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When the NBA begins its postseason in less than eight weeks, a team with 48 victories could be sitting at home while a team with 36 victories gets rewarded with a trip to the playoffs, whatever prestige or résumé-padding comes with that and, not insignificant, the profits of at least two extra home games.
That's like taking the D students to the baseball game or the theme park at the end of the year, but leaving the B students behind.
Then, when the NBA holds its draft lottery in May, a team with 35 victories could have its nose pressed against the LCD flat panel, on the outside looking in, while a team with 48 victories sends a representative clutching shamrocks and rabbits' feet in his crossed-fingers fists, maximizing its chances of scoring one of the three best prospects in the world.
That's like doling out milk money to the kids wearing Abercrombie and stiffing those decked out in Goodwill.
Some people, even in the league headquarters at Olympic Tower in New York, will frame those above injustices as some sort of yin and yang, a half-empty predicament being rectified by a half-full situation soon after. Or vice versa. Let's cut through that masquerade to call it what it is: Two wrongs allegedly making a right.
And failing miserably.
There is no thrill in watching an overmatched No. 8 seed getting thumped by a No. 1 seed that finished 28 games ahead in the conference standings, just as there is no joy in seeing a team that finished 14 games above .500 vying with the NBA's true doormats for the quick fixes of Michael Beasley or Derrick Rose. Meanwhile, that No. 8 seed that was so fortunate to get swept out of the playoffs barely a week after its regular-season finale has to wait and wait and wait on draft night for the right to select the 15th-most-promising new player.
That's as dreary as a 4-0 Finals, which left a castor-oil taste in our mouths that lingers from last June.
All of this could come to a head again this spring, thanks to a gap between the Western and Eastern conferences that is as big as, or bigger than, any in recent memory. The potential playoff and lottery teams cited above weren't merely hypothetical; they were projections, based on Philadephia's spot among the playoff qualifiers despite its 25-32 record as of Tuesday morning and Denver's current status as a West also-ran with a 33-23 mark.
If those teams continue winning (and losing) at their current clips -- and the Rockets don't splash down now that Yao Ming has been shut down -- the 76ers would make the East field at 36-46, while the Nuggets would be out of the West bracket at 48-34. And that 12-game difference between them -- a topsy-turvy disparity between one conference's worst playoff team and the other's best lottery club -- would be by far the worst in the past decade. Double, in fact, any previous "unfairness'' factor since 1998.
It isn't unusual that what gets a team into the postseason in one conference would send you home immediately in the other; that situation has existed after eight of the past 10 seasons, including last spring when Orlando's 40-42 earned it the privilege of being swept by Detroit while the Clippers' identical 40-42 earned it a lottery shot.
The Clippers being the Clippers, they didn't improve their position at all, yet still landed Al Thornton at No. 14. Orlando's pick, held coincidentally by Detroit, was next at No. 15 and became Rodney Stuckey.
In 2006, Utah missed the playoffs at 41-41, but Milwaukee made it at 40-42. Same pattern in 2005: Minnesota missed at 44-38, New Jersey got in at 42-40. And in 2004, the gap went from Letterman-sized to jack-o'-lantern large, with the Jazz on the outs at 42-40 while the Celtics got in with a 36-46 record.
That six-game difference will look modest if Denver, Portland and even Sacramento keep winning just often enough to finish ninth or worse in the West this season. All three could wind up with better records, by far, than the least of the East playoff teams.
Funny thing is, the West's dominance of the East isn't anything special this season. Through Monday, its 198-146 record represented a .576 winning percentage, right in line with its .579 percentage since the start of the 1999-2000 season. Teams from the West have won about 600 more interconference clashes over these past nine seasons, along with seven of the last nine (1999-2007) NBA championships.
Commissioner David Stern generally has swatted away concerns about the competitive imbalance by saying it is cyclical. Which, unfortunately, is not the same thing as being random. What we have seen over the past three decades -- the 1980s and '90s favoring the East when it was loaded in Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Indiana and even Atlanta for a spell, and this decade swinging to the West -- is that the tilt lasts for a while, often in relation to players' careers.
That's why the NBA needs to fix the system, either by altering the playoffs, tweaking the draft or both.
"I think the league will take a look at that,'' Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said last week. "They changed the playoff system last year because of what happened the year before, where it seemed a little illogical. They changed it. So if they think there's a better way to do it, I think they'll look at it again.''
The NBA now seeds the top four winners in each conference according to won-lost records, to avoid a powerhouse clash in the second round. Home-court advantage also is dictated by record rather than playoff berth. So why should conference affiliation be so sacrosanct, if really good teams from one side are being eliminated?
