By SCOTT CACCIOLA
SEPT. 8, 2015

The N.B.A. Board of Governors voted to seed playoff teams based solely on their regular-season records, the league announced Tuesday, effectively removing the importance of division titles.

In past seasons, each division winner was guaranteed a top-four seed in its conference regardless of regular-season record. The rule created some conflict last season when the Portland Trail Blazers received the No. 4 seed in the Western Conference by winning the Northwest Division with 51 victories. The Grizzlies, who were seeded fifth, and the Spurs, who were sixth, both finished with 55 wins, raising questions about the fairness of the process.

At league meetings in July, the N.B.A.’s competition committee recommended modifying the way teams were seeded, and Commissioner Adam Silver said he welcomed the proposal.

The board also amended its tiebreaker procedures, making head-to-head results the first tiebreaker for seeding and home-court advantage between two teams with identical regular-season records. A division winner previously received home-court advantage if two teams with identical records met in the playoffs.

As it should be...

About time we stop rewarding mediocrity in professional sports.

Lets be real, teams and fans of the OTHER 29 TEAMS have to walk away with something. Its all nice to say "if you ain't winning a chip, your all losers" but that's not real.
The pursuit of a chip and the excitement of the journey is very important.

personally, I had a blast during Linsanity (lousy season) and while we fell in the second round, I enjoyed the 54 game season while it was happening. I thought the team was playing over its head, or to its potential and I had no illusions of we'd go far. We finished in first. No reason for a banner, but it was fun.

if western conference has more winning teams their 9th and 10th seeded teams with more Ws should make the playoffs in the East.
eventually what will happen is that more eastern teams will get better drafts and it will even out.

Basically, every team plays every other team once at home and once on the road, giving you a 58 game regular season that could start on Christmas Day and have no back-to-backs and do the best-of-7 playoff as usual.

Nalod wrote:

dk7th wrote:makes eminent sense and should have been done years ago. next step is to allow only the top 16 teams in league-wide... this will end the amount of mediocrity into the first round of the playoffs. the last several seasons western conference 9 and 10 teams have had better records than eastern conference 7 and 8 teams. one can dream.

The thought for not doing it is at some point parity SHOULD come back and eastern teams rise up.
To eliminate the conferences would eliminate regional matchups and rivalries.

A Boston-Knick series won't have time problems like a first round Knick-Blazer series. Away games on the coast would start at 10;30-11pm and viewership would suffer.
The other thing is an epic series creates rivalries that last and that helps attendance and ratings. Hated the Heat for years after the battles with knicks and Riles in charge!
Reggie Miller became a villain because his antics in the garden, but the rivalry of the teams is what made that moment!! Reggie had history with Spike!

Keeping conferences builds rivalries!!!

the best-16 team playoff format would create the parity you think "should" happen... wouldn't it?

i'm all for rivalries so long as it's based on competence and not sentimentality.

10:30 pm starts during the regular season is not worth it, but come playoff time... totally different level of interest and frankly worth losing some sleep over. that said, i am certain there would have to be some level of compromise depending on time zone. obviously a 9:30pm start eastern time would be ideal if the knicks had to play playoff games on the west coast. for home playoff games against west coast teams it isn't out of the question to have an 8:30pm start.

rivalries would still prevail regardless of the best-16 team playoff format.