Will LeBron’s move shift NBA playoff format?
Marc Stein
It was one of the reflex reactions to the bombshell bulletin that LeBron James is becoming a Los Angeles Laker:
Change your playoff format, NBA!
If LeBron no longer lives there to grace the NBA Finals every June, so the critics say, why even bother with an Eastern Conference?
This isn’t a new complaint, of course, but the cries have never been louder than in the wake of James joining the conference already known for housing the bulk of the league’s best players.
Yet there’s also no denying that there are some real obstacles to ditching the practice of seeding playoff teams 1 through 8 by conference and instituting a 1-16 seeding protocol based purely on overall record.
Obstacle No. 1: League officials, based on a study of historical data, estimate that the change would increase the cumulative travel for the 16 playoff teams by more than 40 percent every postseason.
Obstacle No. 2: Almost every schedule-related change implemented by the league office in recent years has been motivated by a push to prioritize player health and to chip away at the various factors — too much travel, too many back-to-back games, too many unholy stretches of four games in five nights — that make the current 82-game regular-season schedule the dreaded grind that it is. Adding an estimated 40,000 miles of cumulative playoff travel to the roughly 90,000 miles last season’s 16 playoff clubs logged would work against all those measures.
And perhaps the biggest obstacle: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver cannot unilaterally change the league’s playoff format or seeding procedures, even if he wanted to. League rules dictate that a two-thirds vote of NBA owners would be required to approve such an overhaul.
That’s 20 owners out of 30. So even if 15 out of 15 owners in the West were prepared to vote in favor of conference-free playoff seeding, where would Silver find five in the East willing to co-sign?
Success is already elusive enough for the 15 franchises in what has been pilloried as the Leastern Conference going back almost as far as Michael Jordan’s second retirement from the Chicago Bulls in 1998. Owners in the Least, er, East are willingly going to make things even tougher? Not likely.
Silver, mind you, hasn’t signaled that he’s seriously in favor of changing the format anyway. Not without a much more balanced regular-season schedule.
My long-held dream of a completely balanced schedule, using the Premier League soccer model in which every NBA team would play the other 29 teams twice each — home and home — is a complete no-hoper. That would take the regular-season schedule down to 58 games from 82. Zero owners out of 30 would forfeit 12 home dates per season and their corresponding revenue. It will never, ever happen.
Nor will a switch to playing three games every season against every other team. That would stretch the 82-game season to 87 — after the NBA just moved up the start of the regular season by a week, shortened its preseason schedule considerably and extended the All-Star break to reduce schedule congestion.
If a smoother formula emerges for a more balanced schedule that positions each team to play the same number of regular-season games against East and West teams, expect Silver to consider it. He has made it clear in recent news conferences that he is not wedded to the 82-game schedule, in place since the 1967-68 season. He hasn’t been a “that’s the way we’ve always done it” kind of commissioner.
“The obstacle is travel — and it’s not tradition in my mind at least,” Silver said in February.
Player health and wellness, remember, have been top priorities during Silver’s four years in charge. Any change to the playoff system would have to work in concert with the various initiatives he has already enacted in hopes of giving players more windows for sleep, more protections against fatigue and more insulation from the time-zone switches that wreak havoc on body clocks.
Something else to consider: The East, at least in the regular season, has been far more competitive against the West lately than anyone seems willing to acknowledge. During the past three seasons, Eastern Conference teams were 24, 42 and 14 games under .500 in head-to-head games against the West.
The discrepancy was 118 games under .500 for the East as recently as the 2013-14 season. Going back further, that same gap was 98 (2000-01), 80 (2002-03) and 112 (200304) in three of the first four seasons in the 2000s.
The league office, as a result, presumably doesn’t feel the same urgency to overhaul the playoff format that league critics do.
But this debate will surely continue, because there’s no dodging the nearly two-decades-old perception that the West is deeper and tougher. It was a familiar refrain throughout the playoffs: James never would have sniffed the finals this past season if his hugely flawed Cleveland Cavaliers had to get through a conference in which Minnesota needed 47 wins just to snag the No. 8 spot. (The Washington Wizards claimed the East’s final playoff slot with 43 wins.)