Pretty interesting read, more here. http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2011/3/30/2079706/nba-playoffs-east-coast-bias
damn europeans and their single table standings! In all seriousness though, while I agree about it being crap that an 8th seed and sometimes 6th and 7th in the east is worse than an 9th seed in the west, with an imbalanced schedule, I dont know how to go away from conferences.
I'm lazy and not reading the article right now, but does the author account for the possibility that the top teams in the east might be better than the top teams in the west. If this were true, the teams in the east play those better teams more frequently then the lower teams in the west. What I'm really getting at, is in order for this to be truly balanced, all teams would have to play each other equally. There is also the factor that teams in the west play earlier in the day when they go east, say 4pm their own reference time. While teams from the east playing in the west play closer to 10 or 1030 their own reference time. This could be an unfair advantage as well. Thus all games must be played in the same location, at the same time, with equal number of games amongst every opponent.
David Stern is attempting to alleviate this problem by relocating every team to Los Angeles or New York.
There are problems everywhere you play (especially denver, FU YOU DENVER AND YOUR CRAPPY HARD TO BREATHE AIR!) you should be able to get used to them after a few years in the league. Time of play differs when East plays West and West plays East but you just gotta roll with that as a player. Shouldn't be that much of an unfair advantage, not close to the playing really good teams on back to backs. The Standing systems allows 1 to 4 "bad teams" in regardless of conference. 10 years ago we had the opposite effect for a few seasons. The conference system is a way to justify fair play when you have 4 games every season vs other teams in your conference and only 2 vs teams in the east. The thing I think should change is how the Divisions in the conference is set up. Why the hell are Minnesota and OKC in the Northwest conference? I'm not sure how you would change the NBA's playoff system to better balance it out. Maybe take Division winners and then the next 8 teams with the best record after that. You would find a ton of bitching if you were NYK and your bracket was LA/ Winner of Por/Pheonix because of how much air travel you would doing. I at the moment cannot figure out a more fair way of doing it without doing way to much work that i'm unwilling to do before heading into work.
