When the Cleveland Cavaliers face the Golden State Warriors in a Christmas Day showdown, the headline label for the game is that it’s a likely NBA Finals preview.
This is not an inaccurate analysis of Cavs-Dubs.
The Warriors are the favorite in the West, and no team has yet shown that it is likely to stand in Cleveland’s way in the East. It is anything but foolish to forthrightly declare that Cleveland-Golden State is the most likely Finals matchup in June.
The problem here is not found in any projections; it’s found in the reality that the projections are sound.
This forms the basis for our story, as the NBA arrives at Christmas and many casual sports fans begin to (slowly) welcome basketball into their lives, a dynamic which becomes more pronounced after the Super Bowl.
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The longstanding argument behind a reseeding of the NBA playoffs was that the strength of the Western Conference, coexisting with the weakness of the East, made it unfair for the teams in the West to have to play each other in the early rounds of the playoffs. This was never more apparent than when the Los Angeles Clippers and San Antonio Spurs played an epic seven-game first-round series last season. One team left the playoffs in round one, all while the Washington Wizards and Atlanta Hawks both gained safe passage into round two. Neither team likely would have beaten the Spurs in the first round. Conference segregation played a considerable role in shaping the winners and losers of the playoffs.
This season, however, the balance of power between the conferences is different. The West’s noted depth has evaporated. Only the top three teams in the conference — Golden State, San Antonio, and the Oklahoma City Thunder — have lived up to the billing. The rest of the conference is languishing near the .500 mark. The Dallas Mavericks are wildly overachieving — full credit to them — but the conference as a whole is a shell of its former self.
Last season, 45 wins were needed to get the No. 8 playoff seed in the West. A year earlier, 49 wins were required to do the same. The West wasn’t just a cutthroat conference at the top; the ninth-place team — left outside the playoff candy store — was a legitimately good team, one which almost certainly would have beaten the 7 or 8 seed in the East in a best-of-seven series.
In light of this climate, the drumbeat intensified for reform. Plenty of NBA thinkers and bloggers clamored for a reseeded playoff system integrating the East and the West in a 1-through-16 format. The 45-win teams in the West would get in. The 40-win teams in the East would not sneak in and snatch a playoff berth. The best team in the league would face that 40-win team from the East in round one. The Clippers would not play the Spurs in round one; they’d play the Milwaukee Bucks.
It all looked good on paper, but as the 2015-16 season has developed, that model has seemingly been shattered.
The East has more winning teams than the West as Christmas Day arrives. It’s not so much that the East has become a transformed place; there are no great teams in that half of the NBA other than Cleveland. However, the East has significantly reduced its number of bad teams. Now, they’re average or moderately decent clubs.
It’s the West which has accumulated a number of declining teams, some due to injuries (New Orleans, expected to be a playoff team before the season began), and some due to James Harden not being a superstar-level leader (Houston, last season’s Western Conference runner-up).
Right now, the West’s No. 7 seed (Houston) lacks a winning record, sitting at .500. The No. 8 seed (Utah) is 12-15. The longstanding thought process attached to a reseeded NBA playoff system appears to lie in tatters.
On some levels, this is true.
However, as Cleveland and Golden State prepare for their (likely, not guaranteed) Finals preview on Christmas in Oakland, one thing has to be said about a reformed and revised NBA playoff structure: It’s still needed… just for a reason not mentioned above.
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Cleveland is unquestionably the best team in the East, which is why it’s easy to call Cavs-Warriors a probable Finals preview. However, consider an NBA in which a 1-through-16 seeding system — with integrated conferences — existed.
San Antonio would be the No. 2 seed in the playoffs, and Oklahoma City would be third. Cleveland would be fourth.
Stop for a moment and realize that Golden State-San Antonio should not have to bow out of the NBA playoffs in the semifinal round… at least if they continue to perform at this rate and leave the rest of the NBA in the dust this season. Warriors-Spurs should be the Finals preview we’re talking about right now, but conference segregation and an inflexible playoff bracket will deny us that pleasure.
Imagine: The 75-win Warriors and 69-win Spurs would not play in the NBA Finals. The league would not showcase the two best teams in its championship series under such a hypothetical. That would be a shame. Yes, LeBron James would be in the Finals again, giving the league a stage and box-office buzz. However, a LeBron-Golden State or LeBron-San Antonio meeting would be better saved for the semifinals, as a lead-in to the Finals.
It would be more merit-based… and unlike bowl games (which are rooted in tourism and television), professional sports are supposed to be about merit, not gimmicks.
If you think that’s the end of the argument, you need to realize that it’s not. There’s one more point to consider in this larger discussion, one which should be of equal if not greater value to the NBA: making the regular season infinitely more interesting from game one through game 82.
If the NBA went to the 1-through-16 seeding system with integrated conferences, Cleveland would instantly find a need to play this regular season with a lot more urgency. This is not a knock on the Cavaliers — they should indeed preserve LeBron as much as possible and coast to a modest 55-win record. No one else in the East is likely to match that win total. Cleveland can get the top seed in the East and yet have LeBron very fresh for the playoffs. The organization is doing exactly what it should, full stop.
Let’s simply acknowledge that if the 1-16 system existed, Cleveland would be locked in an urgent battle to get the No. 2 seed — partly to get home-court advantage in the semifinals, partly in a chase to potentially draw Oklahoma City and push the Spurs into a 1-versus-4 battle with Golden State.
Sure, under current circumstances, that scenario is remote, but if the 1-16 format had been a reality at the start of the season, it would have been a priority from day one (in late October) for Cleveland and Oklahoma City to be the second- and third-best teams in the NBA, in order to avoid the transcendent Warriors in the semifinals. The value of each and every game would have been magnified. It’s very much in the NBA’s best interests to achieve that goal.
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If you thought this season has already refuted the notion that the NBA playoffs’ fundamental structure should be adjusted, think again.
Cavs-Warriors would make a great NBA Finals, to be sure. However, is it the NBA Finals preview we ought to look forward to? Spurs-Warriors as a semifinal would feel like a letdown of sorts, much as Spurs-Clippers in round one of the 2015 playoffs felt conspicuously premature.
The NBA playoffs still need to be reformed… just not for reasons most basketball pundits were dicussing throughout the offseason.
Stuff that thought in your stocking when you watch a Christmas Day duel between LeBron and Steph in Oracle Arena.