"It would be great to have the best 16 teams in there,'' Popovich said. "That would seem logical. I think they'll take a look at it.''
Dallas coach Avery Johnson, when asked Sunday about the injustice of a team with 48 regular-season victories not qualifying for the postseason, said: "Fifty! It could be 50. ... To win 50 games in this league and not make it [or] to win 48 games in the West and not make it, that can be pretty disappointing.''
Asked if he expected the league to address this, Johnson added ever so diplomatically: "Maybe so. They always do a good job of doing that. That's why we have the best commissioner in sports. ... The great thing about our league, now being on this quote-unquote management side, is they've been real open to suggestions.''
The instant answer, though not necessarily the right one, would be to simply seed, No. 1 through No. 16, the teams with the best records. But that would not account for the imbalanced schedule -- three or four games against your own conference rivals, two against the other guys -- and, in fact, would argue against it. Then you would be fiddling with the essence of the competition over six long months, and the math of the 82-game schedule. We would have an extra three or four teams, already, with little to play for.
Other possible fixes have been suggested, such as crossover playoff matchups in the first round -- No. 1 in the West facing No. 8 in the East, and so on -- to swiftly filter out the weaker playoff teams.
A simpler, if less immediate, solution would be to focus on the draft side. There really is no persuasive argument for giving a team with 48 or 45 victories a shot at the No. 1 pick in the draft while making a 35-victory team wait until No. 15. One week of playoff basketball hardly makes up for 10 years of imbalance, if the lesser team artificially has to settle for lesser prospects.
To put it in the context of 2008, there is no good reason that Portland, Denver, Golden State or now, possibly, Houston should draft in front of Philadelphia, New Jersey or Washington, just because the playoff cut is different in each conference. By all other measures, those West teams are stronger and better set up for the future than those East clubs.
The draft ought to run strictly in inverse order of records, with whatever little "chance'' element the league wants at the very top to discourage tanking. And this goes way beyond fairness. If the East's first-round fodder teams got better access to better players, the disparity between the conferences might, in time, narrow. Then the NBA would be treating the illness, not merely the symptoms.
Not that this is an exact science, of course. When Utah finished six games ahead of Boston in 2004 and, because it missed the playoffs, drafted in front of the Celtics, it took Kris Humphries at No. 14. Boston, at No. 15, selected Al Jefferson.
But that's anecdotal. This fix still would be a start.
- Steve Aschburner
That's like taking the D students to the baseball game or the theme park at the end of the year, but leaving the B students behind.
Then, when the NBA holds its draft lottery in May, a team with 35 victories could have its nose pressed against the LCD flat panel, on the outside looking in, while a team with 48 victories sends a representative clutching shamrocks and rabbits' feet in his crossed-fingers fists, maximizing its chances of scoring one of the three best prospects in the world.
That's like doling out milk money to the kids wearing Abercrombie and stiffing those decked out in Goodwill.
Some people, even in the league headquarters at Olympic Tower in New York, will frame those above injustices as some sort of yin and yang, a half-empty predicament being rectified by a half-full situation soon after. Or vice versa. Let's cut through that masquerade to call it what it is: Two wrongs allegedly making a right.
And failing miserably.
There is no thrill in watching an overmatched No. 8 seed getting thumped by a No. 1 seed that finished 28 games ahead in the conference standings, just as there is no joy in seeing a team that finished 14 games above .500 vying with the NBA's true doormats for the quick fixes of Michael Beasley or Derrick Rose. Meanwhile, that No. 8 seed that was so fortunate to get swept out of the playoffs barely a week after its regular-season finale has to wait and wait and wait on draft night for the right to select the 15th-most-promising new player.
That's as dreary as a 4-0 Finals, which left a castor-oil taste in our mouths that lingers from last June.
All of this could come to a head again this spring, thanks to a gap between the Western and Eastern conferences that is as big as, or bigger than, any in recent memory. The potential playoff and lottery teams cited above weren't merely hypothetical; they were projections, based on Philadephia's spot among the playoff qualifiers despite its 25-32 record as of Tuesday morning and Denver's current status as a West also-ran with a 33-23 mark.
If those teams continue winning (and losing) at their current clips -- and the Rockets don't splash down now that Yao Ming has been shut down -- the 76ers would make the East field at 36-46, while the Nuggets would be out of the West bracket at 48-34. And that 12-game difference between them -- a topsy-turvy disparity between one conference's worst playoff team and the other's best lottery club -- would be by far the worst in the past decade. Double, in fact, any previous "unfairness'' factor since 1998.
