NBA Playoff Seeding No Longer Affected By Division Winners

You may have missed it, as the bombast and bowties of the 2015 NBA Draft became the center of the league’s universe for the past several days, but it looks like the commissioner and the NBA’s competition committee are about to accomplish something very important.

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In his latest act as patron saint of NBA progressivism, commissioner Adam Silver appears ready to do away with one of the more widely derided aspects of the league’s playoff format.

In other words: good job, good effort, divisional playoff seeding. You will not be missed.

Silver has talked about the need to restructure the playoff seeding format for a while now, chiming in earlier this season with various ideas about how to iron out the current system’s various inequities, including a scenario in which the best 16 teams make the postseason, regardless of conference. While that outcome might remain a pipe dream for those tired of seeing 38-win teams quietly ushered into the playoff party through an alleyway service entrance, it does seem that tangible progress is on the way.

While Silver broached the topic earlier this month prior to Game 1 of the NBA Finals, according to USA Today’s Jeff Zillgitt, we could see the NBA enact rule changes as soon as next season that would nix any seeding advantage gained by a team simply by winning its division:

Though this alteration to the NBA’s playoff landscape is long overdue, it’s still a welcome change, as well as a tribute to the new regime’s forward thinking stance on volatile issues that have already sprung up in Silver’s still nascent tenure as commissioner. Since taking over for David Stern in February of 2014, Silver has readily embraced dialogues tackling hot button topics such as legalized gambling and the league’s domestic violence policies.

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Aside from more trivial annoyances like having to explain to non die-hard NBA followers the labyrinthine processes that lead to Team A being seeded above Team B despite having four fewer wins, the old, divisional model of playoff formatting had very real consequences as recently as this spring.

Though the story is well-tread at this point, here’s a quick refresher: When the San Antonio Spurs failed to snag a road victory against the New Orleans Pelicans in the season finale at the Smoothie King Center, Tim Duncan et al. plummeted down the standings from the second seed in the Western Conference all the way to the sixth, setting them up as the road team in a first round clash with the Los Angeles Clippers.

Although that series went on to become an all-time classic seven-game slug fest that single-handedly rescued fans from the unwatchable dreck that was the other seven first-round series, the fact that arguably two of the West’s three best teams had to square off so early was horrendously unfair.

Yes, this game is often unfair, and yes, the “Portland shouldn’t have been the four-seed!” trope has passed through so many wormholes of sarcasm and meta-sarcasm that NBA Reddit can no longer differentiate the joke from the rant, but striving for a spirit of competitive fairness and the idea that the best teams should be seeded accordingly is certainly something most fans can get behind.

Though, in all likelihood, injuries and luck will keep the undisputed two best teams from meeting in the NBA Finals every year, it’s still an ideal worth reaching for; and while the new seeding might not be the sweeping playoff reform some might clamor for, it’s clearly a step in the right direction.

Next: Are The 2014-15 Golden State Warriors An All-Time Great Team?

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