It's no secret that the NBA playoff system has been a complete mess, allowing lousy Eastern Conference teams into the playoffs and quality Western Conference teams out of contention.
Take this season. The Oklahoma City Thunder were eliminated from the playoffs after falling one game short to the New Orleans Pelicans
Theoretically, if the Thunder were in the Eastern Conference, they would have been ahead of the Bucks, Celtics and Nets for 6th place in the East.
What’s worse is that last year wasn’t any better.
Like the Thunder, the Phoenix Suns theoretically would have placed 3rd or 4th in the East, having an equal record to the Bulls and Raptors, and a better record than the Wizards, Nets, Hornets and Hawks (all playoff teams).
In fact, for the past 19 seasons, the top 16 teams with the best records have only reached the …show more content…
“What’s come up is whether we should be reseeding the playoff teams, whether we should have a different process for selecting those teams that do make the playoffs,” Silver said. “The sense of the room was that certainly no one was advocating a particular change at this time. It was more of a suggestion.”
One of the proposed ideas was to pick the 16 best teams to compete in the playoffs, instead of allowing the 8 best teams in each conference to advance.
The problem is, this new format would eliminate the need to even have two conferences, stopping annual events like the NBA All-Star game.
It’s also important to note that this would cause the current division system to become null and void, which awards division winners a top 4 seed, even if their records weren’t as good as other playoff teams.
An example of how broken the division system is came into question this season when the Portland Trailblazers finished fourth in the West, despite the Grizzlies and Spurs having better records this