Who Wants The NBA Playoffs To Be More Reasonable?

The NBA playoffs do not cry out for improvement, but they're imperfect. As has been the case for years, the Western Conference is overflowing with talented teams, and the Eastern Conference features a pathetic late-season scrum for lower seeds among squads that are guaranteed to get shellacked in the opening round. This is not some great tragedy. Some good teams will miss the playoffs in the West, and receive a spot in the draft lottery as consolation. A few series in the East will be skip-worthy, which is slightly serendipitous for those of us whose dedication to early playoff basketball manifests to the detriment of our personal hygiene and interpersonal relationships each April. Maybe we'll go outside for a couple hours while Cavs-Pacers is on. Not so bad.

It's strange that a systemic flaw which is, all things considered, pretty minor has been met with the sort of Change It Now! fervor usually reserved for political protests, but it has. Or, anyway, Basketball Internet is angry about it. And sure, it would probably be optimal if the NBA restructured its playoffs so lousy Eastern Conference teams were swapped out for Western Conference ones with even outside chances at making a deep run. As things currently stand, the half-in-the-tank Celtics are going to the postseason and Anthony Davis isn't. For anyone outside of New England, that's less than ideal.

A simple solution has been posed many times over: ditch conference associations and just throw the 16 teams with the best records into a bracket ordered by win percentage. This creates a fairer, presumably more entertaining playoff with minimal fuss. Fewer first-round sweeps marked by 18-point blowouts, fewer good teams excluded from the postseason.

The sharpest downside, though, is that there would also be fewer meetings between conference rivals. The way the system is set up now, there is a bottleneck-producing effect where, if two teams are competitive for a few seasons in a row, there's a decent chance that they will cross playoff paths enough times to become enemies. The Grizzlies faced off against the Clippers in the 2012 and 2013; the Heat and Bulls met up in 2011 and 2013; the Thunder and Spurs have each won the conference finals against the other in recent years. If the playoffs are seeded 1-through-16 without any organizing method other than record, this sort of thing will happen less frequently. Two teams might play an excellent series against each other with no strong promise of a Part II in the near future.

The reason this matters is that there is nothing quite like a seven-game series between familiar foes. This an easy phenomenon to understand—you can see it in the way Zach Randolph looks at Blake Griffin whenever the two share a court—and difficult to explain. If watching your team play a game is giving yourself over to an event that's going to make you emote one way or another, and a playoff series is a smattering of high-stakes—and therefore more emotionally fraught—games against a single opponent, then you are likely to develop a connection with that opponent, because they are the persistent antagonist in this story you're investing in. And when the rematch occurs a year or two later, you and everyone involved will have a bank of memories to draw upon. The story grows richer.

The difference between the current playoff system and the proposed one is the difference between serialized and episodic TV shows. Our relationship with a villain on a single episode of "Law & Order" is not altogether like the one we have with one who schemes his way through an entire season of "Deadwood." We know the latter more intimately than the former, and as a result, our fear or hatred of them runs deeper. In the same way, the experience of watching LeBron James thundering down the lane at the United Center is something that sits in a Bulls fan's bones. Dirk Nowitzki coming to Chicago for a series is an intriguing prospect, but there's little history there. It's a novelty, not the latest confrontation in a long-running blood feud.

This intimate hostility between teams would be a casualty of more egalitarian playoffs. The competition would become stronger in a lot of objective ways, and maybe more fair in a general one, but the theater of it—the emotional stakes, the overage and intensity— would suffer. It may be that this doesn't particularly matter, and it's certainly not like teams won't go full-throttle in the postseason just because they haven't spent years learning to hate each other. It may be rivalries are worth sacrificing in service of a higher overall level of play.

But it also may be that more reason and fairness and proportionality in the NBA playoffs would reveal how little all those laudable things have to do with what makes the playoffs great. If Adam Silver and the owners are indeed beginning to consider the end of a conference-based postseason, then we are on the verge of losing part of what makes the whole exercise so much fun. Better playoffs are not necessarily better than the playoffs we have now.