Conference realignment?
Columnist Berry Tramel wants the NBA to retool conferences now that talent is so concentrated in the West.
No sooner had LeBron James headed West than did the rumblings spread. Time to change the NBA playoff format. Time to seed the teams 1-16, rather than 1-8 in each conference.
You can understand the frustration. The power and depth lives in the West. The Eastern Conference is the junior varsity. The East has been won eight straight years by LeBron’s team, either Cleveland or Miami.
The West keeps getting better. Paul George and Jimmy Butler went from East to West last summer; now LeBron to the Lakers. The westward migration of basketball talent has broadened the already-expansive gulf between the conferences.
But playoff seeding without regard to conference is no solution. That doesn’t help the West teams. That hurts the West teams.
Unbalanced scheduling remains the NBA norm. Teams play four games each against fellow division rivals, three or four games against the other teams in its conference, then two games against teams in the opposite conference. It stands to reason the East teams will play weaker schedules.
Even if you mandated that each conference qualifies eight teams for the playoffs, the East could have unearned seeding advantages. In fact, that would have happened last season.
Four of the NBA’s top seven records last season came from the East — Toronto 59-23, Boston 55-27, Philadelphia 52-30 and Cleveland 50-32. Plus, Indiana at 48-34 tied with the Thunder, Jazz and Pelicans for eighth-best. Did the 50-win Cavaliers deserve a better seed than the 49-win Blazers? Of course not.
Of the NBA’s 12 toughest strength of schedules, only one came from the East. Chicago’s, in a three-way tie for 10th.
If you want NBA playoff reform, here’s a better idea. Conference realignment.
The current East/West split serves the Eastern Conference well, keeping travel at a minimum. Of the NBA’s 30 teams, 15 are east of the Mississippi, 12 are west of the Mississippi and three (New Orleans, Memphis, Minnesota) are in cities right on the mighty river. And the Mississippi is more east than west across the continental U.S.
So why not try something new. How about a north/ south split?
Keep the Central and Atlantic divisions together in the North. Move the Southeast Division to the South. Keep the Southwest Division intact, in the South.
That leaves each conference needing five teams.
Portland, Minnesota, Golden State and Sacramento would be in the North.
Phoenix, both Los Angeles teams and Oklahoma City would be in the South.
Then you’d have to split up Utah and Denver. Put the Jazz
in the North and the Nuggets in the South.
If you don’t want to split up natural rivals Denver and Utah, you could keep both in the South, while moving the Washington Wizards to the North, where its historic rivals would reside.
The effect would be a small shift in the balance of power.
The Warriors are great now but spent decades wallowing in mediocrity. Utah and Portland haven’t been great in what seems like forever but are historically competitive franchises that mostly avoid serious dips.
Those franchises leaving the rest of the West, replaced by the likes of Charlotte, Orlando and Atlanta, would balance out the conferences.
Going north/south would require more travel, since the nation is wider than it is long, but neither the NFL nor Major League Baseball aligns leagues or conferences by division.
Both the NFC and AFC have teams on each coast. Same with the National League and American League.
The NBA has more difficult travel than either of those entities — basketball has four- and five-game road trips, all in different cities — but already has goofy traveling. The NBA has a division stretching from Portland to Minneapolis to Oklahoma City and back to Portland, with Denver and Salt Lake City in the middle. That’s a geographic triangle that would intimidate Lewis & Clark.
The West teams moving North would lose the Lakers coming to town twice the majority of seasons, but the Celtics would replace them. That’s not a bad trade.
And conference realignment shouldn’t offend historic sensibilities.
Until 1980, the Houston Rockets and San Antonio Spurs were in the Eastern Conference. In 1979, the Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls were in the West. Let’s not pretend this is like the Yankees moving to the National League.
Realignment should come with erasing all divisions.
There is no playoff seeding based on divisions. Only scheduling. So get rid of it. Give each team within a conference roughly equitable schedules.
That’s the way to produce a fair playoff field. If the West is too dominant, the answer is clear. Break up the West.
Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at (405) 760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM98.1. You can also view his personality page at newsok. com/berrytramel.