LeBron James ‘Disagrees’ With The Idea The NBA Should Get Rid Of The East-West Playoff Model

The NBA All-Star Game ditched the traditional East vs. West format this season in favor of an All-Star draft that produced a much more intriguing and competitive game.

Team LeBron’s 148-145 win over Team Steph, which featured more defense in the fourth quarter than we’ve seen in almost a decade in the All-Star Game, proved that the new format was working. There are more tweaks that can be made to improve it, most notably televising the draft, but for the first year of a new experiment it had to be considered a success.

With the All-Star Game seeing a major shift this season and the draft lottery also getting a structure change, there have been some wondering if the league would consider doing something to the postseason to provide more competitive balance. The proposal that seems to come up every few years and tends to get the most support is one that does away with the Eastern Conference and Western Conference brackets and, instead, seeds the top-16 teams in the NBA, regardless of conference.

To do so would require the league to abandon tradition, something few sports leagues are willing to do very often, and would also require some changes to the regular season structure (there would need to be a balanced schedule in order to most fairly seed the teams rather than the current conference/division structure). While there are plenty of supporters for the idea, not everyone is on board. Among those against the concept is LeBron James, he of seven straight Finals runs in the East (with three championships in that stretch).

James was asked about the idea on Wednesday at Cavs practice and said he “disagrees” with the premise, noting that conference power shifts regularly and has throughout the NBA’s history.

“I would disagree with that,” James said. “I think our league has been built the right way as far as when it comes to the postseason. There’s been dominant conferences throughout time. Obviously in the 80s it was mix-matched as you had the Lakers dominating the league then you had Boston dominating the league. In the 90s you had Chicago dominating the league. San Antonio had its run, we had our run in the East with Miami. You know, Golden State is having they run. It just changes the landscape of the history of the game if you start messing with seeding the playoffs.

“Then you start talking about if this team had played this Western Conference team, would he would’ve…It’s cool to mess around with the All-Star Game,” James continued. “We proved that you can do that, but let’s not get too crazy about the playoffs. You have Eastern Conference. You have Western Conference. You have Eastern Conference champions, you have guys that win the championship from the Eastern Conference who wins the big dance and then sometimes you have it from the West as well.”

James’ argument is sound in the sense that conference power is always shifting, but it also seems to be a really good argument for the abolishment of the East and West designations.

If a conference features more deserving teams than the other, then those teams should be rewarded with postseason berths. The top teams in the weaker conference would not be punished, but instead would have what would likely be a tougher matchup early in the playoffs. The argument for playoff seeding reform isn’t that there aren’t top teams in both conferences capable of winning championships, but that, regardless of conference, the 16-best teams should make the postseason and teams that are worse than others shouldn’t be rewarded based off geography.

The argument against the overall seeding concept is more a logistical one than a competitive one. If you strip away conference designations, it no longer makes sense for the East to play West teams only twice, play their division four times and most of the rest of their conference only three times. The best way, as I’ve figured it out in the past 10 minutes while thinking about it, is to keep divisions but abolish conferences and cut the season by 10 games.

The idea would be you play your division, plus two other divisions (rotating each year a la the NFL schedule) three times and the other three divisions twice. Therefore, you play 72 games (42 against your division and the two rotating divisions, 30 against the other three) and you eliminate back-to-backs to account for the new reality of more coast to coast travel (especially in years when the Pacific and Atlantic line up). To make up for lost revenue that losing 10 games would cost, we can steal Bill Simmons’ idea of the 16 worst teams playing for the final two playoff spots (and lottery position) and come pretty close to making it up.