The NBA commission has been trying to come up with a way to eliminate tanking and make the league more competitive. They have no current fix all solution to achieve this. One idea was to eliminate conferences and move to a playoff structure that has the best 16 teams regardless of conference compete for a championship. The plan has yet to go into effect because they are worried about excessive travel and this still will not fix how the draft would play out.
Below is just my opinion on why things are the way they are. I would have posted this in a global SB nation area rather than Pounding The Rock, but I could not find it.
The NBA lottery is a game of chance. Your chance at losing. You purchase your lottery tickets by either losing over and over or trading your best assets for those tickets.
For a player, think of them like your normal everyday worker. The boss says you need to slack off and do your job poorly to get better work amenities and co-workers. For a boss or organization, you worked hard to get your company what it has now. You just bought some super computer a few years ago that makes the day to day work go by fluidly. But soon, that super computer is not brand spanking new, your workers are aging and their productivity is not up to where it was when you first hired them. So there comes a point where you have to sell that super computer to be able to afford more workers more fit for the job. And the cycle repeats.
What if it worked just like normal competitive companies. You train and encourage workers to always do their best. The company makes more money to hire those new workers and the industry keeps growing and becoming more competitive. What do most people who work at normal jobs want from a job? Security, money based on personal progress, holidays and benefits, and a good retirement plan.
The playoffs as designed are to ease travel between teams from game to game and scheduling conflicts. It is not designed this way because it always puts the best against the best at the forefront.
- How many playoffs have there been where some teams in the West are inherently better than a team in East or vice versa, and because of their conference, the better team might miss the playoffs? You can probably think of a few.
- Does a team in a certain conference have an advantage over a team in a different conference because some conferences are stronger than others? You can probably think of a few.
- Can a team have a better record based off playing weaker teams more often? Absolutely.
- We have to find a way for teams to play an even number of times against each other so no team has an easier schedule.
- We have to remove conferences out of the season so teams do not have a conference advantage.
- We have to have the regular season have a bigger effect on what happens at the end of the season.
- We have to schedule the games so no team is at a disadvantage playing a bad string of back to back games while another team does not.
- A regular season will now consist of a 60 game season.
- Each team will play each team twice.
- If your last game was home, the next one will be away.
- There is no conferences in the regular season
- There must be at least one day off between the present game and the next game.
- The top 1-16 teams will become Conference A and they will compete for the championship.
- The middle 17-23 teams will become Conference B and they will compete for the 8th-14th Draft pick.
- The bottom 24-30 teams will become Conference C and they will compete for the 1st-7th draft pick.
Shorter regular season where you only play each team twice.
Each team plays each team twice, and since there is no conference, there is no location advantage.
That is true, but since the regular season was shorter and you didn't play different teams more than twice.That offsets the rate of travel over the entire course of an NBA season.
This is one area I think there is no scheduling or home/away work around for. There might have to be a concession. The NBA would need to build a big giant mega arena for all the playoffs to take place or three large arenas to house the three different conferences.