For a long time, the NBA’s Western Conference has felt like the major leagues, while the East has resembled, if not Little League, then at least AAA. Certain teams are able to compete for a championship from time to time, like the Boston Celtics or the LeBron James-led Cavs or Heat, but top to bottom, the West has been much stronger and deeper for years.
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Consequently, certain people around the game, fans included, have advocated for a restructuring of the playoff system. As it stands right now, each conference essentially has their own playoff, with one team emerging from each conference to meet in the NBA Finals.
Since there are so many more good teams in the West, the thinking goes, they should be rewarded with more playoff representation, with teams seeded 1-16 regardless of which conference they come from. If that results in, say, three of the top four seeds being from the West, then at least it’s representative of who the best teams really are.
Rachel Nichols and Chris Mannix discussed the question of radical playoff realignment on the most recent episode of Sports Illustrated’s Open Floor podcast. Mannix said he hears from Western Conference executives that they’d love to alter the playoff system to account for the imbalance between leagues, but Nichols said that it’s just a pipe dream.
“It is never going to happen,” she said. “Everybody out there having this discussion year after year, it is never going to happen. And the reason it is never gonna happen, is it would need to be ratified by a certain amount of owners that is more than half, I believe it’s two-thirds or something like that.”
“You know what, if you’re an owner of a team in the East, you don’t want?” Nichols asked. “All of your teams eliminated in the first round!”
“There is no way Eastern Conference teams are going to agree to cut their playoff revenue, to cut the playoff energy and excitement they can give their fans,” she asserted.
Nichols empathized with Western teams that face a tougher road under the current system, but she said, “It’s just a non-starter, because of the money that teams make from being in the playoffs.”
Interestingly enough, the WNBA uses a system that ignores conference affiliation when determining playoff seeding. Instead of having four teams from the East and four from the West make the playoffs, the top eight teams are seeded according to record.
This year, for instance, three of the top four seeds and five of the eight playoff teams came from the West. Three of the four first-round matchups fell along conference lines, but the Phoenix Mercury faced the New York Liberty in the other series. That would be like the Suns and Knicks facing each other in the first round.
Mannix said that Western Conference teams are fed up with the status quo because this isn’t a new thing. “I think where the frustration’s starting to bubble over is that this is kind of the apex of the moment, but the moment’s lasted a long time,” he said. “It has been a generation where the Western Conference has been light years ahead of the East.”
This upcoming season may feature the biggest gap yet between the two conferences, because some of the top Eastern teams from a year ago have been gutted due to injuries. The Pacers will be without Tyrese Haliburton all year. The Celtics may be in the same boat with Jayson Tatum. Both of those players tore their Achilles tendons in the playoffs. As did Dame Lillard of the Bucks, and now he’s gone back to Portland.
The Knicks and the Cavs are the only two Eastern teams seen as real title threats right now, while in the West the list of strong teams is unbelievably deep. The Thunder, Nuggets, Rockets, Wolves, Lakers, Mavericks, Warriors, Clippers and Spurs are all expected to be serious contenders, but at least one of those won’t end up being a top-eight seed. If any of them were in the East, they’d likely be in the top four.
At the end of the day, money talks, and the NBA is a big business. Nichols is right that Eastern Conference teams won’t voluntarily kneecap themselves, so unless the league office incentivizes them in some way, the system that we have is the system that we’ll keep.
