chance, no team could tank down the stretch without insulting paying customers beyond repair.
"Is there any downside for that idea? Lottery teams couldn't tank down the stretch and sideline their best players with dubious injuries. Playoff teams get two weeks of rest and practice so they'll be running on all cylinders in the playoffs. And if that's not enough, the Entertaining-as-Hell Tournament would be entertaining as hell, wouldn't it? Then, when the real playoffs started, we'd have a wide-open, 16-team bracket in which (A) the top-four teams couldn't play each other until the conference finals, (B) the matchups would be completely unpredictable, and (C) the bracket even would lend itself to a few illegal office pools (with the Finals MVP as the tiebreaker)."
As my alignment strategy doesn't take conferences into consideration, we guarantee the top 12 seeds overall, but still have the bottom four seeds determined by the EAHT, as I will refer to it as from here on out. Simmons' point A, the top four teams not playing each other until the conference finals, is another benefit to the straight 16 seed bracket. As it stands now, the best teams often fall within the same conference, so you may have the two best teams in the NBA meeting in the Conference Finals, or two of the best three even squaring off in the Conference Semifinals. This is no way to determine a champion. With the straight 16 seed bracket, the top four teams get the top four seeds, and they are guaranteed not to meet until at least the NBA Semifinals (formerly the Conference Finals), with the top two seeds not matching up until the NBA Finals. They could even be from the same division, in this case, as we only guarantee homecourt in the first round for division winners. There are no top seed restrictions. If Dallas finishes a season with the best record, and Oklahoma City finishes with the second best, they would be seeded 1-2. The other four division winners and the two remaining auto-qualifiers would round out the top 8, allowing for the two best teams to truly meet in the Finals. If, of course, they take care of business.
The EAHT would be seeded in order of overall record, using the same tiebreakers currently employed by the Association. This would follow the typical layout of an 18-team double elimination tournament, where the champion gets the #13 seed in the playoffs, the runner-up gets #14, third place is seeded #15, and the team that finishes in fourth gets the last seed and the honor to matchup against the team with the best record in the NBA. With this format, we could see some pretty exciting first round matchups, and like Simmons mentions, even see a Cinderella team gel during the EAHT and take advantage of matchups with their first round opponent in the NBA Playoffs, giving us some unexpected upsets.
Taking a look at the finishes for the 2010-11 season, here's what the NBA Playoffs would have looked like with the proposed division alignment and new postseason structure (using records from this season, which would of course be different with altered schedules and divisions):
The teams left out that made the 2011 NBA Playoffs would be the Hawks, the Sixers, the Hornets, and the bandwagon flavor of the month Grizzlies. Watching the Grizzlies' remarkable postseason, I have little doubt they would have put together a serious run in the EAHT, and made the playoffs through that method too. Regardless, what we watched with Memphis this past month would be duplicated every season, with underachieving (or not, depending on how you view them) regular season teams putting together an unexpected stretch during the Tournament and gaining real support from fans all over. Here's how the seeding and opening matchups for the EAHT would have looked like this year:
Remember, these aren't best-of-5 or best-of-7 series, it's a double elimination tournament, so each game matters. The tournament could even be hosted at a different NBA venue each year, like All-Star Weekend, or even rotate between couple destination cities, like the Super Bowl. Imagine the EAHT in Las Vegas every year. Actually, if David Stern is reading this, don't imagine that. Imagine this being another event to increase the popularity of your Association. This would be a radical shift from current policy, but something like this tournament could be the best decision the NBA makes, in terms of fan interest as well as marketing power.
Back to Simmons' comment about shortening the regular season. Once I finalized my five divisions, I realized the schedule would not be workable in its current state, and that some changes were necessary. Here's the breakdown I came up with:
a) Teams play each division opponent five times. Two home, two away, and alternate the host of the fifth every year. This comes to 25 games.
b) Teams play a home-and-home series with every team outside their division, just like teams currently do with opponents from the opposite conference. Fans still have the opportunity to see every team at least once in this scenario, as they do now with the current scheduling system. This comes to 48 games, for a total of 73 so far.
c) Here's where it starts to get interesting. The teams will play one additional game against the teams in the other four divisions that finished in the same place as them the previous season. Meaning the following year the team that finished second in Atlantic will play one additional game against the teams that finished second in their divisions. It's an idea the NFL currently uses effectively, and I could see it being beneficial for the NBA as well. This comes to four games, totaling 77.
d) Lastly, one additional game vs. the team's traditional/geographical/team-that-stole-their-city rival from outside the division. This has two purposes. First, being able to see one more Lakers-Celtics game a year can't possibly hurt, and neither would an extra matchup of Hornets-Jazz (Battle for New Orleans!) or Knicks-Heat (the Pat Riley Special). Hell, you could even see trophies introduced for the winner of the season series, like the Cascadia Cup in MLS or college football rivalries. Secondly, we need to have an even number of home and away games, and this "extra" game would even out the schedule at a nice 78: 39 Home, 39 Away.
This scheduling structure would allow us to cut about a week off the end of the regular season, which would then be used to hold and showcase the EAHT. The tough part might be determining that extra matchup for some franchises. Celtics-Lakers makes sense, but who would be designated as Memphis' matchup each year? Maybe we could institute a 4- or 5-year reevalutation period, where you can switch the "rivalry" games for the following few seasons until the next evalutation. I haven't come up with a perfect solution for this one yet.
This will probably never happen, but I can see it only benefiting the NBA if it were ever adopted. You'd have a more exciting regular season, an Entertaining-as-Hell Tournament, and an improved NBA Playoff format. What's there to lose?
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