Of all the criticisms you can at levy at the NBA, a fear of change isn’t among them. To varying degrees of success and/or disaster, the league has tried all sorts of new initiatives to improve the quality of its product. Most recently, commissioner Adam Silver announced a long-overdue format change to the All-Star game in an effort to restore the annual festivity to watchability.
This season alone, the league has also made necessary tweaks to the schedule: an abbreviated preseason, the elimination of four games in five nights, and a further reduction in back-to-backs, all in an effort to preserve the players’ health and the quality of competition. League brass have further worked to ensure that the star players won’t sit out high-profile, nationally-televised games, which are a major revenue stream.
There are still matters to address, however. For instance, many would like to see a reduction in the number of regular-season games. Perhaps more pressing is the fact that the imbalance between the two conferences has never been greater following a wild off-season in which several superstars migrated West. It’s a reality that’s resurrected the ongoing debate about whether the playoffs should be seeded 1-16 regardless of conference considerations.
Silver said earlier this week that it’s a possibility that remains on the table. Via Nick Friedell of ESPN.com:
“Reformatting the playoffs is something we’ll continue to look at,” Silver said before a preseason game between the Golden State Warriors and the Minnesota Timberwolves at Mercedes Benz Arena. “I think though it would require revisiting the regular-season schedule as well. As I’ve said before, we don’t play a balanced schedule now, as I’m sure you know. And for those that don’t, that means that teams in the East play each other more than they play teams in the West. And our feeling is, if we were going to seed 1-16, we would need to play a balanced schedule to make it fair for everyone if we were going to seed 1-16 in the playoffs. It may be that as we continue to experiment with the number of days over which we can schedule 82 games that it will create more of an opportunity for a balanced schedule.”
As Silver points out, fans should keep in mind that there are Byzantine complexities in alterations of this magnitude, not to mention all sorts of potentially unforeseen ripple effects.
Regardless, it seems clear that everyone involved would benefit from more competitive balance in the post-season. The question is how long it will take before it becomes a reality.
(ESPN.com)