It isn't unusual that what gets a team into the postseason in one conference would send you home immediately in the other; that situation has existed after eight of the past 10 seasons, including last spring when Orlando's 40-42 earned it the privilege of being swept by Detroit while the Clippers' identical 40-42 earned it a lottery shot.
The Clippers being the Clippers, they didn't improve their position at all, yet still landed Al Thornton at No. 14. Orlando's pick, held coincidentally by Detroit, was next at No. 15 and became Rodney Stuckey.
In 2006, Utah missed the playoffs at 41-41, but Milwaukee made it at 40-42. Same pattern in 2005: Minnesota missed at 44-38, New Jersey got in at 42-40. And in 2004, the gap went from Letterman-sized to jack-o'-lantern large, with the Jazz on the outs at 42-40 while the Celtics got in with a 36-46 record.
That six-game difference will look modest if Denver, Portland and even Sacramento keep winning just often enough to finish ninth or worse in the West this season. All three could wind up with better records, by far, than the least of the East playoff teams.
Funny thing is, the West's dominance of the East isn't anything special this season. Through Monday, its 198-146 record represented a .576 winning percentage, right in line with its .579 percentage since the start of the 1999-2000 season. Teams from the West have won about 600 more interconference clashes over these past nine seasons, along with seven of the last nine (1999-2007) NBA championships.
Commissioner David Stern generally has swatted away concerns about the competitive imbalance by saying it is cyclical. Which, unfortunately, is not the same thing as being random. What we have seen over the past three decades -- the 1980s and '90s favoring the East when it was loaded in Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Indiana and even Atlanta for a spell, and this decade swinging to the West -- is that the tilt lasts for a while, often in relation to players' careers.
That's why the NBA needs to fix the system, either by altering the playoffs, tweaking the draft or both.
"I think the league will take a look at that,'' Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said last week. "They changed the playoff system last year because of what happened the year before, where it seemed a little illogical. They changed it. So if they think there's a better way to do it, I think they'll look at it again.''
The NBA now seeds the top four winners in each conference according to won-lost records, to avoid a powerhouse clash in the second round. Home-court advantage also is dictated by record rather than playoff berth. So why should conference affiliation be so sacrosanct, if really good teams from one side are being eliminated?
"It would be great to have the best 16 teams in there,'' Popovich said. "That would seem logical. I think they'll take a look at it.''
Dallas coach Avery Johnson, when asked Sunday about the injustice of a team with 48 regular-season victories not qualifying for the postseason, said: "Fifty! It could be 50. ... To win 50 games in this league and not make it [or] to win 48 games in the West and not make it, that can be pretty disappointing.''
Asked if he expected the league to address this, Johnson added ever so diplomatically: "Maybe so. They always do a good job of doing that. That's why we have the best commissioner in sports. ... The great thing about our league, now being on this quote-unquote management side, is they've been real open to suggestions.''
The instant answer, though not necessarily the right one, would be to simply seed, No. 1 through No. 16, the teams with the best records. But that would not account for the imbalanced schedule -- three or four games against your own conference rivals, two against the other guys -- and, in fact, would argue against it. Then you would be fiddling with the essence of the competition over six long months, and the math of the 82-game schedule. We would have an extra three or four teams, already, with little to play for.
Other possible fixes have been suggested, such as crossover playoff matchups in the first round -- No. 1 in the West facing No. 8 in the East, and so on -- to swiftly filter out the weaker playoff teams.
A simpler, if less immediate, solution would be to focus on the draft side. There really is no persuasive argument for giving a team with 48 or 45 victories a shot at the No. 1 pick in the draft while making a 35-victory team wait until No. 15. One week of playoff basketball hardly makes up for 10 years of imbalance, if the lesser team artificially has to settle for lesser prospects.
To put it in the context of 2008, there is no good reason that Portland, Denver, Golden State or now, possibly, Houston should draft in front of Philadelphia, New Jersey or Washington, just because the playoff cut is different in each conference. By all other measures, those West teams are stronger and better set up for the future than those East clubs.
The draft ought to run strictly in inverse order of records, with whatever little "chance'' element the league wants at the very top to discourage tanking. And this goes way beyond fairness. If the East's first-round fodder teams got better access to better players, the disparity between the conferences might, in time, narrow. Then the NBA would be treating the illness, not merely the symptoms.
Not that this is an exact science, of course. When Utah finished six games ahead of Boston in 2004 and, because it missed the playoffs, drafted in front of the Celtics, it took Kris Humphries at No. 14. Boston, at No. 15, selected Al Jefferson.
But that's anecdotal. This fix still would be a start.
- Steve Aschburner