The holy grail of playoff formats for many fans is eliminating conferences from the NBA and seeding the postseason 1-16. Some fans have talked about the idea in hushed tones, unwilling to believe something so fun – and practical – could even be possible.
But the NBA and commissioner Adam Silver has actually given it thought, and it’s something that came up again during his press conference with the media on All-Star Saturday.
Silver said the league has given “serious attention” to the idea of dropping conferences in the postseason, but that obstacles remain to making the switch just yet.
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What’s funny is that Silver was initially asked a question about changing the way All-Stars are voted into the game. But Silver thought the question would be about an arguably more intriguing prospect: moving to conference-less seeding for the postseason.
He answers the first question, then gets into the one that seems more interesting. And Silver suggests two viable options: either taking the top 16 teams for the postseason, or the top eight from each conference and then seeding them 1-16.
“That is something that has gotten serious attention, not just recently but over the last few years, in the league office. I think as I’ve said in the past the obstacle is travel. And it’s not tradition, in my mind, at least. It’s that as we added another week to the regular season, we tried to reduce the number of back to backs that we are concerned about teams crossing the country in the first round, for example. We are just concerned about the overall travel that we would have in the top 16 teams.”
So it seems that travel truly is the issue here, and the league isn’t attached to the Eastern and Western Conferences any more than it was with the All-Star Game. It’s good that the league is giving this a serious look, and Silver said adding time in the schedule could really make it a reality.
“We’re going to continue to look at that and it’s still my hope that we can figure out ways of adding more days to the season to spread it out a little bit more to deal with the travel,” Silver said.
It would not likely lead to massive changes in the way teams are constructed just yet, but it would be a huge change that would likely impact scheduling. For many fans who want to see it happen, the dream is indeed alive.
