NBA: Division Winners Will Still Be In Playoffs

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver made some waves Wednesday when he said the league is leaning toward tweaking its playoff format in such a way that winning a division would not guarantee a playoff spot.

“Where we are leaning right now is that we would not guarantee a spot for a division winner in part because it’s so unlikely to happen and No. 2, if it does happen, it would be potentially confusing to fans,” Silver told the media Wednesday, via ESPN.com. “No. 3, you would be displacing a team that did have a top-eight record.”

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While the non-guarantee part of Silver’s language got a lot of attention Wednesday, there’s a simple fact to remember.

Since the NBA went to the eight-team-per-conference playoff format in 1984, no division winner would have ever missed the postseason party.

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Silver acknowledged that, as well.

“First of all, it’s never happened before that a division winner did not finish within the top eight and our basketball analytics folks calculate that there’s less than a 5 percent chance that it would happen,” Silver said.

The talk about tweaking the playoff format comes a couple of months after the Portland Trail Blazers were awarded the fourth seed in the Western Conference Playoffs after winning the Northwest Division with a record of 51-31.

The Memphis Grizzlies and San Antonio Spurs, each with 55-27 records, were seeded fifth and sixth.

Portland’s record was sixth-best in the West, but instead of the Blazers playing the third-seeded Los Angeles Clippers in the first round, they met the Grizzlies, who were seeded fifth.

The Spurs, given the No. 6 seed, played the Clippers, losing in seven games.

The current playoff format guarantees a division winner no worse than a fourth seed. The Toronto Raptors, 49-33 and champions of the Atlantic Division, were seeded No. 4 in the Eastern      Conference last season, behind the 50-win Chicago Bulls, who were seeded third despite a second-place finish in the Central Division.

The current format was adopted after the 2005-06 season. For the two seasons prior to that, division winners were guaranteed a top-three seed.

That change happened after two division winners—one in each conference—wound up with No. 3 seeds despite worse records than the teams seeded fourth.

In 2006, the New Jersey Nets were the third seed in the East at 49-33, ahead of the 50-32 Cavaliers. In the West, the Denver Nuggets (44-38) were the No. 3 seed, ahead of a 60-win Dallas Mavericks squad.

Under a non-guaranteed system, those 2005-06 Nuggets would have been the eighth seed in the West, losing a tiebreaker to the Sacramento Kings based on a 1-3 head-to-head record that season.

Since 2004-05, when the NBA went to three divisions per conference after the Charlotte Bobcats were admitted to the league, here are the worst division champions by conference each season, their actual seed and where they would have been seeded without the division champion guarantee:

Prior to 2005, when there were just two divisions in each conference, the division winners were guaranteed a top-two seed. Again, here are the worst division champions by conference each season, their actual seed and where they would have been seeded without the division champion guarantee:

From 1977-83, the NBA seeded the top six teams per conference in the playoffs, with the two division winners guaranteed the top two seeds.

There was only one instance—the Milwaukee Bucks in 1979-80—where a second-seeded division champion would have been seeded lower than third (the Bucks were fourth-best in the Western Conference that season).

In the 1975 and 1976 NBA Playoffs, the top two teams in each division qualified with the playoffs, along with the best third-place team.

The lone anomaly in that format came in 1975-76, when the 36-46 Detroit Pistons made the playoffs by finishing second in the Midwest, ahead of the fourth-place Los Angeles Lakers from the Pacific, who finished 40-42.

And even going back to the beginning of conference play in 1970-71, there has never been an instance where a division winner would have finished outside of the top four in their respective conference. The closest was in 1970-71, when the Baltimore Bullets were 42-40 and had the fourth-best record in the East.

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That season, a 36-win Atlanta Hawks team made the playoffs for finishing second in the Central, ahead of the 44-win Boston Celtics, who were third in the Atlantic.

So while the words “no guaranteed playoff spot for a division winner” might sound frightening on the surface, the reality is that in 45 years of conference-formatted play in the NBA, no division champion ever would have been excluded from the party.

Of course, it could be argued that the debate is somewhat moot to begin with. Since the NBA expanded to 16 playoff teams in 1984, the lowest seeded team to reach the Finals in a full season was the sixth-seeded Houston Rockets in 1995.

The New York Knicks went to the NBA Finals as an eighth seed in 1999,but that was in a lockout-shortened season of just 50 regular-season games.

They just might have had a seed commensurate with their record.

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