NBA Realignment Proposal
This is Tumblr—a place where you can be who and what you wish to be. Today I take advantage of that to bring to you an idea that I think will solve a couple of dire problems the National Basketball Association (an American professional sporting association for basketball) has been struggling with in recent years. The problems are two-fold:
(1) Division championships are meaningless. In the old days if you won your division, you earned a top seed. When there were two division, the division winner with the best record got the 1 seed, and the other division winner the 2. It didn't matter if there was a second (or even third) place team that had a better record: winning your division meant you earned a top seed. A good example is the 1991-92 season, where the Chicago Bulls (67-15) earned the top seed, but the 51-31 Boston Celtics earned the second seed as winners of the Atlantic Division, despite the fact that the Cleveland Cavaliers had a much better record at 57-25. Winning the division was incredibly important. Now teams are seeded by record throughout the conference. Division titles mean nothing.
(2) Super teams. Since divisions are meaningless but winning chamiponships is still the most important thing in the NBA, successful players go to teams that can pay the most money. The ones that have the most money are the teams that are most successful. With only two conferences, this usually results in two teams—one in the east, one in the west—being stacked. Players can either join that team or try to form another super team to rival them. And the ones that can rival them are other historically successful teams. All in all, it's a lack of parity, and the same teams winning every single time.
Now, it is assumed, amongst fans and sportswriters, that the league will eventually expand to Seattle, regaining their former Supersonics, and Las Vegas—the latter perhaps when LeBron James retires (he's expressed interest in being an owner for a team in Las Vegas in future). If that comes to pass (and no other teams change locations), I propose a radical realignment of the divisions, and concomitant playoff changes. These changes were inspired by the changes the NHL made in recent years. They had six divisions, like the NBA has now, but then when they expanded, went backward, to four divisions, and the results have been impressive.
If you need to refresh yourselves of the current alignment, you can do so here. Now here's the realignment I propose:
These are the four divisions the NBA had before expanding to six. Most of the membership is the same, but I'll note the discrepancies. First, the most easterly western conference team, the Memphis Grizzlies, has been moved to the east (I always found it absurd that a team in a state one state away from the Atlantic Ocean was in the western conference). The Toronto Raptors and Charlotte Hornets have been swapped, which makes geographic sense, and the Atlanta Hawks have been returned to the Central.
This gives us four divisions with eight teams each. Currently, ten teams from each conference go to the playoffs—kind of. Four teams in each conference are forced into a mini-tournament called the play-in. For this play-in, the 7th place team hosts the 8th place team and the 9th place team hosts the 10th place team in a one game playoff. The winner of the first game becomes the real 7th seed. The loser of the first game plays the winner of the second. The winner of that game becomes the real 8th seed. Then the playoffs proceed as they always have. Very strange.
I propose something radically different. Same number of playoff teams—even the same number of play-in teams—but it's all done inside the division:
Each division has its own playoff. The 4th and 5th place teams play each other for the right to take on the top place team in the division in the first round of the divisional series. Then the 2nd place team hosts the 3rd place team in the division. The winners of each series face off, the winner being crowned the ultimate division champion. Then the western and eastern conference division champions face off, resulting in conference champions, who face off in the finals. The bracket looks like this:
This means that one team from every division will always make it to the semifinals. Division championships are suddenly very important, and there's incentive for good players to try their luck on teams in different divisions if they can't make it in the division they're in. It takes two very large pools (the conferences) and separates them into four smaller pools. It will also ensure you get some nice, exciting playoff matchups in the early going, because every matchup is all but guaranteed to be a rivalry, as the matchups are always interdivision matchups.
For the curious, if this had happened for last season, it would've looked like this (less the two expansion teams):
Same exact playoff teams! And the first matchups would've looked like this:
Some of the matchups are the same, but we get some good ones earlier. Mavs-Pelicans would've been a lot spicier than Thunder-Pelicans. In general, we've got a lot better shot at getting better matchups earlier on, and good matchups at each stage. This is the NBA I want to see!
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