Let's Not Fix the Not-Broken NBA Playoffs

Last week, beneath the resplendent din of the Spurs and Clippers' stone cold classic of a series, there was still some aggrieved nattering in the NBA noise-sphere. It's astounding that anyone, even on the internet, could find an aspect of that balletic seven-game rumble to complain about, but this is the sports and also the internet; irrelevant quibbles come with the territory. That argument goes like this: what was wrong with Spurs-Clips is that it happened too soon.

You see, it just wasn't fair that these two magnificent teams had to face off in the first round, when they should have met in the second, or the Western Conference Finals. This was the fault of the NBA's outdated seeding system, which sort of nonsensically rewards teams for winning their divisions even though no one cares about divisions. The Spurs, if you go purely by record, should have been a five-seed against the Grizzlies; if you want to get radical, they would have been a six-seed against the Raptors in a 16-team tournament that's conference agnostic. In other words, the system failed: it saddled the Clips and Spurs with more difficult opening round opponents than they deserved. If the NBA doled out playoff seeds in a more logical fashion, both teams would probably still be in the postseason right now.

That's all valid enough, although there's an equally valid counterpoint: the system failed perfectly, in this case. It gave us what might be the best series of the entire playoffs, and to focus on the brokenness of the seeding method rather than the sublimity of Chris Paul, Tim Duncan, Blake Griffin, and Kawhi Leonard squaring off is…well, maybe correct on some abstract merit, but also totally asinine concerned-citizen bullshit. It's grousing about the finer points of sound engineering in the middle of a concert. It's lame and fun-killing and serves only to communicate to other people that they're consuming a flawed product, when, in this case, that's not even true. Clips-Spurs was as good as basketball gets. Worrying about how (and when) it came to be is a spectacular bit of point-missing.

Besides, injuries are what have sucked the air out of these playoffs, not structural errors in an antique system. Despite all the separated shoulders and shattered wrists and—cue squealing-ass Black Francis—broken faces, we've got a pretty good thing going in the second round. All the series are knotted at 1-1; there's still everything to play for. Every team except the Warriors resembles a bedraggled and trenchfooted World War I infantry battalion these days, but the games themselves have generally been competitive and interesting.

There are storylines and clashing styles here. LeBron is locked in what feels like Round 97 of his career-spanning spat with the Bulls. The Junkyard Grizz might fall by TKO to the Warriors, but they're determined to gash and bruise Steph Curry and company in the process. The Clippers and Rockets series is currently serving as a blank canvas for Blake Griffin, Devastating Point Forward, but Kevin McHale's squad looks friskier than they have any right to be considering they're leaning on Jason Terry and Pablo Prigioni for backcourt minutes. Even Hawks-Wizards has been entertaining—if also sort of a mess—though that duel may draw to an ugly close if John Wall can't gut out a wrist-and-hand injury that sure sounds un-gut-out-able.

What needs fixing about these playoffs is the same thing that needs fixing about human bodies: they're human and fragile and break at inopportune times. Adam Silver reforming the postseason format wouldn't save this thing. Someone at Bristol-Myers Squibb would need to have taken a break from fleecing sub-Saharan Africa and developed a wonderdrug that creates super-strong bones and ligaments.

Anyway, the postseason doesn't need saving. This setup has produced some fine matchups and will produce a few more. In fact, it might have accidentally been the best possible seeding arrangement, considering a strictly by-the-records one would have looked like this. You'll notice Spurs-Clippers would have been impossible outside of a Finals tilt.

The system could be improved in the sense that it could be made more egalitarian, but the current one is giving us basketball worth celebrating. Given a choice between enjoying what's before us and quibbling about what could be, everyone that cares about basketball knows the right choice, or at least the least haughty and aggravating one. Fairness and structure are secondary concerns. This time of year, appreciation is everything. So let's do that.