http://www.thesportsbank.net/nba/nba-playoffs-expansion/ Let all 30 teams participate in the NBA playoffs. Instead of automatically giving the 8th seed to the team with the 8th-best record, let the teams who finish 8th through 15th in each conference battle it out in a single-elimination tournament. The NBA regular season usually ends on a Wednesday, and the playoffs start on Saturday. That first weekend of playoff games, with four games each day, is one of my favorite of the year. We certainly don’t want to lose that. So under my proposal, the regular season would end on a Sunday. Under my plan, the top seven teams in each conference wouldn’t play their first playoff game until either Saturday or Sunday, meaning they would get a minimum of six days off following their final regular season game. Hopefully, this would enable teams to play their best players for all 82 games, and the fans wouldn’t have to watch so much bad basketball at the end of the season. A team that suffered through numerous injuries early on wouldn’t automatically have their season end in January – even if your top 3 scorers were hurt and you only won 10 of your first 60 games, you would still have a shot at making the playoffs once those guys were all healthy. And teams wouldn’t have to rush injured players back hoping for an eight seed, they could simply win three games in Vegas and make the playoffs without endangering the long-term health of their best players. On Monday, the Eastern Conference play-in tournament would begin. The #8 seed would play the #15 seed, #9 would play #14, #10 would play #13 and #11 would play #12. Tuesday, the Western Conference’s bottom eight teams would have their first round. On Wednesday, the four East teams who won their first-round games would meet, lowest seed remaining versus the highest seed. The West semi-finals would be on Thursday. Then on Friday night, each conference would hold its “championship game”, with the two winners earning the #8 seed in their respective conference. The “real” playoffs would still start on Saturday, and the two teams that won their way in would be guaranteed not to play until Sunday. There's a lot more at the link (yeah I posted a lot of it here, but I wrote it so it's OK)
