His grand scheme was revealed before Saturday's game when the Nuggets coach was asked how a division winner (say, the Clippers), can be no lower than a four seed, but if the division-winner's first-round opponent has a better record, that team gets homecourt advantage.

"I don't know if I like it, but I understand why you do it, because there should be some reward for winning your division," Karl said. "Even though, there really isn't."

So he was asked: Do you think you should wipe out divisions and just have conference standings?

"I'm even crazier than that," the Nuggets' coach said.

Oh, yeah? What ya got?

"I think you should put all top-16 and do it that way, and then reseed for the next round," he said.

So basically, here's Karl's idea: The top eight teams from the Western Conference and the top eight teams from the Eastern Conference are put into a playoff pool. At this point, conference affiliation no longer matters. Instead, it's all about record.

The team with the best record plays the team with the 16th-best record and so on.

And then, like he said, they reseed hockey-style for the next round. And so, the NBA's "Final Four" could be four teams from the same conference — but, as proven by this system, perhaps the four best teams in basketball.

"I think it would get fans excited, man. It would be crazy," Karl said. "And we travel with private jets now, so I think you can schedule it to where you'd get two days of rest between games. I think it would be really fun and interesting to see the matchups."

So if you were commissioner, you would try to make this happen? Like, for real?

"I would advocate it," he said. "I don't know if the Board of Governors would pass it, but I would advocate it."

After George had gone off the map with this idea, I chimed in with a thought — why not just get rid of conferences altogether? Why punish a team that's ninth or 10th in the West that's way better than, say, seventh and eighth in the East?

Promptly, Chris Marlowe from Altitude suggested that my thought was "Draconian," and Karl himself said: "I think you're going off the map."

The coach had one other idea on Saturday. Cut the 82-game season to a 62-game season, and then in the middle of the season, "You can take a three-week break and have an NCAA-like tournament. Single elimination is a lot different than a seven-game series."

I'd watch that.

Benjamin Hochman: 303-954-1294, bhochman @denverpost.com or twitter.com/nuggetsnews

Also, I've wanted the NBA to reduce the number of games played for years now; it would reduce injuries, individual games would mean more, and it would improve the quality of play.

Season is too long and games meaningless.

Personally, I'd love to see Bill Simmons plan or a variation of it implimented, where all the mediocre to pretty good teams play a single elimination/round robin tournament while the good teams get to rest and wait and then play a 7 games series with the teams coming out on top of the tournament. I mean ****, the Knicks may have never beaten the Heat in 7 games and I would bet a lot that the Nuggets probably lose to the Karl's Sonics. The league has many better players yet the product is less entertaining...

loweyecue wrote:Did he say top 8 from each conference or Top ALL 16? That would mean something like 11 teams from the West and 5 from the East given the division fo power these days.

Yea, and like Nalod said, it would never work because of the cash money,

the problem with shifting the playoff seeding is that every team in the NBA is really part of the same company and because it's all really one big company, they have to spread the butter across all the pancakes; basically, all NBA teams are in cahoots, different sides of the same coin

we contrast this to the European soccer league system where you basically have a bunch of independent clubs playing together in a league,

it's a totally different world, that's why you can get relegated to a lower division or promoted to a higher one,

personally, I prefer the European system, but it's really impossible to implement or even consider here,