Adam Silver talks possible reformatting of NBA Playoffs
In this video of Adam Silver at a recent Golden State Warriors game, the NBA Commissioner talked with Bob Fitzgerald and Jim Barnett on the Warriors broadcast to answer some fan questions. Silver had a chance to address his thoughts on a new format for the NBA postseason:
“Ultimately we want to see your best teams in the playoffs. And there is an unbalance and a certain unfairness. There is a proposal (from one of the broadcasters)… where the division WINNERS would all automatically go into the playoffs and then you’d seed the next 10 best teams. I think that’s the kind of proposal we need to look at. There are travel issues of course, but in this day in age every team of course has their own plane, travels charter. I don’t think the discussion should end there. And as I’ve said, my first year I was studying a lot of these issues and year 2 is time to take action. It’s something I’m going to look at closely with the competition committee. I do think it’s an area where we need to make a change.”
We’ll more than likely see the playoff format change soon in a pretty historical way. Lets be honest, this new proposed format is basically addressing the lack of parity in the Eastern Conference for the last several years. The West keeps emerging and producing more quality teams while the East has been top heavy at best as of late. This doesn’t make for a good breadth of competition throughout the playoffs.
Having a system where the division winners plus the next 10 best teams would qualify for the postseason literally pools the 16 best NBA teams for the playoffs, thus making for more intriguing and competitive match ups. If the format were instituted today, we’d have Toronto, Atlanta, Cleveland, Portland, Golden State, and Memphis as division winners and Houston, Clippers, Dallas, San Antonio, Washington, Chicago, Phoenix, Milwaukee, New Orleans, and Oklahoma City would be the last 10 in. That would eliminate Miami and Charlotte from their current playoff standing.
This wouldn’t sound too bad to me.